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null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 8, chapter 73 with the given context. | book 8, chapter 72|book 8, chapter 73 | Lydgate is miserable again. He doesn't know how to vindicate himself. But he also has to ask himself whether he would have asked more questions about Raffles's death if he hadn't just gotten a huge loan from Bulstrode. He considers returning the money to Bulstrode, but how can he, when it would mean going deep into debt again? What would Rosamond say? |
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 72---------
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.
Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the
vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a
bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the
circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother's experience.
"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said. "How can we begin to
inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate
and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the
first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would
have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess
I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult.
I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on
personal matters. And--one should know the truth about his conduct
beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result."
"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"
said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years
had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction
of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr.
Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences,
instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would
conquer by their emotional force. Two days afterwards, he was dining
at the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, and when the dessert was
standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was
nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.
"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
him their first wish must be to justify him. What do we live for, if
it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be
indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in _my_ trouble,
and attended me in my illness."
Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been
when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly three years
before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a
decided opinion. But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and
acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout
admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should
fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon. He
smiled much less; when he said "Exactly" it was more often an
introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissive bachelor
days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve not to
be afraid of him--all the more because he was really her best friend.
He disagreed with her now.
"But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake to manage
a man's life for him in that way. Lydgate must know--at least he will
soon come to know how he stands. If he can clear himself, he will. He
must act for himself."
"I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity," added
Mr. Farebrother. "It is possible--I have often felt so much weakness
in myself that I can conceive even a man of honorable disposition, such
as I have always believed Lydgate to be, succumbing to such a
temptation as that of accepting money which was offered more or less
indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence about scandalous facts long
gone by. I say, I can conceive this, if he were under the pressure of
hard circumstances--if he had been harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has
been. I would not believe anything worse of him except under stringent
proof. But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors,
that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into
a crime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own
consciousness and assertion."
"Oh, how cruel!" said Dorothea, clasping her hands. "And would you not
like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence, if the
rest of the world belied him? Besides, there is a man's character
beforehand to speak for him."
"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at
her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid
and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become
diseased as our bodies do."
"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not be
afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help
him. Why should I be afraid? Now that I am not to have the land,
James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and take his place in
providing for the Hospital; and I have to consult Mr. Lydgate, to know
thoroughly what are the prospects of doing good by keeping up the
present plans. There is the best opportunity in the world for me to
ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things which
might make all the circumstances clear. Then we would all stand by him
and bring him out of his trouble. People glorify all sorts of bravery
except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest
neighbors." Dorothea's eyes had a moist brightness in them, and the
changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, who began to listen.
"It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which
would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother,
almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.
"Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know
the world better than she does." said Sir James, with his little
frown. "Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should really keep
back at present, and not volunteer any meddling with this Bulstrode
business. We don't know yet what may turn up. You must agree with
me?" he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.
"I do think it would be better to wait," said the latter.
"Yes, yes, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point
the discussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution
which was generally appropriate. "It is easy to go too far, you know.
You must not let your ideas run away with you. And as to being in a
hurry to put money into schemes--it won't do, you know. Garth has
drawn me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that sort of thing: I'm
uncommonly out of pocket with one thing or another. I must pull up.
As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune on those oak fences
round your demesne."
Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with Celia
into the library, which was her usual drawing-room.
"Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says," said Celia, "else you will
be getting into a scrape. You always did, and you always will, when
you set about doing as you please. And I think it is a mercy now after
all that you have got James to think for you. He lets you have your
plans, only he hinders you from being taken in. And that is the good
of having a brother instead of a husband. A husband would not let you
have your plans."
"As if I wanted a husband!" said Dorothea. "I only want not to have my
feelings checked at every turn." Mrs. Casaubon was still undisciplined
enough to burst into angry tears.
"Now, really, Dodo," said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than
usual, "you _are_ contradictory: first one thing and then another. You
used to submit to Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you would have
given up ever coming to see me if he had asked you."
"Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my
feeling for him," said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.
"Then why can't you think it your duty to submit a little to what James
wishes?" said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument.
"Because he only wishes what is for your own good. And, of course, men
know best about everything, except what women know better." Dorothea
laughed and forgot her tears.
"Well, I mean about babies and those things," explained Celia. "I
should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do
to Mr. Casaubon."
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 73---------
Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.
When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her that
her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he
trusted soon to see him better and would call again the next day,
unless she sent for him earlier, he went directly home, got on his
horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out
of reach.
He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under
the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come
to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a
mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight
on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only
vulgar standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged. In such
moments a man can hardly escape being unloving. Lydgate thought of
himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured
his lot. He had meant everything to turn out differently; and others
had thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes. His
marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to
Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the
mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave
unwarrantably. There are episodes in most men's lives in which their
highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects
that fill their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present
just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an
emotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life
which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can
understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into
the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who
suspected him of baseness? How could he go silently away from
Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation? And
yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?
For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it
had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation
thoroughly clear to him. Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous
disclosures on the part of Raffles. Lydgate could now construct all
the probabilities of the case. "He was afraid of some betrayal in my
hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:
that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality. And he
may have tampered with the patient--he may have disobeyed my orders. I
fear he did. But whether he did or not, the world believes that he
somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I
didn't help in it. And yet--and yet he may not be guilty of the last
offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have
been a genuine relenting--the effect of second thoughts such as he
alleged. What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the
thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false. In his last
dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite
of my suspicion to the contrary."
There was a benumbing cruelty in his position. Even if he renounced
every other consideration than that of justifying himself--if he met
shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public
statement of all the facts as he knew them, who would be convinced? It
would be playing the part of a fool to offer his own testimony on
behalf of himself, and say, "I did not take the money as a bribe." The
circumstances would always be stronger than his assertion. And
besides, to come forward and tell everything about himself must include
declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of
others against him. He must tell that he had not known of Raffles's
existence when he first mentioned his pressing need of money to
Bulstrode, and that he took the money innocently as a result of that
communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have
arisen on his being called in to this man. And after all, the
suspicion of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.
But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
the same way if he had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had
continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part of
Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
recent heavy obligation. But if he had not received any money--if
Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy--would
he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the
man dead?--would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode--would the
dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own
treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his
profession--have had just the same force or significance with him?
That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he was
reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he had been
independent, this matter of a patient's treatment and the distinct rule
that he must do or see done that which he believed best for the life
committed to him, would have been the point on which he would have been
the sturdiest. As it was, he had rested in the consideration that
disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen, could not be
considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to his
orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply
one of etiquette. Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he
had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and
had said--"the purest experiment in treatment may still be
conscientious: my business is to take care of life, and to do the best
I can think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a
contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive." Alas! the
scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money
obligation and selfish respects.
"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were
a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--I can see
that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make
little difference to the blessed world here. I have been set down as
tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same."
Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at
him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients of his
had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too plain now.
The general black-balling had begun.
No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a hopeless
misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance. The scowl
which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a
meaningless accident. Already when he was re-entering the town after
that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was setting his
mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be
done against him. He would not retreat before calumny, as if he
submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his
should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well
as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from
showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode. It was true
that the association with this man had been fatal to him--true that if
he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts
unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary
rather than the rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a
bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of
men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed
fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get
acquittal for himself by howling against another. "I shall do as I
think right, and explain to nobody. They will try to starve me out,
but--" he was going on with an obstinate resolve, but he was getting
near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged itself again into that
chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of
wounded honor and pride.
How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to
drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common to
them both. He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which
events must soon bring about.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 8, chapter 79 with the given context. | book 8, chapter 77|book 8, chapter 78|book 8, chapter 79 | Will comes back, as promised, to visit Lydgate. He feels like a "sneak" by not admitting to Lydgate that he'd been there that morning, but he can't see a way around it. Lydgate tells him about all the problems they've had since he left Middlemarch . Lydgate concludes the story by saying that they're going to have to move to London - which is what Rosamond wants, and what he absolutely doesn't want. Will feels terrible. He hasn't done anything wrong, but it looks bad that he should have spent so much private time with his friend's wife. Especially since she obviously thinks he was in love with her. |
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 77---------
"And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion."
--Henry V.
The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
should be away until the evening. Of late she had never gone beyond
her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa,
to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
you not, papa? I suppose we shall have very little money. I am sure I
hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
don't mind a hundred or two. I can see the end of that." With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences
is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui. Her melancholy had become so
marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.
But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
in the town. She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
his arrival by a hint of trouble. The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing."
Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit. Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
that of Will Ladislaw. Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she
had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of
gossip--her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music. But
there had followed his parting words--the few passionate words in
which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was
resolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment. From the
time of that parting, Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her,
believing with a proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his
determination that no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart
quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was
sure that the regard was blameless.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust. "If
you are not good, none is good"--those little words may give a
terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for
remorse.
Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
great powers of her womanhood. And it had from the first acted
strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted from her, that the
brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about
herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would
only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.
And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had
felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
one which was inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active
force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
lay within park palings.
"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
absurd. And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
candle for him to see his own folly by. Dorothea had observed the
animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
secrecy. But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.
She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her
whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and
would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail
because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on
the superfluities of her lot. She could bear that the chief pleasures
of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came
to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she
at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,
would be a source of torment to her:--"somebody who will manage your
property for you, my dear," was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of
suitable characteristics. "I should like to manage it myself, if I
knew what to do with it," said Dorothea. No--she adhered to her
declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long
valley of her life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance
would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers
by the way.
This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in
all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.
Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and
compassion. There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier
to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the
husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him. That was a
trouble which no third person must directly touch. But Dorothea
thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon
Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would
surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy
with her.
"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she was
being driven towards the town. The clear spring morning, the scent of
the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth
of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the
cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.
Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of
Lydgate's conduct. "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps
she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."
Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her
carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street,
having told the coachman to wait for some packages. The street door
was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at
the carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to
her that the lady who "belonged to it" was coming towards her.
"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.
"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in," said
Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title for this
queenly young widow with a carriage and pair. "Will you please to walk
in, and I'll go and see."
"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward
intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to
see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.
They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the
passage which led to the garden. The drawing-room door was unlatched,
and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.
Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and
swung back again without noise.
Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being
filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be.
She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything
remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones
which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and
advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a
bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which
filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,
without self-possession enough to speak.
Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall
on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will
Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her
bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her
upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.
Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her
presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and
rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested. Will Ladislaw,
starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new
lightning in them, seemed changing to marble: But she immediately
turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice--
"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished
to put into your own hands."
She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her
retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and
bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the
surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,
and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that
grand people were probably more impatient than others.
Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was
quickly in her carriage again.
"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one
looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual
she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy. And that was
really her experience. It was as if she had drunk a great draught of
scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object. She
needed something active to turn her excitement out upon. She felt
power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink. And she would
carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of
going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that
she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under
his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made
her more ardent in readiness to be his champion. She had never felt
anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing
pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.
"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James was
gone out of the room. "And you don't see anything you look at, Arthur
or anything. You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know. Is
it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?" Celia had
been used to watch her sister with expectation.
"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo, in her full
tones.
"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
forward upon them.
"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said
Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.
"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a
little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.
But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
until she descended at her own door.
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 78---------
"Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
With her sweet faith above for monument"
Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--he
looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
towards him with doubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in
whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification
from what had just happened. Shallow natures dream of an easy sway
over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty
magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures
and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were. She
knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used
to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut
into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to
soothe or subdue. Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always
subdued in the long-run: events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond
would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never
gave up what she had set her mind on.
She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
coat-sleeve.
"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if
his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting. He wheeled
round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the
tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking
fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.
She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as
only Lydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet and
seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
shawl. Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.
It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting. And yet--how
could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her? He was fuming
under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive
vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--
"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."
"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. "Do you
think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
her again at more than a dirty feather?--Explain! How can a man
explain at the expense of a woman?"
"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.
"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is
not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable--to
believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you."
He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again--
"I had no hope before--not much--of anything better to come. But I had
one certainty--that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or
done about me, she believed in me.--That's gone! She'll never again
think me anything but a paltry pretence--too nice to take heaven
except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any
devil's change by the sly. She'll think of me as an incarnate insult
to her, from the first moment we--"
Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage by
snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be
throttled and flung off.
"Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my
preference! I never had a _preference_ for her, any more than I have a
preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I
would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
other woman's living."
Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was
almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
some new terrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute
repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
lash never experienced before. What another nature felt in opposition
to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness. When
Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:
her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them. If it
had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would
have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort
her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very
cheap.
Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity. He
had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless. He knew that he
was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
he felt checked and stultified in his anger. He walked towards the
mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for--he
hardly knew what. The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there--he had had
suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
within it. And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
slow pincers:--that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
heart. But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before it can turn into compassion.
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's
by a mute misery. The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship. But she said nothing,
and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, "Shall I
come in and see Lydgate this evening?"
"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.
And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
been in.
After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting. When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to
make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms. Rosamond said
that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
day of grief.
Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there. The perception that she was ill threw every other
thought into the background. When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested
on him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
she felt some content that he was there. He perceived the difference
in a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her,
and bending over her said, "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated
you?" Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and
for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her. He imagined
that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her
nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards
himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that
visit had raised.
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 79---------
"Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their
talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the
midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall
suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
Despond."--BUNYAN.
When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter
addressed to him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.
When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
visit, and Will could not say, "Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
came this morning?"
"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.
"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.
"No--only a slight nervous shock--the effect of some agitation. She
has been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky
devil. We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you
left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I
suppose you are only just come down--you look rather battered--you
have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"
"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o'clock this
morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting," said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.
And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles which Rosamond had
already depicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned the fact of
Will's name being connected with the public story--this detail not
immediately affecting her--and he now heard it for the first time.
"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation. "You will be sure to
hear it as soon as you turn out into the town. I suppose it is true
that Raffles spoke to you."
"Yes," said Will, sardonically. "I shall be fortunate if gossip does
not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair. I should
think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose."
He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"
But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him. Will was very open
and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted it.
Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.
The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion's trouble. When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow." Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
momentous bargain.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him
this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's
unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book 8, chapter 85 using the context provided. | book 8, chapter 80|book 8, chapter 82|book 8, chapter 85 | The Bulstrodes are preparing to leave Middlemarch permanently, and Bulstrode asks his wife if there's anything she'd like him to do as far as the property they're leaving behind . She says that she'd like to do something for her brother's family, the Vincys - especially for Rosamond and Lydgate. But since Lydgate has refused to have any more dealings with him, Bulstrode suggests that they give Stone Court to Fred. Mrs. Bulstrode has to conduct the business herself, though, since Caleb Garth doesn't want to do business with Mr. Bulstrode. |
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 80---------
"Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
--WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.
When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised
to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt. There was
a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother
family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the
Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady
companion. When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she
was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could
dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered
into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell,
giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and
getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy. She paused on
her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some
garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the
crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the
result of sixty years' experience as to soils--namely, that if your
soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to
make it all of a mummy, why then--
Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than
was necessary. That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like
another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of
his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not
to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets
of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals. The
evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than
usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of
creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for
aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some
inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's
attention.
"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"
"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her
beaver-like notes.
"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his
glasses and looking at the carpet.
"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble. "A German box--very
pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."
"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone
of comprehension, getting up and hunting. The box was found at last
under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, "it
was under a fender the last time."
"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.
"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."
"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.
Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised and
annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it
was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation.
Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked
in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised
anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."
Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true; you
must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate. That sort
of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."
He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to
speak, even when he said good-night.
The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless
within the clutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a
few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards
the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and
moaned out--
"Oh, I did love him!"
Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
thoroughly to leave any power of thought. She could only cry in loud
whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted
and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome--after
her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who,
misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--after her lost woman's
pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet dim perspective of
hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged
recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.
In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--she besought
hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the
mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor
and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame
was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.
There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two, as
if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided
by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her
gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the
lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.
Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had
trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the
dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with
a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out
her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness
was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the
unshrinking utterance of despair.
And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved,
was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a
detected illusion--no, a living man towards whom there could not yet
struggle any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and
indignation and jealous offended pride. The fire of Dorothea's anger
was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning
reproach. Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that
might have been whole enough without him? Why had he brought his cheap
regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in
exchange? He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of
her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before. Why had he not
stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that
they might be less contemptible?
But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and
moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she
sobbed herself to sleep.
In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around
her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had
happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into
the eyes of sorrow. She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit
down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her
thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea's
nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the
narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness
that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own.
She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately
again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible
meaning. Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She
forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a
woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some
clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap
of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she
had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever. But
that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a
faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when
the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult
and had once shown her the truer measure of things. All the active
thought with which she had before been representing to herself the
trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, like her
own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--all this
vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it
asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let
us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own
irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of
driving her back from effort.
And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact
with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants
bearing the sacred branch? The objects of her rescue were not to be
sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her. She yearned towards
the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her
errant will. "What should I do--how should I act now, this very day,
if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of
those three?"
It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light
piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out
towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside
the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his
back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures
moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky
was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the
manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that
involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from
her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish
complaining.
What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but
something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
murmur which would soon gather distinctness. She took off the clothes
which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
and began to make her toilet. Presently she rang for Tantripp, who
came in her dressing-gown.
"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night," burst out
Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face, which
in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater
dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you _will_. Anybody might think now
you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."
"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling. "I have slept; I
am not ill. I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
my new bonnet to-day."
"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most
thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds' worth less of
crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire. "There's a reason
in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds at the bottom of your
skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--and if ever anybody looked
like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--is what's consistent for a
second year. At least, that's _my_ thinking," ended Tantripp, looking
anxiously at the fire; "and if anybody was to marry me flattering
himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be
deceived by his own vanity, that's all."
"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she used to
do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; "get me the
coffee."
She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it
in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this
strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the morning when
she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should have asked for her
lighter mourning which she had waived before. Tantripp would never
have found the clew to this mystery. Dorothea wished to acknowledge
that she had not the less an active life before her because she had
buried a private joy; and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to
all initiation, haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that
slight outward help towards calm resolve. For the resolve was not easy.
Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 82---------
"My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
--SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay in
banishment unless they are obliged. When Will Ladislaw exiled himself
from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his return than
his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier, but simply a
state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind,
and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite
facility. As the months went on, it had seemed more and more difficult
to him to say why he should not run down to Middlemarch--merely for the
sake of hearing something about Dorothea; and if on such a flying visit
he should chance by some strange coincidence to meet with her, there
was no reason for him to be ashamed of having taken an innocent journey
which he had beforehand supposed that he should not take. Since he was
hopelessly divided from her, he might surely venture into her
neighborhood; and as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch
over her--their opinions seemed less and less important with time and
change of air.
And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which
seemed to make a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty.
Will had given a disinterested attention to an intended settlement on a
new plan in the Far West, and the need for funds in order to carry out
a good design had set him on debating with himself whether it would not
be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode, to urge the
application of that money which had been offered to himself as a means
of carrying out a scheme likely to be largely beneficial. The question
seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnance to again entering
into any relation with the banker might have made him dismiss it
quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination the probability
that his judgment might be more safely determined by a visit to
Middlemarch.
That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason for coming
down. He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss the money
question with him, and he had meant to amuse himself for the few
evenings of his stay by having a great deal of music and badinage with
fair Rosamond, without neglecting his friends at Lowick Parsonage:--if
the Parsonage was close to the Manor, that was no fault of his. He had
neglected the Farebrothers before his departure, from a proud
resistance to the possible accusation of indirectly seeking interviews
with Dorothea; but hunger tames us, and Will had become very hungry for
the vision of a certain form and the sound of a certain voice.
Nothing, had done instead--not the opera, or the converse of zealous
politicians, or the flattering reception (in dim corners) of his new
hand in leading articles.
Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything
would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there
would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum
world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and
lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become
the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed
with the nightmare of consequences--he dreaded so much the immediate
issues before him--that seeing while he breakfasted the arrival of the
Riverston coach, he went out hurriedly and took his place on it, that
he might be relieved, at least for a day, from the necessity of doing
or saying anything in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw was in one of those
tangled crises which are commoner in experience than one might imagine,
from the shallow absoluteness of men's judgments. He had found
Lydgate, for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances
which claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the
reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will
to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible. To
a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was a
difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
increased for him. He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded to
show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again; the
friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness was a
power which he dreaded. And all the while there was no more foretaste
of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped
off and he was making his fresh start on crutches. In the night he had
debated whether he should not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but
for London, leaving a note to Lydgate which would give a makeshift
reason for his retreat. But there were strong cords pulling him back
from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of
Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite
of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery
for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance
which was also despair.
Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach. He
came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made up his
mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening. The Rubicon, we know,
was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay
entirely in certain invisible conditions. Will felt as if he were
forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was
not empire, but discontented subjection.
But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness
the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue
that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship. If Dorothea, after
her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she
perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for
discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those
three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past seven that
evening.
Rosamond had been prepared for Will's visit, and she received him with
a languid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous
exhaustion, of which he could not suppose that it had any relation to
Will. And when she sat in silence bending over a bit of work, he
innocently apologized for her in an indirect way by begging her to lean
backward and rest. Will was miserable in the necessity for playing the
part of a friend who was making his first appearance and greeting to
Rosamond, while his thoughts were busy about her feeling since that
scene of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclose them both,
like the painful vision of a double madness. It happened that nothing
called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,
and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded paper
in his saucer. He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he went back
to his inn he had no eagerness to unfold the paper. What Rosamond had
written to him would probably deepen the painful impressions of the
evening. Still, he opened and read it by his bed-candle. There were
only these few words in her neatly flowing hand:--
"I have told Mrs. Casaubon. She is not under any mistake about you. I
told her because she came to see me and was very kind. You will have
nothing to reproach me with now. I shall not have made any difference
to you."
The effect of these words was not quite all gladness. As Will dwelt on
them with excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning at
the thought of what had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond--at the
uncertainty how far Dorothea might still feel her dignity wounded in
having an explanation of his conduct offered to her. There might still
remain in her mind a changed association with him which made an
irremediable difference--a lasting flaw. With active fancy he wrought
himself into a state of doubt little more easy than that of the man who
has escaped from wreck by night and stands on unknown ground in the
darkness. Until that wretched yesterday--except the moment of
vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same
presence--all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been
as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies,
where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered. But now--would
Dorothea meet him in that world again?
----------BOOK 8, CHAPTER 85---------
"Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr.
No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr.
Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr.
Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his
private verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards
unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the
judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman, the
foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic.
Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the
earth! Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very look of him.
Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I,
said Mr. Live-loose; for he would be always condemning my
way. Hang him, hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said
Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity.
He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too good for him,
said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way said
Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all
the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him;
therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death."
--Pilgrim's Progress.
When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions
bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful? That is a
rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know
ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd--to be sure that what we
are denounced for is solely the good in us. The pitiable lot is that
of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to
persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions
incarnate--who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right,
but for not being the man he professed to be.
This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he
made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end
his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.
The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from one
dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a tribunal
before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy. His
equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had sustained the
conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to, yet he had a terror
upon him which would not let him expose them to judgment by a full
confession to his wife: the acts which he had washed and diluted with
inward argument and motive, and for which it seemed comparatively easy
to win invisible pardon--what name would she call them by? That she
should ever silently call his acts Murder was what he could not bear.
He felt shrouded by her doubt: he got strength to face her from the
sense that she could not yet feel warranted in pronouncing that worst
condemnation on him. Some time, perhaps--when he was dying--he would
tell her all: in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand
in the gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from his
touch. Perhaps: but concealment had been the habit of his life, and
the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper
humiliation.
He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he deprecated
any harshness of judgment from her, but because he felt a deep distress
at the sight of her suffering. She had sent her daughters away to
board at a school on the coast, that this crisis might be hidden from
them as far as possible. Set free by their absence from the
intolerable necessity of accounting for her grief or of beholding their
frightened wonder, she could live unconstrainedly with the sorrow that
was every day streaking her hair with whiteness and making her eyelids
languid.
"Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,"
Bulstrode had said to her; "I mean with regard to arrangements of
property. It is my intention not to sell the land I possess in this
neighborhood, but to leave it to you as a safe provision. If you have
any wish on such subjects, do not conceal it from me."
A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to her
brother's, she began to speak to her husband on a subject which had for
some time been in her mind.
"I _should_ like to do something for my brother's family, Nicholas; and
I think we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond and her husband.
Walter says Mr. Lydgate must leave the town, and his practice is almost
good for nothing, and they have very little left to settle anywhere
with. I would rather do without something for ourselves, to make some
amends to my poor brother's family."
Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the
phrase "make some amends;" knowing that her husband must understand
her. He had a particular reason, which she was not aware of, for
wincing under her suggestion. He hesitated before he said--
"It is not possible to carry out your wish in the way you propose, my
dear. Mr. Lydgate has virtually rejected any further service from me.
He has returned the thousand pounds which I lent him. Mrs. Casaubon
advanced him the sum for that purpose. Here is his letter."
The letter seemed to cut Mrs. Bulstrode severely. The mention of Mrs.
Casaubon's loan seemed a reflection of that public feeling which held
it a matter of course that every one would avoid a connection with her
husband. She was silent for some time; and the tears fell one after
the other, her chin trembling as she wiped them away. Bulstrode,
sitting opposite to her, ached at the sight of that grief-worn face,
which two months before had been bright and blooming. It had aged to
keep sad company with his own withered features. Urged into some
effort at comforting her, he said--
"There is another means, Harriet, by which I might do a service to your
brother's family, if you like to act in it. And it would, I think, be
beneficial to you: it would be an advantageous way of managing the land
which I mean to be yours."
She looked attentive.
"Garth once thought of undertaking the management of Stone Court in
order to place your nephew Fred there. The stock was to remain as it
is, and they were to pay a certain share of the profits instead of an
ordinary rent. That would be a desirable beginning for the young man,
in conjunction with his employment under Garth. Would it be a
satisfaction to you?"
"Yes, it would," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with some return of energy.
"Poor Walter is so cast down; I would try anything in my power to do
him some good before I go away. We have always been brother and
sister."
"You must make the proposal to Garth yourself, Harriet," said Mr.
Bulstrode, not liking what he had to say, but desiring the end he had
in view, for other reasons besides the consolation of his wife. "You
must state to him that the land is virtually yours, and that he need
have no transactions with me. Communications can be made through
Standish. I mention this, because Garth gave up being my agent. I can
put into your hands a paper which he himself drew up, stating
conditions; and you can propose his renewed acceptance of them. I
think it is not unlikely that he will accept when you propose the thing
for the sake of your nephew."
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 73 using the context provided. | chapter 72|chapter 73 | Lydgate feels this is the worst calamity to strike him in his checkered career. The gulf between the noble tasks he had imagined for himself and the sordid "swamp" he is trapped in almost breaks him down. He is tortured by doubts. Even if Bulstrode had given him the money to silence him about Raffles disclosures. Even if he disobeyed Lydgates orders, it could be a mistaken continuation of the older form of treatment, which liberally gave alcohol to the patient. Finally, one might wonder whether he himself would have inquired further into the death, had he not had a sense of obligation to Bulstrode. These doubts could not be resolved, but they strengthen. Lydgates power of resistance. He would not leave Middlemarch, neither would he hide his obligation to Bulstrode nor dissociate from him. Only about Rosamonds reaction does he have a doubt. He dare not inform her about the facts, and leaves her to find out by chance. |
----------CHAPTER 72---------
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.
Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the
vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a
bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the
circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother's experience.
"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said. "How can we begin to
inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate
and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the
first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would
have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess
I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult.
I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on
personal matters. And--one should know the truth about his conduct
beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result."
"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"
said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years
had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction
of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr.
Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences,
instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would
conquer by their emotional force. Two days afterwards, he was dining
at the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, and when the dessert was
standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was
nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.
"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
him their first wish must be to justify him. What do we live for, if
it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be
indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in _my_ trouble,
and attended me in my illness."
Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been
when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly three years
before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a
decided opinion. But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and
acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout
admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should
fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon. He
smiled much less; when he said "Exactly" it was more often an
introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissive bachelor
days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve not to
be afraid of him--all the more because he was really her best friend.
He disagreed with her now.
"But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake to manage
a man's life for him in that way. Lydgate must know--at least he will
soon come to know how he stands. If he can clear himself, he will. He
must act for himself."
"I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity," added
Mr. Farebrother. "It is possible--I have often felt so much weakness
in myself that I can conceive even a man of honorable disposition, such
as I have always believed Lydgate to be, succumbing to such a
temptation as that of accepting money which was offered more or less
indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence about scandalous facts long
gone by. I say, I can conceive this, if he were under the pressure of
hard circumstances--if he had been harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has
been. I would not believe anything worse of him except under stringent
proof. But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors,
that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into
a crime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own
consciousness and assertion."
"Oh, how cruel!" said Dorothea, clasping her hands. "And would you not
like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence, if the
rest of the world belied him? Besides, there is a man's character
beforehand to speak for him."
"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at
her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid
and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become
diseased as our bodies do."
"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not be
afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help
him. Why should I be afraid? Now that I am not to have the land,
James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and take his place in
providing for the Hospital; and I have to consult Mr. Lydgate, to know
thoroughly what are the prospects of doing good by keeping up the
present plans. There is the best opportunity in the world for me to
ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things which
might make all the circumstances clear. Then we would all stand by him
and bring him out of his trouble. People glorify all sorts of bravery
except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest
neighbors." Dorothea's eyes had a moist brightness in them, and the
changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, who began to listen.
"It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which
would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother,
almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.
"Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know
the world better than she does." said Sir James, with his little
frown. "Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should really keep
back at present, and not volunteer any meddling with this Bulstrode
business. We don't know yet what may turn up. You must agree with
me?" he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.
"I do think it would be better to wait," said the latter.
"Yes, yes, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point
the discussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution
which was generally appropriate. "It is easy to go too far, you know.
You must not let your ideas run away with you. And as to being in a
hurry to put money into schemes--it won't do, you know. Garth has
drawn me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that sort of thing: I'm
uncommonly out of pocket with one thing or another. I must pull up.
As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune on those oak fences
round your demesne."
Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with Celia
into the library, which was her usual drawing-room.
"Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says," said Celia, "else you will
be getting into a scrape. You always did, and you always will, when
you set about doing as you please. And I think it is a mercy now after
all that you have got James to think for you. He lets you have your
plans, only he hinders you from being taken in. And that is the good
of having a brother instead of a husband. A husband would not let you
have your plans."
"As if I wanted a husband!" said Dorothea. "I only want not to have my
feelings checked at every turn." Mrs. Casaubon was still undisciplined
enough to burst into angry tears.
"Now, really, Dodo," said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than
usual, "you _are_ contradictory: first one thing and then another. You
used to submit to Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you would have
given up ever coming to see me if he had asked you."
"Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my
feeling for him," said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.
"Then why can't you think it your duty to submit a little to what James
wishes?" said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument.
"Because he only wishes what is for your own good. And, of course, men
know best about everything, except what women know better." Dorothea
laughed and forgot her tears.
"Well, I mean about babies and those things," explained Celia. "I
should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do
to Mr. Casaubon."
----------CHAPTER 73---------
Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.
When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her that
her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he
trusted soon to see him better and would call again the next day,
unless she sent for him earlier, he went directly home, got on his
horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out
of reach.
He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under
the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come
to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a
mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight
on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only
vulgar standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged. In such
moments a man can hardly escape being unloving. Lydgate thought of
himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured
his lot. He had meant everything to turn out differently; and others
had thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes. His
marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to
Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the
mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave
unwarrantably. There are episodes in most men's lives in which their
highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects
that fill their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present
just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an
emotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life
which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can
understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into
the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who
suspected him of baseness? How could he go silently away from
Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation? And
yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?
For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it
had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation
thoroughly clear to him. Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous
disclosures on the part of Raffles. Lydgate could now construct all
the probabilities of the case. "He was afraid of some betrayal in my
hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:
that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality. And he
may have tampered with the patient--he may have disobeyed my orders. I
fear he did. But whether he did or not, the world believes that he
somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I
didn't help in it. And yet--and yet he may not be guilty of the last
offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have
been a genuine relenting--the effect of second thoughts such as he
alleged. What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the
thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false. In his last
dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite
of my suspicion to the contrary."
There was a benumbing cruelty in his position. Even if he renounced
every other consideration than that of justifying himself--if he met
shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public
statement of all the facts as he knew them, who would be convinced? It
would be playing the part of a fool to offer his own testimony on
behalf of himself, and say, "I did not take the money as a bribe." The
circumstances would always be stronger than his assertion. And
besides, to come forward and tell everything about himself must include
declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of
others against him. He must tell that he had not known of Raffles's
existence when he first mentioned his pressing need of money to
Bulstrode, and that he took the money innocently as a result of that
communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have
arisen on his being called in to this man. And after all, the
suspicion of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.
But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
the same way if he had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had
continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part of
Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
recent heavy obligation. But if he had not received any money--if
Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy--would
he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the
man dead?--would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode--would the
dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own
treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his
profession--have had just the same force or significance with him?
That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he was
reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he had been
independent, this matter of a patient's treatment and the distinct rule
that he must do or see done that which he believed best for the life
committed to him, would have been the point on which he would have been
the sturdiest. As it was, he had rested in the consideration that
disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen, could not be
considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to his
orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply
one of etiquette. Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he
had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and
had said--"the purest experiment in treatment may still be
conscientious: my business is to take care of life, and to do the best
I can think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a
contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive." Alas! the
scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money
obligation and selfish respects.
"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were
a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--I can see
that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make
little difference to the blessed world here. I have been set down as
tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same."
Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at
him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients of his
had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too plain now.
The general black-balling had begun.
No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a hopeless
misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance. The scowl
which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a
meaningless accident. Already when he was re-entering the town after
that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was setting his
mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be
done against him. He would not retreat before calumny, as if he
submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his
should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well
as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from
showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode. It was true
that the association with this man had been fatal to him--true that if
he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts
unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary
rather than the rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a
bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of
men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed
fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get
acquittal for himself by howling against another. "I shall do as I
think right, and explain to nobody. They will try to starve me out,
but--" he was going on with an obstinate resolve, but he was getting
near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged itself again into that
chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of
wounded honor and pride.
How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to
drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common to
them both. He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which
events must soon bring about.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 77 based on the provided context. | chapter 77|chapter 78|chapter 79 | Rosamond is steeped in melancholy, gentle, and abstracted, so that Lydgate feared her. The only cheerful thing in her life seemed to be the arrival of Ladislaw. Somehow she linked his arrival with an attachment to herself personally. She is also hopeful that after he came, she could persuade her husband to quit Middlemarch, and get her fathers help in resettling in the city. Dorothea also thought of Ladislaw, more so since Bulstrodes scandal, when people began to speak of him, as "the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker." Since his last angry statement when leaving her, she has been confident of his love for her. She cherishes that, though with no thought of marriage, and the public disapproval arouses her sympathy afresh. That morning, she calls on Rosamond as promised, taking along the check for Lydgate. The maid shows her into the drawing room. Leaving Rosamond there, the maid goes in search of her mistress. She stumbles in a weeping Rosamond, with Will Ladislaw clasping her hands and speaking to her in a low tone. Stunned, Dorothea formally hands over the check and hurries away, leaving the other two frozen with shock. |
----------CHAPTER 77---------
"And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion."
--Henry V.
The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
should be away until the evening. Of late she had never gone beyond
her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa,
to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
you not, papa? I suppose we shall have very little money. I am sure I
hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
don't mind a hundred or two. I can see the end of that." With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences
is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui. Her melancholy had become so
marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.
But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
in the town. She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
his arrival by a hint of trouble. The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing."
Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit. Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
that of Will Ladislaw. Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she
had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of
gossip--her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music. But
there had followed his parting words--the few passionate words in
which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was
resolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment. From the
time of that parting, Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her,
believing with a proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his
determination that no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart
quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was
sure that the regard was blameless.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust. "If
you are not good, none is good"--those little words may give a
terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for
remorse.
Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
great powers of her womanhood. And it had from the first acted
strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted from her, that the
brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about
herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would
only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.
And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had
felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
one which was inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active
force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
lay within park palings.
"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
absurd. And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
candle for him to see his own folly by. Dorothea had observed the
animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
secrecy. But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.
She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her
whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and
would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail
because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on
the superfluities of her lot. She could bear that the chief pleasures
of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came
to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she
at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,
would be a source of torment to her:--"somebody who will manage your
property for you, my dear," was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of
suitable characteristics. "I should like to manage it myself, if I
knew what to do with it," said Dorothea. No--she adhered to her
declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long
valley of her life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance
would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers
by the way.
This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in
all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.
Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and
compassion. There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier
to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the
husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him. That was a
trouble which no third person must directly touch. But Dorothea
thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon
Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would
surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy
with her.
"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she was
being driven towards the town. The clear spring morning, the scent of
the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth
of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the
cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.
Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of
Lydgate's conduct. "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps
she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."
Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her
carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street,
having told the coachman to wait for some packages. The street door
was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at
the carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to
her that the lady who "belonged to it" was coming towards her.
"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.
"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in," said
Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title for this
queenly young widow with a carriage and pair. "Will you please to walk
in, and I'll go and see."
"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward
intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to
see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.
They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the
passage which led to the garden. The drawing-room door was unlatched,
and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.
Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and
swung back again without noise.
Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being
filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be.
She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything
remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones
which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and
advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a
bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which
filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,
without self-possession enough to speak.
Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall
on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will
Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her
bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her
upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.
Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her
presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and
rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested. Will Ladislaw,
starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new
lightning in them, seemed changing to marble: But she immediately
turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice--
"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished
to put into your own hands."
She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her
retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and
bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the
surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,
and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that
grand people were probably more impatient than others.
Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was
quickly in her carriage again.
"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one
looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual
she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy. And that was
really her experience. It was as if she had drunk a great draught of
scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object. She
needed something active to turn her excitement out upon. She felt
power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink. And she would
carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of
going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that
she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under
his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made
her more ardent in readiness to be his champion. She had never felt
anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing
pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.
"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James was
gone out of the room. "And you don't see anything you look at, Arthur
or anything. You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know. Is
it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?" Celia had
been used to watch her sister with expectation.
"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo, in her full
tones.
"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
forward upon them.
"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said
Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.
"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a
little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.
But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
until she descended at her own door.
----------CHAPTER 78---------
"Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
With her sweet faith above for monument"
Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--he
looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
towards him with doubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in
whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification
from what had just happened. Shallow natures dream of an easy sway
over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty
magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures
and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were. She
knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used
to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut
into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to
soothe or subdue. Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always
subdued in the long-run: events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond
would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never
gave up what she had set her mind on.
She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
coat-sleeve.
"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if
his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting. He wheeled
round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the
tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking
fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.
She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as
only Lydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet and
seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
shawl. Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.
It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting. And yet--how
could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her? He was fuming
under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive
vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--
"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."
"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. "Do you
think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
her again at more than a dirty feather?--Explain! How can a man
explain at the expense of a woman?"
"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.
"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is
not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable--to
believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you."
He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again--
"I had no hope before--not much--of anything better to come. But I had
one certainty--that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or
done about me, she believed in me.--That's gone! She'll never again
think me anything but a paltry pretence--too nice to take heaven
except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any
devil's change by the sly. She'll think of me as an incarnate insult
to her, from the first moment we--"
Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage by
snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be
throttled and flung off.
"Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my
preference! I never had a _preference_ for her, any more than I have a
preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I
would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
other woman's living."
Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was
almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
some new terrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute
repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
lash never experienced before. What another nature felt in opposition
to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness. When
Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:
her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them. If it
had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would
have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort
her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very
cheap.
Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity. He
had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless. He knew that he
was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
he felt checked and stultified in his anger. He walked towards the
mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for--he
hardly knew what. The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there--he had had
suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
within it. And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
slow pincers:--that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
heart. But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before it can turn into compassion.
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's
by a mute misery. The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship. But she said nothing,
and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, "Shall I
come in and see Lydgate this evening?"
"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.
And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
been in.
After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting. When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to
make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms. Rosamond said
that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
day of grief.
Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there. The perception that she was ill threw every other
thought into the background. When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested
on him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
she felt some content that he was there. He perceived the difference
in a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her,
and bending over her said, "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated
you?" Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and
for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her. He imagined
that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her
nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards
himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that
visit had raised.
----------CHAPTER 79---------
"Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their
talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the
midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall
suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
Despond."--BUNYAN.
When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter
addressed to him. He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.
When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
visit, and Will could not say, "Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
came this morning?"
"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.
"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.
"No--only a slight nervous shock--the effect of some agitation. She
has been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky
devil. We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you
left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I
suppose you are only just come down--you look rather battered--you
have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"
"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o'clock this
morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting," said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.
And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles which Rosamond had
already depicted to him in her way. She had not mentioned the fact of
Will's name being connected with the public story--this detail not
immediately affecting her--and he now heard it for the first time.
"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation. "You will be sure to
hear it as soon as you turn out into the town. I suppose it is true
that Raffles spoke to you."
"Yes," said Will, sardonically. "I shall be fortunate if gossip does
not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair. I should
think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose."
He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"
But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him. Will was very open
and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here. He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted it.
Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence. He made no
allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.
The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion's trouble. When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow." Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing. Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
momentous bargain.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him
this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's
unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 82 using the context provided. | null | Will has been like an exile in London. Hence when a plan for a new settlement in the West comes up, he tells himself he needs to go to Middlemarch to think over taking up Bulstrodes old offer. Immediately on arrival, he goes to Lydgates house, and his "familiar little world" is shattered. After this he roams around restlessly, unsure of what steps to take. Next, he decides to visit the Lydgates, as a friendship could not end so abruptly. Rosamond is cold, Lydgate innocently friendly. Then she slips him note with his teacup, which explain her actions on meeting Dorothea. Will reads it in his room. He is both excited and nervous, not knowing how much her feelings have been altered. |
----------CHAPTER 80---------
"Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
--WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.
When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised
to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt. There was
a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother
family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the
Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady
companion. When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she
was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could
dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered
into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell,
giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and
getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy. She paused on
her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some
garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the
crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the
result of sixty years' experience as to soils--namely, that if your
soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to
make it all of a mummy, why then--
Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than
was necessary. That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like
another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of
his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not
to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets
of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals. The
evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than
usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of
creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for
aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some
inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's
attention.
"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"
"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her
beaver-like notes.
"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his
glasses and looking at the carpet.
"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble. "A German box--very
pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."
"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone
of comprehension, getting up and hunting. The box was found at last
under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, "it
was under a fender the last time."
"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.
"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."
"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.
Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised and
annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it
was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation.
Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked
in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised
anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."
Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true; you
must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate. That sort
of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."
He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to
speak, even when he said good-night.
The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless
within the clutch of inescapable anguish. Dismissing Tantripp with a
few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards
the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and
moaned out--
"Oh, I did love him!"
Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
thoroughly to leave any power of thought. She could only cry in loud
whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted
and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome--after
her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who,
misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--after her lost woman's
pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet dim perspective of
hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged
recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.
In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--she besought
hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the
mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor
and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame
was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.
There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two, as
if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided
by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her
gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the
lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.
Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had
trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the
dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with
a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out
her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness
was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the
unshrinking utterance of despair.
And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved,
was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a
detected illusion--no, a living man towards whom there could not yet
struggle any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and
indignation and jealous offended pride. The fire of Dorothea's anger
was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning
reproach. Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that
might have been whole enough without him? Why had he brought his cheap
regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in
exchange? He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of
her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before. Why had he not
stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that
they might be less contemptible?
But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and
moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she
sobbed herself to sleep.
In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around
her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had
happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into
the eyes of sorrow. She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit
down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her
thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea's
nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the
narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness
that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own.
She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately
again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible
meaning. Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She
forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a
woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some
clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap
of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she
had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever. But
that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a
faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when
the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult
and had once shown her the truer measure of things. All the active
thought with which she had before been representing to herself the
trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, like her
own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--all this
vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it
asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let
us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own
irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of
driving her back from effort.
And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact
with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants
bearing the sacred branch? The objects of her rescue were not to be
sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her. She yearned towards
the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her
errant will. "What should I do--how should I act now, this very day,
if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of
those three?"
It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light
piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out
towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside
the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his
back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures
moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky
was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the
manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that
involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from
her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish
complaining.
What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but
something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
murmur which would soon gather distinctness. She took off the clothes
which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
and began to make her toilet. Presently she rang for Tantripp, who
came in her dressing-gown.
"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night," burst out
Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face, which
in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater
dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you _will_. Anybody might think now
you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."
"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling. "I have slept; I
am not ill. I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
my new bonnet to-day."
"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most
thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds' worth less of
crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire. "There's a reason
in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds at the bottom of your
skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--and if ever anybody looked
like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--is what's consistent for a
second year. At least, that's _my_ thinking," ended Tantripp, looking
anxiously at the fire; "and if anybody was to marry me flattering
himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be
deceived by his own vanity, that's all."
"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she used to
do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; "get me the
coffee."
She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it
in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this
strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the morning when
she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should have asked for her
lighter mourning which she had waived before. Tantripp would never
have found the clew to this mystery. Dorothea wished to acknowledge
that she had not the less an active life before her because she had
buried a private joy; and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to
all initiation, haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that
slight outward help towards calm resolve. For the resolve was not easy.
Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.
----------CHAPTER 82---------
"My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
--SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay in
banishment unless they are obliged. When Will Ladislaw exiled himself
from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his return than
his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier, but simply a
state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind,
and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite
facility. As the months went on, it had seemed more and more difficult
to him to say why he should not run down to Middlemarch--merely for the
sake of hearing something about Dorothea; and if on such a flying visit
he should chance by some strange coincidence to meet with her, there
was no reason for him to be ashamed of having taken an innocent journey
which he had beforehand supposed that he should not take. Since he was
hopelessly divided from her, he might surely venture into her
neighborhood; and as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch
over her--their opinions seemed less and less important with time and
change of air.
And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which
seemed to make a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty.
Will had given a disinterested attention to an intended settlement on a
new plan in the Far West, and the need for funds in order to carry out
a good design had set him on debating with himself whether it would not
be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode, to urge the
application of that money which had been offered to himself as a means
of carrying out a scheme likely to be largely beneficial. The question
seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnance to again entering
into any relation with the banker might have made him dismiss it
quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination the probability
that his judgment might be more safely determined by a visit to
Middlemarch.
That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason for coming
down. He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss the money
question with him, and he had meant to amuse himself for the few
evenings of his stay by having a great deal of music and badinage with
fair Rosamond, without neglecting his friends at Lowick Parsonage:--if
the Parsonage was close to the Manor, that was no fault of his. He had
neglected the Farebrothers before his departure, from a proud
resistance to the possible accusation of indirectly seeking interviews
with Dorothea; but hunger tames us, and Will had become very hungry for
the vision of a certain form and the sound of a certain voice.
Nothing, had done instead--not the opera, or the converse of zealous
politicians, or the flattering reception (in dim corners) of his new
hand in leading articles.
Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything
would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there
would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum
world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and
lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become
the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed
with the nightmare of consequences--he dreaded so much the immediate
issues before him--that seeing while he breakfasted the arrival of the
Riverston coach, he went out hurriedly and took his place on it, that
he might be relieved, at least for a day, from the necessity of doing
or saying anything in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw was in one of those
tangled crises which are commoner in experience than one might imagine,
from the shallow absoluteness of men's judgments. He had found
Lydgate, for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances
which claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the
reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will
to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible. To
a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was a
difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
increased for him. He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded to
show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again; the
friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness was a
power which he dreaded. And all the while there was no more foretaste
of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped
off and he was making his fresh start on crutches. In the night he had
debated whether he should not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but
for London, leaving a note to Lydgate which would give a makeshift
reason for his retreat. But there were strong cords pulling him back
from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of
Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite
of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery
for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance
which was also despair.
Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach. He
came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made up his
mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening. The Rubicon, we know,
was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay
entirely in certain invisible conditions. Will felt as if he were
forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was
not empire, but discontented subjection.
But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness
the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue
that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship. If Dorothea, after
her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she
perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for
discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those
three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past seven that
evening.
Rosamond had been prepared for Will's visit, and she received him with
a languid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous
exhaustion, of which he could not suppose that it had any relation to
Will. And when she sat in silence bending over a bit of work, he
innocently apologized for her in an indirect way by begging her to lean
backward and rest. Will was miserable in the necessity for playing the
part of a friend who was making his first appearance and greeting to
Rosamond, while his thoughts were busy about her feeling since that
scene of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclose them both,
like the painful vision of a double madness. It happened that nothing
called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,
and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded paper
in his saucer. He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he went back
to his inn he had no eagerness to unfold the paper. What Rosamond had
written to him would probably deepen the painful impressions of the
evening. Still, he opened and read it by his bed-candle. There were
only these few words in her neatly flowing hand:--
"I have told Mrs. Casaubon. She is not under any mistake about you. I
told her because she came to see me and was very kind. You will have
nothing to reproach me with now. I shall not have made any difference
to you."
The effect of these words was not quite all gladness. As Will dwelt on
them with excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning at
the thought of what had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond--at the
uncertainty how far Dorothea might still feel her dignity wounded in
having an explanation of his conduct offered to her. There might still
remain in her mind a changed association with him which made an
irremediable difference--a lasting flaw. With active fancy he wrought
himself into a state of doubt little more easy than that of the man who
has escaped from wreck by night and stands on unknown ground in the
darkness. Until that wretched yesterday--except the moment of
vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same
presence--all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been
as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies,
where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered. But now--would
Dorothea meet him in that world again?
----------CHAPTER 85---------
"Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr.
No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr.
Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr.
Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his
private verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards
unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the
judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman, the
foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic.
Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the
earth! Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very look of him.
Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I,
said Mr. Live-loose; for he would be always condemning my
way. Hang him, hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said
Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity.
He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too good for him,
said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way said
Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all
the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him;
therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death."
--Pilgrim's Progress.
When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions
bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful? That is a
rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know
ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd--to be sure that what we
are denounced for is solely the good in us. The pitiable lot is that
of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to
persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions
incarnate--who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right,
but for not being the man he professed to be.
This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he
made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end
his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.
The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from one
dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a tribunal
before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy. His
equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had sustained the
conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to, yet he had a terror
upon him which would not let him expose them to judgment by a full
confession to his wife: the acts which he had washed and diluted with
inward argument and motive, and for which it seemed comparatively easy
to win invisible pardon--what name would she call them by? That she
should ever silently call his acts Murder was what he could not bear.
He felt shrouded by her doubt: he got strength to face her from the
sense that she could not yet feel warranted in pronouncing that worst
condemnation on him. Some time, perhaps--when he was dying--he would
tell her all: in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand
in the gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from his
touch. Perhaps: but concealment had been the habit of his life, and
the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper
humiliation.
He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he deprecated
any harshness of judgment from her, but because he felt a deep distress
at the sight of her suffering. She had sent her daughters away to
board at a school on the coast, that this crisis might be hidden from
them as far as possible. Set free by their absence from the
intolerable necessity of accounting for her grief or of beholding their
frightened wonder, she could live unconstrainedly with the sorrow that
was every day streaking her hair with whiteness and making her eyelids
languid.
"Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,"
Bulstrode had said to her; "I mean with regard to arrangements of
property. It is my intention not to sell the land I possess in this
neighborhood, but to leave it to you as a safe provision. If you have
any wish on such subjects, do not conceal it from me."
A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to her
brother's, she began to speak to her husband on a subject which had for
some time been in her mind.
"I _should_ like to do something for my brother's family, Nicholas; and
I think we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond and her husband.
Walter says Mr. Lydgate must leave the town, and his practice is almost
good for nothing, and they have very little left to settle anywhere
with. I would rather do without something for ourselves, to make some
amends to my poor brother's family."
Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the
phrase "make some amends;" knowing that her husband must understand
her. He had a particular reason, which she was not aware of, for
wincing under her suggestion. He hesitated before he said--
"It is not possible to carry out your wish in the way you propose, my
dear. Mr. Lydgate has virtually rejected any further service from me.
He has returned the thousand pounds which I lent him. Mrs. Casaubon
advanced him the sum for that purpose. Here is his letter."
The letter seemed to cut Mrs. Bulstrode severely. The mention of Mrs.
Casaubon's loan seemed a reflection of that public feeling which held
it a matter of course that every one would avoid a connection with her
husband. She was silent for some time; and the tears fell one after
the other, her chin trembling as she wiped them away. Bulstrode,
sitting opposite to her, ached at the sight of that grief-worn face,
which two months before had been bright and blooming. It had aged to
keep sad company with his own withered features. Urged into some
effort at comforting her, he said--
"There is another means, Harriet, by which I might do a service to your
brother's family, if you like to act in it. And it would, I think, be
beneficial to you: it would be an advantageous way of managing the land
which I mean to be yours."
She looked attentive.
"Garth once thought of undertaking the management of Stone Court in
order to place your nephew Fred there. The stock was to remain as it
is, and they were to pay a certain share of the profits instead of an
ordinary rent. That would be a desirable beginning for the young man,
in conjunction with his employment under Garth. Would it be a
satisfaction to you?"
"Yes, it would," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with some return of energy.
"Poor Walter is so cast down; I would try anything in my power to do
him some good before I go away. We have always been brother and
sister."
"You must make the proposal to Garth yourself, Harriet," said Mr.
Bulstrode, not liking what he had to say, but desiring the end he had
in view, for other reasons besides the consolation of his wife. "You
must state to him that the land is virtually yours, and that he need
have no transactions with me. Communications can be made through
Standish. I mention this, because Garth gave up being my agent. I can
put into your hands a paper which he himself drew up, stating
conditions; and you can propose his renewed acceptance of them. I
think it is not unlikely that he will accept when you propose the thing
for the sake of your nephew."
|
My Antonia.book 1.chapter | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 1, chapter 2 based on the provided context. | book 1, chapter 1|book 1, chapter 2 | Jim doesn't remember arriving at his grandfather's farm, and when he wakes up he's in bed in a little room in his grandparent's house. His grandmother is looking at him and crying because Jim looks so much like his father . She gives him clean clothes and brings him to the kitchen to have a bath behind the stove. Jim goes with her into the basement. The floor is made of cement and the walls are plaster. He smells gingerbread baking. He takes a bath. A large cat comes along and watches. He tells his grandmother the cakes are burning and she comes in to take them out of the oven. Jim's grandmother is a tall stooped woman who looks alert. She is energetic and quick, and she likes things to proceed in an orderly fashion. She is fifty-five and strong. Jim dresses and looks at the cellar next to the kitchen where the men come and go from the fields. While his grandmother makes supper, Jim hangs out with the cat. His grandmother tells him that the new immigrant family he saw on the train is from Bohemia and is now their closest neighbor. At dinner that night, they all talk about Virginia where Jake and Jim used to live with Jim's parents. Jim's grandfather doesn't say much, and Jim senses a great amount of personal dignity in the man. He has a long white beard, a bald head, and blue eyes. We learn that Otto Fuchs is an Austrian immigrant who came to America as a young boy. He was a cowboy in the West until he got pneumonia and had to tone it down. Now he works for Jim's grandfather. After supper, Otto gives Jim a pony named Dude. Then he explains that he lost his ear in a blizzard, and he teaches Jim how to throw a lasso. He shows Jim and Jake his cowboy boots, too. Later the family says prayers. Jim's grandfather reads Psalms and has a great voice. The next morning Jim takes a good look at his new house from the outside. It's one of the only real wooden houses around. He notes the windmill, a small pond, and a large cornfield. Everywhere is the red grass of the prairie, constantly moving in the wind. Grandmother comes out and asks Jim to come into the garden with her to dig potatoes. She brings a cane with her so that she can kill rattlesnakes with it. They walk a quarter of the mile to get to the garden, and Jim checks out the landscape on the way. In the garden, Jim's grandmother points out a badger hole. She says she won't kill the badger because she feels friendly towards the local animals. She leaves Jim alone in the garden after she gets her potatoes. Jim leans against a pumpkin and feels at one with nature. He sees grasshoppers, gophers, and lots more tall grass. He feels happy and defines happiness as being dissolved into something great. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 1---------
I FIRST heard of Antonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey
across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I
traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands"
on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to
work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider
than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with
each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered
him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a
"Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory
books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a
friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we
were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our
confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of
distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of
different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons
were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an
Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the
immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose
destination was the same as ours.
"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you
want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes,
too!"
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to
"Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to
get diseases from foreigners.
I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long
day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so
many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about
Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when
we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled
down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with
lanterns. I could n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were
surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its
long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood
huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew
this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little
tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old
man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting
and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time
I had ever heard a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,
ain't you scared to come so far west?"
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's
jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of
heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to
the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and
that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:
here, I felt, what would be would be.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 2---------
I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.
When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely
larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was
flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and
black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my
grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
"Had a good sleep, Jimmy?" she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like your father!" I
remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have
come to wake him like this when he overslept. "Here are your clean
clothes," she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she
talked. "But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice
warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about."
"Down to the kitchen" struck me as curious; it was always "out in the
kitchen" at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a
kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster
laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor
was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little
half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew
in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of
gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel
trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When
she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my
bath without help.
"Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right
smart little boy."
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
"Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!" Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry
her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew
older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often
thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic
in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often
spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that
everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high,
and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it.
She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was
dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a
stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of
the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from
work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden
bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--he caught not only
rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on
the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked
about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she
said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm
in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men
came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then
she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors
there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke
kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of
an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a
delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he
was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an
adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His
iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had
drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in
Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he
had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he
had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was
a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his "chaps" and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design--roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah." "_He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah._" I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived
in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame
house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east
end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the
kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the
barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare,
and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at
the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow
bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by
our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond
which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.
There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much
larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum
patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as
far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red
grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look
very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against
the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over
the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of
wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,
curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to
it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my
attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a
leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I
must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had
killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who
lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all
summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out
of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at
the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Are n't you afraid of
snakes?"
"A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay anyhow."
"Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow
and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in
the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big
'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once
in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new country a body
feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me
when I'm at work."
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the
path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the
draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I
was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There
were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I
turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and
ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever
seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers
scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as
I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was
something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did
not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like
that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun
and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it
comes as naturally as sleep.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 1, chapter 6 with the given context. | book 1, chapter 3|book 1, chapter 4|book 1, chapter 5|book 1, chapter 6 | One afternoon Jim is giving Antonia a reading lesson outside on the grass. By now she can speak English well. They are sitting by the badger hole and Antonia is talking about how the badger is highly esteemed where she's from, and how the men hunt him using a special kind of dog. Jim looks at all the rabbits running around. Antonia captures a small green insect and listens to him chirp. She tells Jim about an old beggar woman named Old Hata who used to live in her village. If you took her in and let her sit by the fire she would sing you songs. When it's time to go home, Antonia puts the green insect in her hair for safe keeping. Jim loves those fall afternoons. He looks at the miles of red grass. They see a man walking along with a gun. He looks sad, and it turns out to be Antonia's father. She explains to Jim that he is sick all the time. When they run to meet him, Mr. Shimerda shows them a rabbit he just shot. Antonia explains that they will eat the meat and use the skin to make hats for the winter. Then Antonia talks to her father in Bohemian and shows him the little green insect. Meanwhile Jim checks out his gun. Antonia translates from her father, who tells Jim that when he's older he will give him that gun as a present. Jim notes that the Shimerdas are poor but like to give away everything they own. Antonia and her father go home, and Jim goes back to his own farm. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 3---------
ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance
of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as
they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or
chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of
potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed
some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies
in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and
jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big
cornfield.
I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was
only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high
wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild
thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and
shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many
branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the
prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a
plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in
time to his bites as he ate down toward them.
The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the
homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more
than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the
old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs.
Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this
part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell
them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for
advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs
said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father
was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by
trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.
He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here,
though he used to pick up money by it at home.
"If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in
that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger
hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty
dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."
"Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old
horses for the price of good work-teams. I'd have interfered about the
horses--the old man can understand some German--if I'd 'a' thought it would
do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."
Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"
Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It would
take me a long while to explain."
The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw
Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and made the
land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering
tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some
of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining
white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.
As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but
rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging
out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those
banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass
that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had
no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a
door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a
woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A
little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same
embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted
from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not
young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little
eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically.
"Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the
bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no
good!"
Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after
while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."
My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they
were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our
visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled
them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good,
much thank!"--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.
The oldest son, Ambroz,--they called it Ambrosch,--came out of the cave and
stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and
broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His
hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and
suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on
corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.
The little girl was pretty, but An-tonia-- they accented the name thus,
strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier. I remembered what the
conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of
light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was
brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her
brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood
awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see
what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance
one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he
approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to
show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's
foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!" like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly,
"Marek!" then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.
"She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born
like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer." He struck
Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.
At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no
hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his
forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him
look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and
slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,
then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and
well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.
His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face
was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes--like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his
coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf
of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral
pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me
and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep
drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.
When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed
toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how
glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop
until the ground itself stopped--fell away before us so abruptly that the
next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the
edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below
us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like it; she held her
little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed
to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes
fairly blazing with things she could not say.
"Name? What name?" she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my
name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into
the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What
name?"
We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a
baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the sky
and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not
satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word,
making it sound like "ice." She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes,
then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she
distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees
and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then
to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.
"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."
She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused
her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of
words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we
could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of
us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Antonia had said the new words over
and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on
her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite
sternly. I did n't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never
seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was
how they behaved.
While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,
"An-tonia, An-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare. "Tatinek, Tatinek!" she
shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia
reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched
my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.
I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted
by my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia!"
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 4---------
ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony,
under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the
post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time
by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or
to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I
was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after
working hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered
sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the
sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's
story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see
the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a
hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they
had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about
them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the
scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown,
earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We
had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about.
They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were
quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable
houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was
always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under
the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that
must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any
pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the
desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that
some of the holes must go down to water--nearly two hundred feet,
hereabouts. Antonia said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probably
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.
Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them
known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her
reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was
important that one member of the family should learn English. When the
lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the
garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out the
hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers. The
white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with
curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in,
and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were
famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of
the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.
Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about
cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every
movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good
housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!
I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her
family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin
peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste
out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the
measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this
residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk
or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the
two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown
owls housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid of
him.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 5---------
WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two
girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.
I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: "My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody
laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very
nice!"
I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in
that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a
little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country--farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all
the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were
the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,
so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to
people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could
understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they
avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he
had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations
and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this
supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great
frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn
tight over his high cheek-bones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always
had a cough.
Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,
bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met
people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well
as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair
and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the
sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was
usually called "Curly Peter," or "Rooshian Peter."
The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter
always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor
homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to
church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a
low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked
apologetically under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost
every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him. She said they came
from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from
Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for
me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass
well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch,
and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We
found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub. He was working
so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down
as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head
and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of
perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us
down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He
told Antonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any
man could have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for
Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream
with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks
and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it
in a new place.
After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up
the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere
helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men
who were "batching." Besides the kitchen, there was a living-room, with a
wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham
sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window,
where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That
day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and
beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in
the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies
and sunshine alike.
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over
them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them,
they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us
knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with
juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one--better than medicine; in his
country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable
and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Antonia, he sighed and told us
that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have
had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said
he had left his country because of a "great trouble."
When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that
would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily
painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart
began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very
doleful, and he sang words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 6---------
ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all
about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of
some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead--all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a
little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the
buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.
Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and
indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty
little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her
village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs
and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked
voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see
her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.
When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf
of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on
quickly when the sun got low, and Antonia's dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false
pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put
the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over
her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and
then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the
magical light of the late afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As
far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in
sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day.
The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw
long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire
and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of
triumphant ending, like a hero's death--heroes who died young and
gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prairie under
that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or
followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and
nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the
upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet
along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.
"My papa sick all the time," Tony panted as we flew. "He not look good,
Jim."
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered
about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her
cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from
the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and
showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Antonia with a wintry
flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.
"My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for win-ter!"
she exclaimed joyfully. "Meat for eat, skin for hat,"--she told off these
benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted
it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata.
He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood
looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he
listened as if it were a beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,
short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock. When he saw me examining
it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if
I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and
Antonia translated:--
"My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine, from
Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got
here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his
wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you."
[Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over
his shoulder]
I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even
the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected
substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while
the feeble minstrel sheltered in Antonia's hair went on with its scratchy
chirp. The old man's smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of
pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it. As the sun sank there
came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.
Antonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket
and raced my shadow home.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book 1, chapter 7, utilizing the provided context. | book 1, chapter 7|book 1, chapter 8 | Jim likes Antonia, but he doesn't like her superior attitude. She is older than he and so she treats him like a child sometimes. But then one adventure changes that. One day Jim rides over to the Shimerdas and finds Antonia getting ready to go to Russian Peter's house to borrow a spade for Ambrosch. He ends up taking her there on his pony. On the way home with the spade, Antonia gets him to stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of the holes to see what it looks like. The prairie-dog town is large and spread out. Jim notes how orderly it seems. The dogs scurry underground as Jim approaches. He and Antonia check out a big hole with two entrances. Then Antonia screams, and Jim spots the biggest rattlesnake he's ever seen. She starts yelling in Bohemian. The snake rattles, and Jim sees that he is about to strike. He starts jabbing at the snake with his spade until it's dead. After, Antonia tells Jim he should have run. But she's impressed that he's so brave. She insists that they bring the dead snake back home for everyone to see. Jim points out the green liquid coming out of the snake's head and says it's the poison. They measure the snake to be five and a half feet long with 24 rattles. Antonia says this means the snake is 24 years old. Jim starts to feel proud of what he did. He respects the snake as the ancient and oldest Evil. Dude is too scared to let them come near him with the dead snake, so Antonia rides him home while Jim walks beside, dragging the snake behind him and feeling proud of himself. When they get home Otto greets them first. He asks how Jim killed the snake, and he thinks it's lucky they had a spade with them. Antonia gushes about Jim's bravery. He and Otto go to hang the snake up in the windmill, while Antonia goes into the kitchen to tell the story once again. Later, Jim learns that this particular snake was old and that's why he didn't fight too much. He knows that a younger snake that size would have outmatched him. The snake hangs there and several neighbors come to admire it over the next few days. Antonia likes Jim much better from then on and she stops acting so superior. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 7---------
MUCH as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of
the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more
like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off on
foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been
another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as
wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled--hundreds of
miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling,
burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get
warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,
heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,
Antonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of
the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were
horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get
some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the
town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an
orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude
down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would
be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on
their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they
barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the
mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the
town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.
If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.
We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into
the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors
united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which
much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I
heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and
shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of
those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was
sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when
Antonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter "W." He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big
snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones could n't crush the disgusting vitality
out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I did n't run
because I did n't think of it--if my back had been against a stone wall I
could n't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten--now he would
spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head
with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia,
barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly
head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back
on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. Antonia came
after me, crying, "O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why you not run
when I say?"
"What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!" I said petulantly.
"I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared." She took my handkerchief
from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away
from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.
"I never know you was so brave, Jim," she went on comfortingly. "You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for
him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show
everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you
kill."
She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for
this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly
in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.
"Look, Tony, that's his poison," I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to
taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained
to Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must
have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over--would n't let us come near
him.
We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her
exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big
and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that
no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward
the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the edge
of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antonia called him
to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but
scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.
"Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?"
"Up at the dog-town," I answered laconically.
"Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?"
"We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch."
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. "It was just luck you had a tool," he said cautiously. "Gosh! I
would n't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane would n't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?"
Antonia broke in: "He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's boots.
I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was
crazy."
Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: "Got him in the head
first crack, did n't you? That was just as well."
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I
found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with
a great deal of color.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it,
a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world does n't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for
many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the
snake was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and
admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 8---------
WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles
to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a
mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was
Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could
give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew
that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty--that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew
faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with
mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow-workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill
indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the
log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The
Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to
put them out of mind.
One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just
as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,
and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch
them. When Antonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated
grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I
would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning. My plan
must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about
humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,
and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches
and doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I sat in the
straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a
cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in
the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of
the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept
sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would
never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew
magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the
world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his
land, too, some such belief.
The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that
we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided
us--the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.
We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I
sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in
front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the
thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept
moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then
swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore
down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me
think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying
desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in
one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up
with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together--to tell us
that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed,--a long
complaining cry,--as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some
old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor
by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap--then the
high whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.
"He is scared of the wolves," Antonia whispered to me. "In his country
there are very many, and they eat men and women." We slid closer together
along the bench.
I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging
open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell
horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the
tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of
spirits went through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and
slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted
some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous,
unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so
simple and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper.
He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Antonia took my hand under
the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to
hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his
bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.
"It's wolves, Jimmy," Antonia whispered. "It's awful, what he says!"
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who
had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could
hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which
fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to
his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots--I thought I had
never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to
the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for
breath, like a child with croup. Antonia's father uncovered one of his
long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see
what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out
like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That
sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over.
Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got
up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home.
Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under
the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.
On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and
rattling Antonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did
not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days
afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were
asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another
village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to
the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and
six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the
parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a
supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and
drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and
blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his
sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and
Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove.
The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom's
sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for
merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.
The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too
much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and
echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together.
There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove
came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like
streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were
hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,--he was
probably very drunk,--the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a
clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow,
and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed
made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The
groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest--all the others carried
from six to a dozen people.
Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible
to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the
wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who
were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.
The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel
sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the
groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm
and to guide them carefully.
At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked
back. "There are only three sledges left," he whispered.
"And the wolves?" Pavel asked.
"Enough! Enough for all of us."
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down
the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a
whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father's sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as
if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even
then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the
heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness
hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom's movement had given
Pavel an idea.
They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left
out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel's middle horse was
failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;
Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the
horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in
the harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone
upon the familiar road. "They still come?" he asked Peter.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Twenty, thirty--enough."
Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave
Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He
called to the groom that they must lighten--and pointed to the bride. The
young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away.
In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the
sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly
how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front
seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound
that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it
before--the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early
prayers.
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever
since. They were run out of their village. Pavel's own mother would not
look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned
where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who
had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed
them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.
They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always
unfortunate. When Pavel's health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and
was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left
the country--went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of
Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During
the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes.
He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held
mortgages on Peter's live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes
at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow
before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but
this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans
had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and
bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons
that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping
beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.
When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit
there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows
penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to any one, but
guarded it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that
night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a
painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often
found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country
that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book 1, chapter 11 using the context provided. | book 1, chapter 9|book 1, chapter 10|book 1, chapter 11 | Jake is assigned to do the Christmas shopping for the family, but it starts snowing on December 21st and there is no way to get to town. The men can't even do much work outside so they stay in and grease their boots. Grandfather realizes that no one will be able to go into town to buy presents, and refuses to let Jake go in by horseback. So they decide to have a country Christmas without presents from town. Jim had wanted to get picture books for Yulka and Antonia, so Grandmother helps him make some using pieces of cotton cloth like Jim pastes in cut shapes to make scenes. He also uses cut-up magazines. Otto makes candles and grandmother bakes gingerbread men. On the day before Christmas Jake packs up all the handmade gifts and sets off by horseback to the Shimerdas'. When he goes, Jim sees that he's wearing a hatchet and has planned a surprise for him . When Jake returns, he has a Christmas tree with him. That Christmas Eve they all gather around the tree and decorate it. Otto contributes with relics from his cowboy trunk. Narrator-Jim still remembers how his whole family looked sitting around that tree. He thinks it's remarkable that Otto had no children of his own but liked children so much. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 9---------
THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff
willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the
Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like
strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in
a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the
old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job
if I had n't hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the
next day I went over to take Yulka and Antonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box,
and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the
Shimerdas' I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the
bottom of the draw and called. Antonia and Yulka came running out, wearing
little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard
about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in
beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to
be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white
stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Antonia said, the whole world
was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.
The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft
between snow-drifts--very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops
that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they
would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were
so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind
had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if
some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same
time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we
stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their
color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the
sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual
impression of the stinging lash in the wind.
The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering
beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were
so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter's house. The great
fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like
wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go
home again. Could n't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house,
Yulka asked, and could n't I go to town and buy things for us to keep
house with?
All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when we
turned back,--it must have been about four o'clock,--the east wind grew
stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky
became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it
around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head
under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins
clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It
was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with
them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a
fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home
directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of
quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks.
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days--like a
tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day,
husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down
over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think
they were like Arctic explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making
husking-gloves, I read "The Swiss Family Robinson" aloud to her, and I
felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an
adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the
cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about
keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when
she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was
not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, "very little to
do with." On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on
other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or
cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,
striped with currants and boiled in a bag.
Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most
interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth
and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands
cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously:
feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs.
When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of
their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather
read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the
stove, "easing" their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their
cracked hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to
sing, "For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong," or, "Bury Me Not on
the Lone Prairee." He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing
when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.
I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see
the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good
fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept
faith with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name
with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him
behave like a crazy man--tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. If he, as
he said, "forgot himself" and swore before grandmother, he went about
depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the
cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and
to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare
themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do
anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.
On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed
us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling
down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys
of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies,
wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be
persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.
I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was
working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with
her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:--
When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his
relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join
her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it
was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he
"got on fine with the kids," and liked the mother, though she played a
sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but
three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he
was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him,
the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who
made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and
often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken
ashore at New York, he had, as he said, "to carry some of them." The trip
to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very
difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The
mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could
feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture
factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was
rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in
some fashion to blame. "I was sure glad," Otto concluded, "that he did n't
take his hard feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for
me, all right! Now, did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard
luck, Mrs. Burden?"
Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to
his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he did n't
realize that he was being protected by Providence.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 10---------
FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the
Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold
which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to
have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr.
Shimerda out hunting.
"He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that
he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em
over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of
cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
"All but the crazy boy," Jake put in. "He never wears the coat. Krajiek
says he's turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be
getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield
yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot.
He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on,
to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter'n me and put 'em back
in his sack and walked off."
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. "Josiah, you
don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do
you?"
"You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline," he
replied gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and
ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.
I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat
family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake
packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
"Now, Jake," grandmother was saying, "if you can find that old rooster
that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll take him
along. There's no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n't have got hens
from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she
was confused and did n't know where to begin. I've come strange to a new
country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no
matter what you don't have."
"Just as you say, mam," said Jake, "but I hate to think of Krajiek getting
a leg of that old rooster." He tramped out through the long cellar and
dropped the heavy door behind him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and
climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas' we
heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and
her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the
pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over
her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the
hole in the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the
provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy
path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came from
the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind
whisked them roughly away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother's
hand. She did not say "How do!" as usual, but at once began to cry,
talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were
tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at every one.
The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if
he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her
kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at
her mother, hid again. Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark
corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack
stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the
crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it
was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a
feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and
made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been
frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively
vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the
hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches. Then the
poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid
her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed
to her, but called Antonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left
her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.
"You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad," she whispered,
as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things grandmother
handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of
potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
"Have n't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia? This is no
place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?"
"We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,--what he throw out. We got no
potatoes, Mrs. Burden," Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the
door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from
behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as
if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and
neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room.
In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger
than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one
of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw.
The old man held the lantern. "Yulka," he said in a low, despairing voice,
"Yulka; my Antonia!"
Grandmother drew back. "You mean they sleep in there,--your girls?" He
bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. "It is very cold on the floor, and this is
warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there," she insisted eagerly.
"My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?" She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built against
the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. "Sure enough, where _would_ you sleep, dear! I don't
doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after while, Antonia,
and then you'll forget these hard times."
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his
wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on
Antonia's shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated.
He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he
made good wages, and his family were respected there. He left Bohemia with
more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was
paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway
fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid
Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm
machinery, they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know,
however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until
spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden, and
would then do very well. Ambrosch and Antonia were both old enough to work
in the fields, and they were willing to work. But the snow and the bitter
weather had disheartened them all.
Antonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in
the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the
logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been
felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor
with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us
and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his
queer noises for me--to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,--but he did
not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be
agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up
for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,
and, while Antonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own
account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and
brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and
half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy
began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the
contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent,
even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied
it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.
"For cook," she announced. "Little now; be very much when cook," spreading
out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon.
"Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my
country."
"Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda," grandmother said drily. "I can't say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself."
[Illustration: Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms in a Bohemian forest]
Antonia undertook to explain. "This very good, Mrs. Burden,"--she clasped
her hands as if she could not express how good,--"it make very much when
you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in
the gravy,--oh, so good!"
All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good
Christian people could forget they were their brothers' keepers.
"I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where's a body to begin, with these people? They're wanting in everything,
and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give 'em that, I guess. Jimmy,
here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon
that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?"
"He's a worker, all right, mam, and he's got some ketch-on about him; but
he's a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and
then, ag'in, they can be too mean."
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package
Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked
like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the
most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor. We
could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
"They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain't dried
fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I'm afraid of 'em. Anyhow, I
should n't want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old
clothes and goose pillows."
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the
chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the
strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little
brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so
jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some
deep Bohemian forest {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 11---------
DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of
our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas shopping.
But on the 21st of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the
windmill--its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial like a shadow. The
snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The
cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men could
not go farther than the barns and corral. They sat about the house most of
the day as if it were Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their
suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced at breakfast that it
would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases. Jake was
sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things in
saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated, and
a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over. Anyway, he would
never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had
wanted to get some picture-books for Yulka and Antonia; even Yulka was
able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut
squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound
it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room
table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those
good old family magazines which used to publish colored lithographs of
popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
"Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine" for my frontispiece. On the
white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and advertising cards which I
had brought from my "old country." Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and
made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and
baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar
and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the
Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's gray gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung
to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was
planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from
the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west
hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a
coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he
was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my
father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten
how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner
of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all
gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table,
looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five
feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals,
strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into
pasteboard sockets. Its real splendors, however, came from the most
unlikely place in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never seen
anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker's
wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly
colored paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand
alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in
Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously appareled, and the ox and the ass and the
shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels,
singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the
three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends
and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it
reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under
it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the
lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face
seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar
that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As
I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner
behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had
only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of
those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 1, chapter 13 with the given context. | book 1, chapter 12|book 1, chapter 13|book 1, chapter 14 | In the next week the land finally thaws out, and everything is slushy by New Year's. Jim starts doing his regular chores again. One morning Antonia and Mrs. Shimerda come over; Antonia's mother has never been in the Burdens' house before. She runs around looking at everything and ends up taking one of their pots on the grounds that they have several and she has none. Jim resents that his grandmother lets them take it. After dinner Mrs. Shimerda tells Grandmother that if she had all the luxuries grandmother had, she would make much better food than Grandmother does. Jim isn't happy about this either. Antonia tells Jim that her father is very sad, because he misses his old country. He doesn't even play his violin anymore because he hates this country. Jim responds that people who don't like this country should have stayed home. Antonia explains that her mother made them come to America, thinking they would make a lot of money here. Then they argue about whether or not Jim's grandparents ought to have to help the Shimerdas. Antonia thinks they should help because, once Ambrosch is rich, he'll pay them back. We learn that Ambrosch is the main man of the family. He calls the shots and they pin their hopes on his future. After the Shimerdas leave, Jim expresses his anger at Mrs. Shimerda to his grandmother. She tells him that poverty brings out different things in people. Then she makes him read religious literature. The weather remains good for three weeks. The bulls start fighting each other because they think it's spring. Fuchs has to pitchfork them apart. On Jim's eleventh birthday, a giant blizzard begins. The men make themselves some shovels and Jim has to stay inside and let the men do the outdoor chores. The next day the men shovel all morning to clear the snow. It's the biggest storm in ten years. They decide not to go out and feed the cattle. After dinner Jake and Otto dig a tunnel through the snow to the hen house so that Grandmother and Jim can walk there to get eggs. They don't finish the chores until 5pm. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 12---------
ON Christmas morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just
coming in from their morning chores--the horses and pigs always had their
breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted "Merry Christmas"! to me,
and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat. Morning
prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from St. Matthew
about the birth of Christ, and as we listened it all seemed like something
that had happened lately, and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the
Lord for the first Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the world
ever since. He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the
poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder
than it was here with us. Grandfather's prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he
talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull
from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the
time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and
his views about things.
After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how pleased the
Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was friendly and
went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft gray
day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky, and occasional
squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on
holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played
dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother. He always
wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he was, and no
matter how long it had been since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in
the dining-room. He would write for a while, then sit idle, his clenched
fist lying on the table, his eyes following the pattern of the oilcloth.
He spoke and wrote his own language so seldom that it came to him
awkwardly. His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.
At about four o'clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He had
come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother's kindness to
his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we sat about the
stove, enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon and the
atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather's house. This feeling
seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the
crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace
and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he
had left so far behind. He sat still and passive, his head resting against
the back of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His
face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when
they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass
of Virginia apple-brandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint
flush came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a
shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled
rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter content.
[Illustration: Jake bringing home a Christmas tree]
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before
the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow
flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of
meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and
quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body
formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.
He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and
hurt people's feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree
before, but now, with some one kneeling before it,--images, candles, {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable
head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little
urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to
look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his
deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into
the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his
overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern
and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took
grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly,
"Good wo-man!" He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and
went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather
looked at me searchingly. "The prayers of all good people are good," he
said quietly.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 13---------
THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all
the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about
examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting
upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen
she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said:
"You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-minded of grandmother
to give the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better."
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawn-tree."
"People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said
severely. "We don't make them come here."
"He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: 'America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls.' My papa, he cry for leave his old
friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the
long horn like this"--she indicated a slide trombone. "They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle."
"Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them
and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more than she did any one
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n't
come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. "She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
would n't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in 'The Prince of
the House of David.' Let's forget the Bohemians."
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:--
"You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you."
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle--they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but to-morrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap
so that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other's backs. "This'll take the bile out of 'em!" Fuchs remarked
gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the
henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their
ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done--just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a
strange, unnatural sort of day.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 14---------
ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes,
I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in
the kitchen--grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What
could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn
had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was
lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his
hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing
their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both
looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with
a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed
reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips
were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear
Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have
prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda
is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys
have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That
is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys."
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to
talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances. I held my
tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
"No, sir," Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, "nobody
heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a
road, and the women folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch
come in it was dark and he did n't see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of
queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--bolted clean out of
the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a
lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him."
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned. "I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How
could he forget himself and bring this on us!"
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden," Fuchs
declared. "He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of
fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed
hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Antonia heated the
water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he
was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he
was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn
and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls,
where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent
except,"--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,--"except what he could n't
nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the
bed. He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck
and rolled up his sleeves."
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. "Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the
trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the
barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!"
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly. "There's something mighty queer about
it."
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
"Well, mam, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I picks it up and
carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in
the front of the old man's face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin'
round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun
whimperin', 'My God, man, don't do that!' 'I reckon I'm a-goin' to look
into this,' says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about
wringin' his hands. 'They'll hang me!' says he. 'My God, they'll hang me
sure!'"
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. "Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so have you.
The old man would n't have made all them preparations for Krajiek to
murder him, would he? It don't hang together. The gun was right beside him
when Ambrosch found him."
"Krajiek could 'a' put it there, could n't he?" Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go
trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble. Otto reads
you too many of them detective stories."
"It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline," said grandfather quietly.
"If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the
inside outward."
"Just so it is, Mr. Burden," Otto affirmed. "I seen bunches of hair and
stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up
there by gunshot, no question."
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas with
him.
"There is nothing you can do," he said doubtfully. "The body can't be
touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a
matter of several days, this weather."
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to
them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a
right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He's left her alone in a
hard world." She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his
breakfast at the kitchen table.
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to
make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On
the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the
country with no roads to guide him.
"Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on
a second pair of socks. "I've got a good nose for directions, and I never
did need much sleep. It's the gray I'm worried about. I'll save him what I
can, but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!"
"This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you
can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner. She's a good
woman, and she'll do well by you."
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had
not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not say a
word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his
hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy fell asleep
where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that
would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big
black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy
white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set
off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black
and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs.
Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted
cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the
house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to
acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar,
and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not
been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After
the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat
down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got "Robinson Crusoe" and tried to read,
but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed
upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about in this world at
all, it would be here, in our house, which had been more to his liking
than any other in the neighborhood. I remembered his contented face when
he was with us on Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this
terrible thing would never have happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore,--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly
underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house. There,
on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda.
Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It
was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were
sitting there with him. I went over all that Antonia had ever told me
about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the
fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned
to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,--belonging,
as Antonia said, to the "nobles,"--from which she and her mother used to
steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that
forest, and if any one killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid
pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not
yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze," Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. "As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly. "I almost know it is n't true." I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 1, chapter 15 with the given context. | book 1, chapter 15|book 1, chapter 16|book 1, chapter 17 | Otto gets back from town the next day, exhausted from his trip. He reports that the coroner is coming later that day. He brought with him a young Bohemian eager to help his countrymen, named Anton Jelinek. He immediately thanks Grandmother for helping the Shimerdas. Jim admires Anton. The young man goes to school in town. At dinner Grandfather talks more than usual. He also likes Anton. The men discuss whether or not a priest will be willing to come to a suicide. Grandfather thinks no priest is necessary for Mr. Shimerda's soul to reach heaven, but Anton thinks prayer is necessary. He tells a story to explain: When he was young he was an altar boy. During war with the Prussians lots of men died, and he used to go with the priest to say the last rites. Everyone in the camp got sick from cholera except for he and the priest, because they were carrying the holy sacrament with them. Grandfather admires the young man's faith. After dinner Anton starts trying to cut a path through the snow to the Shimerda's house so that a wagon can get through. Otto sets to making a coffin. Jim admires Anton's long wolf skin coat, which was made from coyotes he shot and skinned himself. He watches Anton start to cut the path through the snow. Grandfather rides off to the Shimerdas to meet the coroner there. Otto starts work on the coffin while Jim watches. He tells a story about the last time he made a coffin, when he was working in Colorado. An Italian died in a mine and he was the only guy around who knew how to make a coffin. Everyone agrees that it's a good thing Otto is around to make the coffin. Jim likes listening to the sounds of the coffin being made. He wonders why Otto didn't choose to become a cabinetmaker, since he seems to like carpentry so much. He even sings while he works. At 4pm Mr. Bushy the postmaster stops by. He is another neighbor who is on his way to the Shimerdas' house. Several other neighbors stop by and Grandmother feeds them all cake. Everyone wants to know details about the suicide and they all discuss where Mr. Shimerda will be buried. They worry that a suicide won't be allowed to get buried in the Catholic graveyard. Jim thinks it's nice that everyone is talking to each other. He listens to several more of Otto's stories, but we don't get to hear any of them in detail. The postmaster stops back at the Burdens' again on his way home from the Shimerdas'. He reports that the Norwegian burial yard has refused to take in Mr. Shimerda's body. This angers Grandmother. Then Grandfather returns with Anton and the coroner. The coroner thinks that Krajiek killed Mr. Shimerda, but Grandfather has talked him into letting that possibility go. Also, Krajiek is acting very guilty. At supper everyone continues to talk about where they should bury Mr. Shimerda. Ambrosch and Mrs. Shimerda want to bury him on the corner of their land. Grandfather tells Ambrosch that someday there will be a crossroads there, but Ambrosch doesn't care. Grandfather seems to think there is some superstition in Bohemia about burying a suicide at cross-roads. |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 15---------
OTTO FUCHS got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported that
the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon, but the
missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles
away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours' sleep at
the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the gray gelding had strained
himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That long trip
through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a
homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow-countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties then,
handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a miracle
in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks
bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur
cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.
"I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to
poor strangers from my kawn-tree."
He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He said he
would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to husk
corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going to the school
by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children. He told me
he had a nice "lady-teacher" and that he liked to go to school.
At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to
strangers.
"Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?" he asked.
Jelinek looked serious. "Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father
has done a great sin," he looked straight at grandfather. "Our Lord has
said that."
Grandfather seemed to like his frankness. "We believe that, too, Jelinek.
But we believe that Mr. Shimerda's soul will come to its Creator as well
off without a priest. We believe that Christ is our only intercessor."
The young man shook his head. "I know how you think. My teacher at the
school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the
dead. I have seen too much."
We asked him what he meant.
He glanced around the table. "You want I shall tell you? When I was a
little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make
my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By
'n' by war-times come, when the Austrians fight us. We have very many
soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp,
and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give
the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with
the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness
but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because
we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us." He
paused, looking at grandfather. "That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened
to myself. All the soldiers know, too. When we walk along the road, the
old priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on
horse. All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth,
pull up their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we
pass. So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family."
We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank,
manly faith.
"I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these
things," said grandfather, "and I would never be the one to say you were
not in God's care when you were among the soldiers."
After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong
black farmhorses to the scraper and break a road through to the
Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was
the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, was set to work on a coffin.
Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us
that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who "batched"
with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made the coat.
From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn with the blacks,
and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield. Sometimes he was
completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him; then he and
the horses would emerge black and shining.
Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for
the oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his work-table and watched him. He did
not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of
paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus
engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his
half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At
last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.
"The hardest part of my job's done," he announced. "It's the head end of
it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The last
time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden," he continued, as he sorted and
tried his chisels, "was for a fellow in the Black Tiger mine, up above
Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of
the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a
trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled across a box
canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two Swedes
had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down. If you'll
believe it, they went to work the next day. You can't kill a Swede. But in
my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned out
different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It's a handy
thing to know, when you knock about like I've done."
"We'd be hard put to it now, if you did n't know, Otto," grandmother said.
"Yes, 'm," Fuchs admitted with modest pride. "So few folks does know how
to make a good tight box that'll turn water. I sometimes wonder if
there'll be anybody about to do it for me. However, I'm not at all
particular that way."
All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting
wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such
cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a
pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so
soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the
boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow
shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to
cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled
the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands
went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he
were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if
this occupation brought back old times to him.
At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbor who lived
east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their way to the
Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over there had somehow got
abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother gave the visitors
sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were gone, the brother of
the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door,
and after him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbors
on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room. They were
all eager for any details about the suicide, and they were greatly
concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried. The nearest Catholic
cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks before a wagon could get
so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. There was a
burying-ground over by the Norwegian church, west of Squaw Creek; perhaps
the Norwegians would take Mr. Shimerda in.
After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to
the kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate cake, and
Otto again filled the house with the exciting, expectant song of the
plane. One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked more
than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything but "Only
papers, to-day," or, "I've got a sackful of mail for ye," until this
afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman; to herself or to the
Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was naturally
taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper that I used
to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now every one seemed
eager to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story; about the
Black Tiger mine, and about violent deaths and casual buryings, and the
queer fancies of dying men. You never really knew a man, he said, until
you saw him die. Most men were game, and went without a grudge.
The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring
the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the
Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the
Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother was indignant. "If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr.
Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring. If
anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst
'em."
Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that
important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil
War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case
very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would have
sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. "The way he acted, and the way his
axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man."
Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake
and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he
behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps
he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man's misery and loneliness.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had
hoped would linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated condition,
disappeared on the second round. They talked excitedly about where they
should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbors were all disturbed
and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their own land;
indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner. Grandfather had
explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country was put under fence
and the roads were confined to section lines, two roads would cross
exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, "It makes no matter."
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some
superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the
cross-roads.
Jelinek said he did n't know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once
been such a custom in Bohemia. "Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind," he
added. "I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the
neighbors; but she say so it must be. 'There I will bury him, if I dig the
grave myself,' she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the
grave to-morrow."
Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. "I don't know whose
wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will
live to see the people of this country ride over that old man's head, she
is mistaken."
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 16---------
MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the barn four days, and on the fifth they buried
him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging the grave,
chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On Saturday we breakfasted
before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin. Jake and Jelinek
went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in
which it was frozen fast to the ground.
When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found the
women-folk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat
crouching by the stove, Antonia was washing dishes. When she saw me she
ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. "Oh, Jimmy," she
sobbed, "what you tink for my lovely papa!" It seemed to me that I could
feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.
Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her
shoulder toward the door while the neighbors were arriving. They came on
horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a wagon
over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from her farm
eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women into the
cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning to
fall, and every one was afraid of another storm and anxious to have the
burial over with.
Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to
start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors had brought,
Antonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her
father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill;
Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door, so
it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from the cave and
looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up.
His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was bandaged in white
muslin, like a mummy's; one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the
black cloth; that was all one could see of him.
Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Antonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward, and kept saying
something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down, shut her eyes, and put
out her hand a little way, but she drew it back and began to cry wildly.
She was afraid to touch the bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the
shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin, but grandmother interfered.
"No, Mrs. Shimerda," she said firmly, "I won't stand by and see that child
frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of
her. Let her alone."
At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the box,
and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look at
Antonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close to
her.
The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave,
it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the
coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about
watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and
shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek spoke in a
persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to grandfather.
"She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for
him here in English, for the neighbors to understand."
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the
other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember
it. He began, "Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the
sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee."
He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled
the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the
way before this widow and her children, and to "incline the hearts of men
to deal justly with her." In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at "Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat."
All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said "Amen," I thought she looked
satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, "Can't you start a
hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish."
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her
suggestion, then began, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and all the men and
women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has
made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the
bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:--
"While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high."
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass
had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the
prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran
about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr.
Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and
an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda
never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a
little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a
little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was
never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray
rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and
in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim
superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and
still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the
error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along
which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver
passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 17---------
WHEN spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the
nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter
was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in
the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and
playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.
The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill,--bought on credit,--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April,
Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Antonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.
She gave me a shrewd glance. "He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know
about the wet and the dry."
I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.
When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.
She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.
"Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall."
While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand. "You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope
your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?"
"No, we did n't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a
lot."
Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were
stiff. "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother
can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work
as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land
one good farm."
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Antonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?" she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. "My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?"
"No," I said, "I will never forget him."
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers. Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in
Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day.
Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.
[Illustration: Antonia ploughing in the field]
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: "You take them ox to-morrow
and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart."
His sister laughed. "Don't be mad. I know it's awful hard work for break
sod. I milk the cow for you to-morrow, if you want."
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. "That cow not give so much milk like
what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him
back the cow."
"He does n't talk about the fifteen dollars," I exclaimed indignantly. "He
does n't find fault with people."
"He say I break his saw when we build, and I never," grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me.
Antonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table
and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother
had said, "Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose all her nice
ways and get rough ones." She had lost them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Antonia. She was out in the fields from
sun-up until sun-down. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making
me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she
helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased
with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, "She
will help some fellow get ahead in the world."
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much
she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too,
that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that
the farmhands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I
saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her
dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to
think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet
managed to say so much when he exclaimed, "My An-tonia!"
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 1 based on the provided context. | book 1, chapter 18|book 1, chapter 19|chapter 1 | Jim Burden first heard of Antonia when he was on a very long train ride out west to Nebraska. He was ten years old and was being sent out west to his grandparents by his Virginia relatives after his parents had died. He was brought out by Jake Marpole, a man who has been hired by his grandparents. As he rides the train, he reads a novel about the life of Jesse James. The train conductor befriends them and tells them of a family on the immigrant car who will be settling in Black Hawk, Nebraska, the same place where Jim will be living. The train conductor encourages Jim to go over and meet the girl, but he is shy about it. Jake approves of his decision, saying that he should watch out because he could get a disease from foreigners. Jim doesnt think much of Nebraska. It is a long train ride through the state and he only notices its vastness. When they arrive at Black Hawk, it is dark. He feels "surrounded by utter darkness. " He cant see any lights anywhere. As they debark from the train, he notices the immigrant family. A man comes to them and speaks in a foreign language. Jim is interested to hear it since it is the first time he has heard a foreign language. Then Otto Fuchs, Jims grandparents hired man, comes to pick them up. Jim thinks Otto looks just like a character from his Jesse James book. They put Jim in the back of the wagon and head off for the farm. Jim sleeps under a buffalo hide, but the ride is too rough for comfort. He peeps out from the hide to see the land. He finds nothing to see. He thinks it is nothing but the material from which to make a country. He feels as if they have left the world behind. When he looks up at the sky, he realizes he doesnt believe his father and mother are watching over him here, but must be back in Virginia looking for him. The wagon goes on and Jim experiences a strange feeling, not of sadness, but of nothingness. He thinks that if they kept on going forever, he wouldnt mind. That night, he doesnt say his prayers. He feels as if here in Nebraska, "what would be would be." |
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 18---------
AFTER I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians. We
were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback
and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making comrades of them I was getting even with
Antonia for her indifference. Since the father's death, Ambrosch was more
than ever the head of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings as
well as the fortunes of his women-folk. Antonia often quoted his opinions
to me, and she let me see that she admired him, while she thought of me
only as a little boy. Before the spring was over, there was a distinct
coldness between us and the Shimerdas. It came about in this way.
One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar which
Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful
blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses
along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower
stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and
their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet
gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.
We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was
cleaning out the stable, and Antonia and her mother were making garden,
off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill
tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake asked
for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar belonged to
grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
"Now, don't you say you have n't got it, Ambrosch, because I know you
have, and if you ain't a-going to look for it, I will."
Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the
stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he
returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used--trampled in the dirt
and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.
"This what you want?" he asked surlily.
Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough
stubble on his face. "That ain't the piece of harness I loaned you,
Ambrosch; or if it is, you've used it shameful. I ain't a-going to carry
such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden."
Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. "All right," he said coolly,
took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by the
belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch's feet had scarcely
touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at Jake's
stomach. Fortunately Jake was in such a position that he could dodge it.
This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they played at
fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head--it
sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over,
stunned.
We heard squeals, and looking up saw Antonia and her mother coming on the
run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged through the
muddy water, without even lifting their skirts. They came on, screaming
and clawing the air. By this time Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
sputtering with nose-bleed. Jake sprang into his saddle. "Let's get out of
this, Jim," he called.
Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were
going to pull down lightning. "Law, law!" she shrieked after us. "Law for
knock my Ambrosch down!"
"I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden," Antonia panted. "No
friends any more!"
Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. "Well, you're a damned
ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you," he shouted back. "I guess the
Burdens can get along without you. You've been a sight of trouble to them,
anyhow!"
We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for
us. I had n't a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and
trembling all over. It made him sick to get so angry. "They ain't the
same, Jimmy," he kept saying in a hurt tone. "These foreigners ain't the
same. You can't trust 'em to be fair. It's dirty to kick a feller. You
heard how the women turned on you--and after all we went through on account
of 'em last winter! They ain't to be trusted. I don't want to see you get
too thick with any of 'em."
"I'll never be friends with them again, Jake," I declared hotly. "I
believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath."
Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake to
ride to town to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had
knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was
inclined to make trouble--her son was still under age--she would be
forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market
the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after Jake had
started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving by, looking
neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight down the Black
Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would
follow the matter up.
Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for
that purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in town
that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had to sell
his pig to pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas great
satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met
Antonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road with her
work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing
voice:--
"Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!"
Otto pretended not to be surprised at Antonia's behavior. He only lifted
his brows and said, "You can't tell me anything new about a Czech; I'm an
Austrian."
Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the
Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Antonia always greeted him respectfully, and he
asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought
the future looked hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he
soon realized that his oxen were too heavy for any work except breaking
sod, and he succeeded in selling them to a newly arrived German. With the
money he bought another team of horses, which grandfather selected for
him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but he could never
teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The one idea that had ever got
through poor Marek's thick head was that all exertion was meritorious. He
always bore down on the handles of the cultivator and drove the blades so
deep into the earth that the horses were soon exhausted.
In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy's for a week, and took Marek
with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator;
she and Antonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses
got colic and gave them a terrible fright.
Antonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well
before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was swollen
about the middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted another
horse, without waiting to saddle him, and hammered on our door just as we
were going to bed. Grandfather answered her knock. He did not send one of
his men, but rode back with her himself, taking a syringe and an old piece
of carpet he kept for hot applications when our horses were sick. He found
Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern, groaning and wringing
her hands. It took but a few moments to release the gases pent up in the
poor beast, and the two women heard the rush of wind and saw the roan
visibly diminish in girth.
"If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden," Antonia exclaimed, "I never stay here
till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before morning."
When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy's, we learned that he had given
Marek's wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses for their father's
soul. Grandmother thought Antonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda
needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, "If he can spare six
dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes."
It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas.
One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well, he
thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July. He would
need more men, and if it were agreeable to every one he would engage
Ambrosch for the reaping and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small
grain of their own.
"I think, Emmaline," he concluded, "I will ask Antonia to come over and
help you in the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something, and it will
be a good time to end misunderstandings. I may as well ride over this
morning and make arrangements. Do you want to go with me, Jim?" His tone
told me that he had already decided for me.
After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she
ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she did not
want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse,
and we followed her.
Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been
grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal, pulled
up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to hide the
cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow
held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at her hind
quarters, trying to spank her into the draw-side.
Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch?
Which field?"
"He with the sod corn." She pointed toward the north, still standing in
front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.
"His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter," said grandfather
encouragingly. "And where is Antonia?"
"She go with." Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously
in the dust.
"Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me cut
my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good-morning. By the
way, Mrs. Shimerda," he said as he turned up the path, "I think we may as
well call it square about the cow."
She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not
understand, grandfather turned back. "You need not pay me anything more;
no more money. The cow is yours."
"Pay no more, keep cow?" she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes
snapping at us in the sunlight.
"Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow." He nodded.
Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and crouching down beside
grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had ever been
so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too. Somehow, that
seemed to bring the Old World very close.
We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: "I expect she thought we had
come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she would n't have
scratched a little if we'd laid hold of that lariat rope!"
Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.
Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She
presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, "Now you not come
any more for knock my Ambrosch down?"
Jake laughed sheepishly. "I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone."
"If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine," she said
insinuatingly.
Jake was not at all disconcerted. "Have the last word, mam," he said
cheerfully. "It's a lady's privilege."
----------BOOK 1, CHAPTER 19---------
JULY came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains
of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if
we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a
faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered
stalks stood so juicy and green. If all the great plain from the Missouri
to the Rocky Mountains had been under glass, and the heat regulated by a
thermometer, it could not have been better for the yellow tassels that
were ripening and fertilizing each other day by day. The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between. It took
a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee that they would
enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields,
or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one
of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie
all the activities of men, in peace or war.
The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,
secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little to
fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the wheatfields
that they did not notice the heat,--though I was kept busy carrying water
for them,--and grandmother and Antonia had so much to do in the kitchen
that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another.
Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Antonia went with me
up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner. Grandmother made her
wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached the garden she threw it on the
grass and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over
the pea-vines, beads of perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like
a little mustache.
"Oh, better I like to work out of doors than in a house!" she used to sing
joyfully. "I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I
like to be like a man." She would toss her head and ask me to feel the
muscles swell in her brown arm.
We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive that
one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with pans.
Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Antonia worked for
us.
All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The
harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the
house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat
lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt frame
of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a
beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut
grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when
the dishes were washed Antonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof of
the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic,
like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags
across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a
moment. Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the
west was luminous and clear: in the lightning-flashes it looked like deep
blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and the mottled part of the
sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid sea-coast
city, doomed to destruction. Great warm splashes of rain fell on our
upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted out
into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward. All about us we
could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the
farmyard. Grandmother came to the door and said it was late, and we would
get wet out there.
"In a minute we come," Antonia called back to her. "I like your
grandmother, and all things here," she sighed. "I wish my papa live to see
this summer. I wish no winter ever come again."
"It will be summer a long while yet," I reassured her. "Why are n't you
always nice like this, Tony?"
"How nice?"
"Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be
like Ambrosch?"
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. "If I
live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But
they will be hard for us."
----------CHAPTER 1---------
I FIRST heard of Antonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey
across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I
traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands"
on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to
work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider
than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with
each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered
him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a
"Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory
books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a
friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we
were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our
confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of
distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of
different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons
were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an
Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the
immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose
destination was the same as ours.
"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you
want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes,
too!"
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to
"Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to
get diseases from foreigners.
I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long
day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so
many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about
Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when
we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled
down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with
lanterns. I could n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were
surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its
long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood
huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew
this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little
tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old
man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting
and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time
I had ever heard a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,
ain't you scared to come so far west?"
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's
jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of
heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to
the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and
that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:
here, I felt, what would be would be.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 3 based on the provided context. | chapter 2|chapter 3|chapter 4 | On Sunday morning, Otto Fuchs drives Jim and his grandmother to the Shimerdas to take them some provisions. On the way, Jims grandmother tells him the Shimerdas have been cheated by their countrymen, Peter Krajiek, who sold them the land and livestock and some equipment for scandalous prices. When they get to the Shimerdas house, Mrs. Shimerda and her youngest daughter, Julka, rush out to greet them with profuse thanks. Jim is not impressed with Ambroz, the eldest son, and is disturbed by the other son of the family, who seems to be retarded. As the adults are talking, Antonia pulls Jim aside and they run to the grass to play and talk. She asks him his name and the names of things she sees. She is eager to learn English. When they are called back to the house, Jim meets Antonias father who treats him with respect he is not used to as a child and who asks Mrs. Burden earnestly to teach Antonia English. |
----------CHAPTER 2---------
I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.
When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely
larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was
flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and
black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my
grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
"Had a good sleep, Jimmy?" she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like your father!" I
remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have
come to wake him like this when he overslept. "Here are your clean
clothes," she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she
talked. "But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice
warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about."
"Down to the kitchen" struck me as curious; it was always "out in the
kitchen" at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a
kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster
laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor
was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little
half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew
in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of
gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel
trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When
she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my
bath without help.
"Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right
smart little boy."
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
"Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!" Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry
her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew
older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often
thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic
in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often
spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that
everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high,
and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it.
She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was
dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a
stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of
the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from
work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden
bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--he caught not only
rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on
the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked
about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she
said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm
in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men
came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then
she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors
there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke
kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of
an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a
delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he
was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an
adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His
iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had
drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in
Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he
had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he
had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was
a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his "chaps" and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design--roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah." "_He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah._" I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived
in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame
house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east
end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the
kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the
barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare,
and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at
the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow
bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by
our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond
which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.
There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much
larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum
patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as
far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red
grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look
very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against
the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over
the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of
wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,
curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to
it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my
attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a
leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I
must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had
killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who
lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all
summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out
of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at
the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Are n't you afraid of
snakes?"
"A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay anyhow."
"Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow
and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in
the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big
'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once
in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new country a body
feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me
when I'm at work."
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the
path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the
draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I
was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There
were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I
turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and
ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever
seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers
scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as
I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was
something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did
not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like
that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun
and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it
comes as naturally as sleep.
----------CHAPTER 3---------
ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance
of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as
they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or
chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of
potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed
some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies
in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and
jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big
cornfield.
I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was
only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high
wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild
thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and
shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many
branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the
prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a
plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in
time to his bites as he ate down toward them.
The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the
homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more
than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the
old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs.
Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this
part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell
them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for
advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs
said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father
was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by
trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.
He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here,
though he used to pick up money by it at home.
"If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in
that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger
hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty
dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."
"Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old
horses for the price of good work-teams. I'd have interfered about the
horses--the old man can understand some German--if I'd 'a' thought it would
do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."
Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"
Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It would
take me a long while to explain."
The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw
Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and made the
land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering
tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some
of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining
white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.
As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but
rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging
out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those
banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass
that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had
no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a
door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a
woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A
little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same
embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted
from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not
young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little
eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically.
"Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the
bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no
good!"
Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after
while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."
My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they
were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our
visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled
them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good,
much thank!"--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.
The oldest son, Ambroz,--they called it Ambrosch,--came out of the cave and
stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and
broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His
hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and
suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on
corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.
The little girl was pretty, but An-tonia-- they accented the name thus,
strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier. I remembered what the
conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of
light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was
brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her
brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood
awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see
what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance
one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he
approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to
show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's
foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!" like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly,
"Marek!" then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.
"She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born
like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer." He struck
Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.
At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no
hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his
forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him
look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and
slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,
then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and
well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.
His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face
was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes--like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his
coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf
of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral
pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me
and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep
drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.
When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed
toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how
glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop
until the ground itself stopped--fell away before us so abruptly that the
next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the
edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below
us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like it; she held her
little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed
to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes
fairly blazing with things she could not say.
"Name? What name?" she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my
name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into
the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What
name?"
We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a
baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the sky
and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not
satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word,
making it sound like "ice." She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes,
then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she
distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees
and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then
to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.
"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."
She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused
her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of
words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we
could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of
us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Antonia had said the new words over
and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on
her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite
sternly. I did n't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never
seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was
how they behaved.
While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,
"An-tonia, An-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare. "Tatinek, Tatinek!" she
shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia
reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched
my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.
I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted
by my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia!"
----------CHAPTER 4---------
ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony,
under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the
post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time
by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or
to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I
was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after
working hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered
sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the
sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's
story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see
the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a
hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they
had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about
them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the
scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown,
earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We
had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about.
They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were
quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable
houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was
always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under
the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that
must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any
pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the
desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that
some of the holes must go down to water--nearly two hundred feet,
hereabouts. Antonia said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probably
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.
Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them
known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her
reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was
important that one member of the family should learn English. When the
lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the
garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out the
hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers. The
white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with
curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in,
and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were
famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of
the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.
Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about
cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every
movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good
housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!
I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her
family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin
peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste
out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the
measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this
residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk
or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the
two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown
owls housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid of
him.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 7 based on the provided context. | chapter 5|chapter 6|chapter 7 | Jim has begun to hate Antonias superior tone with him. She is four years older than he and seems to regard him as if he were the inferior one, when he feels it is clear that as a boy, he is superior to her as a girl. One day his problem is solved. She is sent by her brother to get a spade from the Russians and Jim accompanies her. On their way back, she suggests they stop at the prairie dog field to dig one of the holes up and find out the secret of whats in them--if there is a subterranean water source, if the owls have feather-lined nests, and the proportions of the tunnels. When they get to the field, Jim is startled by Antonia screaming at him in her language. He turns around and sees a rattlesnake over five feet long. It slowly coils itself. When it lifts its head to strike, Jim hits it with the spade and crushes its head. He is so upset that he continues striking it over and over while Antonia screams. He scolds Antonia for warning him by "jabber Bohunk" to him. She apologizes submissively and tells him he looked like a big man when he was killing the snake. She insists that they take the snake home to show everyone Jims heroism. They count the snakes rattles and decide it must have been twenty-four years old. Jim thinks of this as the time before European settlers came, during the "buffalo and Indian times." He begins to feel proud of himself for having killed the snake, thinking of the snake as some kind of "ancient, eldest Evil." When they get back, they find Otto Fuchs. He asks if it was a struggle and before Jim can answer, Antonia gives him a vivid fabrication of a fight with the snake. When she walks off, he tells Jim he probably crushed its head with the spade on the first strike. Jim realizes it was not a real adventure only later when he has had other encounters with younger and more vigorous snakes. He thinks of it now as a "mock adventure." From that time on, Antonia treats him as if he were a big man. |
----------CHAPTER 5---------
WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two
girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.
I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: "My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody
laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very
nice!"
I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in
that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a
little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country--farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all
the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were
the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,
so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to
people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could
understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they
avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he
had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations
and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this
supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great
frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn
tight over his high cheek-bones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always
had a cough.
Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,
bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met
people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well
as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair
and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the
sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was
usually called "Curly Peter," or "Rooshian Peter."
The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter
always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor
homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to
church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a
low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked
apologetically under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost
every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him. She said they came
from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from
Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for
me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass
well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch,
and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We
found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub. He was working
so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down
as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head
and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of
perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us
down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He
told Antonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any
man could have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for
Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream
with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks
and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it
in a new place.
After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up
the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere
helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men
who were "batching." Besides the kitchen, there was a living-room, with a
wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham
sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window,
where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That
day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and
beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in
the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies
and sunshine alike.
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over
them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them,
they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us
knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with
juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one--better than medicine; in his
country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable
and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Antonia, he sighed and told us
that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have
had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said
he had left his country because of a "great trouble."
When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that
would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily
painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart
began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very
doleful, and he sang words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
----------CHAPTER 6---------
ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all
about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of
some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead--all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a
little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the
buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.
Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and
indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty
little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her
village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs
and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked
voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see
her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.
When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf
of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on
quickly when the sun got low, and Antonia's dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false
pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put
the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over
her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and
then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the
magical light of the late afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As
far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in
sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day.
The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw
long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire
and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of
triumphant ending, like a hero's death--heroes who died young and
gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prairie under
that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or
followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and
nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the
upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet
along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.
"My papa sick all the time," Tony panted as we flew. "He not look good,
Jim."
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered
about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her
cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from
the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and
showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Antonia with a wintry
flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.
"My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for win-ter!"
she exclaimed joyfully. "Meat for eat, skin for hat,"--she told off these
benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted
it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata.
He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood
looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he
listened as if it were a beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,
short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock. When he saw me examining
it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if
I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and
Antonia translated:--
"My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine, from
Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got
here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his
wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you."
[Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over
his shoulder]
I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even
the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected
substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while
the feeble minstrel sheltered in Antonia's hair went on with its scratchy
chirp. The old man's smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of
pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it. As the sun sank there
came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.
Antonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket
and raced my shadow home.
----------CHAPTER 7---------
MUCH as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of
the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more
like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off on
foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been
another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as
wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled--hundreds of
miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling,
burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get
warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,
heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,
Antonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of
the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were
horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get
some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the
town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an
orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude
down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would
be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on
their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they
barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the
mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the
town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.
If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.
We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into
the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors
united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which
much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I
heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and
shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of
those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was
sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when
Antonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter "W." He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big
snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones could n't crush the disgusting vitality
out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I did n't run
because I did n't think of it--if my back had been against a stone wall I
could n't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten--now he would
spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head
with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia,
barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly
head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back
on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. Antonia came
after me, crying, "O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why you not run
when I say?"
"What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!" I said petulantly.
"I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared." She took my handkerchief
from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away
from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.
"I never know you was so brave, Jim," she went on comfortingly. "You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for
him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show
everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you
kill."
She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for
this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly
in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.
"Look, Tony, that's his poison," I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to
taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained
to Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must
have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over--would n't let us come near
him.
We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her
exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big
and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that
no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward
the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the edge
of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antonia called him
to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but
scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.
"Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?"
"Up at the dog-town," I answered laconically.
"Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?"
"We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch."
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. "It was just luck you had a tool," he said cautiously. "Gosh! I
would n't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane would n't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?"
Antonia broke in: "He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's boots.
I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was
crazy."
Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: "Got him in the head
first crack, did n't you? That was just as well."
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I
found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with
a great deal of color.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it,
a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world does n't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for
many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the
snake was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and
admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 9 using the context provided. | chapter 8|chapter 9 | It begins to snow in early December. Otto Fuchs makes a sled for Jim out of a wooden goods-box. Jim hooks the sled up to his horse and goes to pick up Antonia and Julka. The girls arent dressed for the winter, so they are cold the whole time, but still, they are thrilled to be outside having fun instead of stuck inside their cave of a house being scolded by their mother all day long. The three of them ride out to Pavel and Peters old house. By the time they come home, it is getting dark and the wind is up. Jim lets them off at their house and hurries home, but he is so chilled that he gets a cold that keeps him inside for two weeks. The basement kitchen is a warm and safe place in a very cold world. The men are out working all day long. Jim is amazed at their dedication to their tasks. He stays inside and reads "Swiss Family Robinson" and thinks his own life in Nebraska is much more adventurous. When the men come in at night, they have to work all evening to get the chill out of their bones. Jim can still remember the way Jake and Otto looked as they sat, slumped with fatigue, and rubbed mutton tallow onto their cracked hands. Fuchs has had many jobs: cowboy, stage-driver, bartender and miner. Jake isnt as smart as Fuchs. He is almost illiterate. He has a terrible temper that sometimes makes him seem crazy. He is also extremely softhearted. If he accidentally curses in front of Mrs. Burden, he mopes around shame-faced for days afterwards. The two men work very hard and never complain. Jim wonders why they never became anything more than workers. One night Otto tells the story of when he came to the United States. One of his relatives asked him to take care of a woman who was crossing on the same ship as he was. She had two children and another on the way. Midway across the ocean, she gave birth to triplets. Everyone on board looked at Otto as if he were responsible for some monstrous thing. Even when they arrived in the U.S. and her husband saw the big family, he looked at Otto as if it were his fault. Mrs. Burden told him God had probably taken good care of him in recompense for that difficult trip. |
----------CHAPTER 8---------
WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles
to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a
mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was
Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could
give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew
that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty--that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew
faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with
mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow-workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill
indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the
log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The
Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to
put them out of mind.
One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just
as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,
and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch
them. When Antonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated
grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I
would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning. My plan
must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about
humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,
and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches
and doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I sat in the
straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a
cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in
the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of
the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept
sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would
never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew
magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the
world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his
land, too, some such belief.
The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that
we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided
us--the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.
We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I
sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in
front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the
thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept
moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then
swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore
down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me
think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying
desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in
one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up
with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together--to tell us
that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed,--a long
complaining cry,--as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some
old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor
by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap--then the
high whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.
"He is scared of the wolves," Antonia whispered to me. "In his country
there are very many, and they eat men and women." We slid closer together
along the bench.
I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging
open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell
horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the
tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of
spirits went through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and
slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted
some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous,
unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so
simple and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper.
He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Antonia took my hand under
the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to
hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his
bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.
"It's wolves, Jimmy," Antonia whispered. "It's awful, what he says!"
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who
had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could
hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which
fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to
his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots--I thought I had
never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to
the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for
breath, like a child with croup. Antonia's father uncovered one of his
long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see
what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out
like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That
sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over.
Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got
up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home.
Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under
the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.
On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and
rattling Antonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did
not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days
afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were
asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another
village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to
the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and
six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the
parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a
supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and
drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and
blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his
sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and
Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove.
The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom's
sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for
merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.
The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too
much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and
echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together.
There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove
came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like
streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were
hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,--he was
probably very drunk,--the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a
clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow,
and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed
made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The
groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest--all the others carried
from six to a dozen people.
Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible
to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the
wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who
were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.
The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel
sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the
groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm
and to guide them carefully.
At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked
back. "There are only three sledges left," he whispered.
"And the wolves?" Pavel asked.
"Enough! Enough for all of us."
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down
the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a
whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father's sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as
if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even
then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the
heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness
hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom's movement had given
Pavel an idea.
They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left
out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel's middle horse was
failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;
Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the
horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in
the harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone
upon the familiar road. "They still come?" he asked Peter.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Twenty, thirty--enough."
Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave
Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He
called to the groom that they must lighten--and pointed to the bride. The
young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away.
In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the
sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly
how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front
seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound
that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it
before--the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early
prayers.
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever
since. They were run out of their village. Pavel's own mother would not
look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned
where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who
had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed
them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.
They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always
unfortunate. When Pavel's health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and
was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left
the country--went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of
Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During
the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes.
He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held
mortgages on Peter's live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes
at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow
before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but
this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans
had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and
bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons
that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping
beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.
When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit
there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows
penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to any one, but
guarded it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that
night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a
painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often
found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country
that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.
----------CHAPTER 9---------
THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff
willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the
Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like
strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in
a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the
old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job
if I had n't hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the
next day I went over to take Yulka and Antonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box,
and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the
Shimerdas' I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the
bottom of the draw and called. Antonia and Yulka came running out, wearing
little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard
about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in
beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to
be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white
stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Antonia said, the whole world
was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.
The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft
between snow-drifts--very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops
that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they
would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were
so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind
had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if
some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same
time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we
stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their
color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the
sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual
impression of the stinging lash in the wind.
The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering
beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were
so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter's house. The great
fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like
wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go
home again. Could n't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house,
Yulka asked, and could n't I go to town and buy things for us to keep
house with?
All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when we
turned back,--it must have been about four o'clock,--the east wind grew
stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky
became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it
around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head
under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins
clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It
was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with
them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a
fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home
directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of
quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks.
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days--like a
tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day,
husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down
over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think
they were like Arctic explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making
husking-gloves, I read "The Swiss Family Robinson" aloud to her, and I
felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an
adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the
cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about
keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when
she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was
not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, "very little to
do with." On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on
other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or
cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,
striped with currants and boiled in a bag.
Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most
interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth
and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands
cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously:
feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs.
When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of
their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather
read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the
stove, "easing" their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their
cracked hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to
sing, "For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong," or, "Bury Me Not on
the Lone Prairee." He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing
when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.
I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see
the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good
fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept
faith with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name
with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him
behave like a crazy man--tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. If he, as
he said, "forgot himself" and swore before grandmother, he went about
depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the
cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and
to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare
themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do
anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.
On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed
us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling
down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys
of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies,
wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be
persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.
I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was
working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with
her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:--
When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his
relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join
her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it
was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he
"got on fine with the kids," and liked the mother, though she played a
sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but
three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he
was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him,
the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who
made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and
often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken
ashore at New York, he had, as he said, "to carry some of them." The trip
to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very
difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The
mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could
feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture
factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was
rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in
some fashion to blame. "I was sure glad," Otto concluded, "that he did n't
take his hard feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for
me, all right! Now, did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard
luck, Mrs. Burden?"
Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to
his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he did n't
realize that he was being protected by Providence.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 11 based on the provided context. | chapter 10|chapter 11|chapter 12|chapter 13 | Before Christmas, Jake had intended to go to the country store to make everyones Christmas purchases. When the day drew near, the roads were impassable and Grandfather refused to let him try to make it, knowing he would get lost many times over. Jim had planned to buy some picture books for Antonia and Julka. Grandmother helped him make books out of cardboard and cotton cloth. He pasted pictures from family magazines inside. Grandmother made them gingerbread men and the day before Christmas, Jake packed everything up and took it to the Shimerdas. When he returned, he had a tree for Jim. They all decorated it, especially Otto who had been receiving Christmas ornaments over the years from his mother in Austria. When they were finished, the tree looked like a storybook with all the images of the nativity on it. Jim can still vividly remember them all there by the tree. Jake and Otto are rough looking men. Jim writes, "As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless." He thinks especially of Otto who was even at that point in his life so much of a "case-hardened drifter" that he would never marry and have children despite the fact that he loved children so much. |
----------CHAPTER 10---------
FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the
Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold
which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to
have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr.
Shimerda out hunting.
"He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that
he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em
over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of
cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
"All but the crazy boy," Jake put in. "He never wears the coat. Krajiek
says he's turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be
getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield
yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot.
He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on,
to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter'n me and put 'em back
in his sack and walked off."
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. "Josiah, you
don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do
you?"
"You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline," he
replied gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and
ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.
I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat
family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake
packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
"Now, Jake," grandmother was saying, "if you can find that old rooster
that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll take him
along. There's no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n't have got hens
from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she
was confused and did n't know where to begin. I've come strange to a new
country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no
matter what you don't have."
"Just as you say, mam," said Jake, "but I hate to think of Krajiek getting
a leg of that old rooster." He tramped out through the long cellar and
dropped the heavy door behind him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and
climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas' we
heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and
her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the
pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over
her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the
hole in the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the
provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy
path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came from
the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind
whisked them roughly away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother's
hand. She did not say "How do!" as usual, but at once began to cry,
talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were
tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at every one.
The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if
he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her
kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at
her mother, hid again. Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark
corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack
stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the
crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it
was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a
feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and
made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been
frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively
vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the
hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches. Then the
poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid
her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed
to her, but called Antonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left
her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.
"You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad," she whispered,
as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things grandmother
handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of
potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
"Have n't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia? This is no
place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?"
"We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,--what he throw out. We got no
potatoes, Mrs. Burden," Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the
door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from
behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as
if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and
neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room.
In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger
than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one
of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw.
The old man held the lantern. "Yulka," he said in a low, despairing voice,
"Yulka; my Antonia!"
Grandmother drew back. "You mean they sleep in there,--your girls?" He
bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. "It is very cold on the floor, and this is
warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there," she insisted eagerly.
"My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?" She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built against
the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. "Sure enough, where _would_ you sleep, dear! I don't
doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after while, Antonia,
and then you'll forget these hard times."
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his
wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on
Antonia's shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated.
He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he
made good wages, and his family were respected there. He left Bohemia with
more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was
paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway
fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid
Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm
machinery, they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know,
however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until
spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden, and
would then do very well. Ambrosch and Antonia were both old enough to work
in the fields, and they were willing to work. But the snow and the bitter
weather had disheartened them all.
Antonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in
the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the
logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been
felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor
with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us
and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his
queer noises for me--to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,--but he did
not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be
agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up
for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,
and, while Antonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own
account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and
brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and
half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy
began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the
contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent,
even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied
it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.
"For cook," she announced. "Little now; be very much when cook," spreading
out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon.
"Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my
country."
"Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda," grandmother said drily. "I can't say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself."
[Illustration: Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms in a Bohemian forest]
Antonia undertook to explain. "This very good, Mrs. Burden,"--she clasped
her hands as if she could not express how good,--"it make very much when
you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in
the gravy,--oh, so good!"
All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good
Christian people could forget they were their brothers' keepers.
"I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where's a body to begin, with these people? They're wanting in everything,
and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give 'em that, I guess. Jimmy,
here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon
that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?"
"He's a worker, all right, mam, and he's got some ketch-on about him; but
he's a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and
then, ag'in, they can be too mean."
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package
Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked
like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the
most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor. We
could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
"They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain't dried
fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I'm afraid of 'em. Anyhow, I
should n't want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old
clothes and goose pillows."
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the
chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the
strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little
brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so
jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some
deep Bohemian forest {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
----------CHAPTER 11---------
DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of
our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas shopping.
But on the 21st of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the
windmill--its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial like a shadow. The
snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The
cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men could
not go farther than the barns and corral. They sat about the house most of
the day as if it were Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their
suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced at breakfast that it
would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases. Jake was
sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things in
saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated, and
a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over. Anyway, he would
never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had
wanted to get some picture-books for Yulka and Antonia; even Yulka was
able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut
squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound
it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room
table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those
good old family magazines which used to publish colored lithographs of
popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
"Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine" for my frontispiece. On the
white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and advertising cards which I
had brought from my "old country." Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and
made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and
baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar
and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the
Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's gray gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung
to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was
planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from
the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west
hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a
coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he
was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my
father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten
how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner
of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all
gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table,
looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five
feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals,
strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into
pasteboard sockets. Its real splendors, however, came from the most
unlikely place in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never seen
anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker's
wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly
colored paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand
alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in
Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously appareled, and the ox and the ass and the
shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels,
singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the
three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends
and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it
reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under
it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the
lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face
seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar
that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As
I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner
behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had
only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of
those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
----------CHAPTER 12---------
ON Christmas morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just
coming in from their morning chores--the horses and pigs always had their
breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted "Merry Christmas"! to me,
and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat. Morning
prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from St. Matthew
about the birth of Christ, and as we listened it all seemed like something
that had happened lately, and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the
Lord for the first Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the world
ever since. He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the
poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder
than it was here with us. Grandfather's prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he
talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull
from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the
time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and
his views about things.
After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how pleased the
Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was friendly and
went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft gray
day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky, and occasional
squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on
holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played
dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother. He always
wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he was, and no
matter how long it had been since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in
the dining-room. He would write for a while, then sit idle, his clenched
fist lying on the table, his eyes following the pattern of the oilcloth.
He spoke and wrote his own language so seldom that it came to him
awkwardly. His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.
At about four o'clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He had
come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother's kindness to
his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we sat about the
stove, enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon and the
atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather's house. This feeling
seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the
crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace
and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he
had left so far behind. He sat still and passive, his head resting against
the back of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His
face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when
they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass
of Virginia apple-brandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint
flush came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a
shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled
rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter content.
[Illustration: Jake bringing home a Christmas tree]
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before
the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow
flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of
meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and
quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body
formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.
He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and
hurt people's feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree
before, but now, with some one kneeling before it,--images, candles, {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable
head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little
urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to
look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his
deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into
the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his
overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern
and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took
grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly,
"Good wo-man!" He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and
went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather
looked at me searchingly. "The prayers of all good people are good," he
said quietly.
----------CHAPTER 13---------
THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all
the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about
examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting
upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen
she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said:
"You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-minded of grandmother
to give the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better."
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawn-tree."
"People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said
severely. "We don't make them come here."
"He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: 'America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls.' My papa, he cry for leave his old
friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the
long horn like this"--she indicated a slide trombone. "They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle."
"Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them
and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more than she did any one
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n't
come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. "She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
would n't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in 'The Prince of
the House of David.' Let's forget the Bohemians."
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:--
"You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you."
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle--they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but to-morrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap
so that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other's backs. "This'll take the bile out of 'em!" Fuchs remarked
gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the
henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their
ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done--just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a
strange, unnatural sort of day.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 15 based on the provided context. | chapter 14|chapter 15 | Otto Fuchs returns from Black Hawk. He has reported the death to the coroner, who will reach the Shimerdas that afternoon. The priest, however, is a hundred miles away and there are no trains running that can bring him back. Fuchs brings a country mate of the Shimerdas, a young man named Anton Jelinek, who has been living in Black Hawk for a season of work. He is a very impressive young man and inspires even Grandfather to talk. Mr. Burden asks him how bad it is for the Shimerdas not to have a priest for their father. Anton tells him it is very bad indeed according to their beliefs. Mr. Burden says Protestants also believe that suicide is a great sin, but that they believe the soul will find a home with its Creator without a priest since for Protestants Christ is the only intercessor between people and God. Anton tells the story of his youth when he assisted the priest of his home to administer the Holy Sacrament to the dying soldiers during the Prussian invasion of Bohemia. He says that even though a cholera epidemic had broken out on the dying fields, he and the priest remained untouched by the disease because they carried the body and blood of God. Everyone in the household is touched by Antons "frank and manly faith." Grandfather says he is happy to meet a young man who thinks so seriously about these things and that he too is sure God was taking care of him and the priest on the field that day. After dinner, they decide to let Anton Jelinek take their two farm horses to clear the road of snow so a wagon can pass through it when necessary. He wears a coyote-skin coat that his roommate, Jan Bouska, a man who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made for him. They bring out the carpenters bench, and Otto Fuchs goes to work on making a coffin for Mr. Shimerdas body. He figures for a long time on paper and then says the hardest part of his work is done. He goes to work planing and sawing wood that Grandfather had bought for re-flooring the house in the spring. Jim likes to hear the sound of the sawing and planing in the house that day. He thinks it is a cheerful sound like a promise for new things for people. He wonders why Otto Fuchs doesnt settle down to carpentry for life since he seems so comfortable with his work. As he works, "his hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them." That afternoon, Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, comes by with another neighbor, on his way to the Shimerdas. Another visitor, the brother of Widow Steavens, comes by, and then another neighbor man, the father of a German family. Everyone eagerly talks about the suicide and the disposition of the body. Catholic cemetery at Black Hawk is too far for the wagon to reach in the snow and it is unlikely that they will allow a suicide to be buried there. There is a burying ground by the Norwegian settlement which they hope will take Mr. Shimerdas body. When their visitors leave, they all return to the kitchen where Grandmother is cooking. Jim likes this time since it makes everyone talk more than they usually do. Grandfather is naturally a quiet man. The other men are usually so tired from work that they dont speak much. Jim usually feels a wall of silence around him. That afternoon Fuchs tells stories of his days working on the Black Tiger Mine, especially about all the deaths. He tells Jim that one never really knows a person until one sees him or her die. He says, "Most men are game, and went without a grudge." The postmaster stops by on his way home saying Grandfather would be bringing the coroner to spend the night. He tells them the Norwegians have refused to accept Mr. Shimerdas body in their cemetery. This makes Grandmother very indignant. She says shes going to get Josiah busy arranging to set up "an American graveyard. " She doesnt want people deliberating over whether to take her body when its her time to die. Soon Grandfather, Anton Jelinek and the coroner arrive. The Coroner is a Civil War veteran. He seems very worried about the gash on Mr. Shimerdas head and says if it hadnt been for Grandfather he would have ruled it a murder, mainly on the basis of Krajieks guilty behavior. Jelinek tells them Mrs. Shimerda has decided she wants the body buried at the crossroads. Grandfather wants to know if this is a Bohemian custom and Anton thinks there might have been one, but he only vaguely remembers. He says he has had to promise to help her bury Mr. Shimerda there tomorrow. Grandfather agrees that they must follow Mrs. Shimerdas wishes but that she should know there is no one in the neighborhood who will ride over the grave. |
----------CHAPTER 14---------
ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes,
I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in
the kitchen--grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What
could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn
had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was
lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his
hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing
their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both
looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with
a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed
reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips
were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear
Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have
prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda
is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys
have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That
is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys."
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to
talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances. I held my
tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
"No, sir," Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, "nobody
heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a
road, and the women folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch
come in it was dark and he did n't see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of
queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--bolted clean out of
the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a
lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him."
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned. "I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How
could he forget himself and bring this on us!"
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden," Fuchs
declared. "He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of
fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed
hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Antonia heated the
water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he
was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he
was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn
and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls,
where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent
except,"--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,--"except what he could n't
nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the
bed. He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck
and rolled up his sleeves."
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. "Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the
trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the
barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!"
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly. "There's something mighty queer about
it."
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
"Well, mam, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I picks it up and
carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in
the front of the old man's face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin'
round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun
whimperin', 'My God, man, don't do that!' 'I reckon I'm a-goin' to look
into this,' says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about
wringin' his hands. 'They'll hang me!' says he. 'My God, they'll hang me
sure!'"
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. "Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so have you.
The old man would n't have made all them preparations for Krajiek to
murder him, would he? It don't hang together. The gun was right beside him
when Ambrosch found him."
"Krajiek could 'a' put it there, could n't he?" Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go
trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble. Otto reads
you too many of them detective stories."
"It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline," said grandfather quietly.
"If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the
inside outward."
"Just so it is, Mr. Burden," Otto affirmed. "I seen bunches of hair and
stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up
there by gunshot, no question."
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas with
him.
"There is nothing you can do," he said doubtfully. "The body can't be
touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a
matter of several days, this weather."
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to
them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a
right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He's left her alone in a
hard world." She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his
breakfast at the kitchen table.
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to
make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On
the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the
country with no roads to guide him.
"Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on
a second pair of socks. "I've got a good nose for directions, and I never
did need much sleep. It's the gray I'm worried about. I'll save him what I
can, but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!"
"This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you
can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner. She's a good
woman, and she'll do well by you."
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had
not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not say a
word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his
hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy fell asleep
where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that
would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big
black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy
white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set
off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black
and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs.
Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted
cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the
house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to
acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar,
and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not
been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After
the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat
down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got "Robinson Crusoe" and tried to read,
but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed
upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about in this world at
all, it would be here, in our house, which had been more to his liking
than any other in the neighborhood. I remembered his contented face when
he was with us on Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this
terrible thing would never have happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore,--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly
underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house. There,
on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda.
Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It
was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were
sitting there with him. I went over all that Antonia had ever told me
about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the
fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned
to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,--belonging,
as Antonia said, to the "nobles,"--from which she and her mother used to
steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that
forest, and if any one killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid
pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not
yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze," Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. "As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly. "I almost know it is n't true." I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.
----------CHAPTER 15---------
OTTO FUCHS got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported that
the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon, but the
missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles
away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours' sleep at
the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the gray gelding had strained
himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That long trip
through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a
homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow-countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties then,
handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a miracle
in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks
bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur
cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.
"I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to
poor strangers from my kawn-tree."
He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He said he
would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to husk
corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going to the school
by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children. He told me
he had a nice "lady-teacher" and that he liked to go to school.
At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to
strangers.
"Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?" he asked.
Jelinek looked serious. "Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father
has done a great sin," he looked straight at grandfather. "Our Lord has
said that."
Grandfather seemed to like his frankness. "We believe that, too, Jelinek.
But we believe that Mr. Shimerda's soul will come to its Creator as well
off without a priest. We believe that Christ is our only intercessor."
The young man shook his head. "I know how you think. My teacher at the
school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the
dead. I have seen too much."
We asked him what he meant.
He glanced around the table. "You want I shall tell you? When I was a
little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make
my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By
'n' by war-times come, when the Austrians fight us. We have very many
soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp,
and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give
the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with
the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness
but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because
we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us." He
paused, looking at grandfather. "That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened
to myself. All the soldiers know, too. When we walk along the road, the
old priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on
horse. All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth,
pull up their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we
pass. So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family."
We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank,
manly faith.
"I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these
things," said grandfather, "and I would never be the one to say you were
not in God's care when you were among the soldiers."
After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong
black farmhorses to the scraper and break a road through to the
Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was
the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, was set to work on a coffin.
Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us
that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who "batched"
with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made the coat.
From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn with the blacks,
and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield. Sometimes he was
completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him; then he and
the horses would emerge black and shining.
Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for
the oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his work-table and watched him. He did
not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of
paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus
engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his
half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At
last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.
"The hardest part of my job's done," he announced. "It's the head end of
it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The last
time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden," he continued, as he sorted and
tried his chisels, "was for a fellow in the Black Tiger mine, up above
Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of
the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a
trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled across a box
canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two Swedes
had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down. If you'll
believe it, they went to work the next day. You can't kill a Swede. But in
my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned out
different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It's a handy
thing to know, when you knock about like I've done."
"We'd be hard put to it now, if you did n't know, Otto," grandmother said.
"Yes, 'm," Fuchs admitted with modest pride. "So few folks does know how
to make a good tight box that'll turn water. I sometimes wonder if
there'll be anybody about to do it for me. However, I'm not at all
particular that way."
All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting
wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such
cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a
pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so
soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the
boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow
shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to
cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled
the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands
went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he
were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if
this occupation brought back old times to him.
At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbor who lived
east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their way to the
Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over there had somehow got
abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother gave the visitors
sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were gone, the brother of
the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door,
and after him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbors
on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room. They were
all eager for any details about the suicide, and they were greatly
concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried. The nearest Catholic
cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks before a wagon could get
so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. There was a
burying-ground over by the Norwegian church, west of Squaw Creek; perhaps
the Norwegians would take Mr. Shimerda in.
After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to
the kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate cake, and
Otto again filled the house with the exciting, expectant song of the
plane. One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked more
than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything but "Only
papers, to-day," or, "I've got a sackful of mail for ye," until this
afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman; to herself or to the
Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was naturally
taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper that I used
to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now every one seemed
eager to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story; about the
Black Tiger mine, and about violent deaths and casual buryings, and the
queer fancies of dying men. You never really knew a man, he said, until
you saw him die. Most men were game, and went without a grudge.
The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring
the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the
Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the
Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother was indignant. "If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr.
Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring. If
anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst
'em."
Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that
important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil
War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case
very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would have
sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. "The way he acted, and the way his
axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man."
Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake
and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he
behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps
he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man's misery and loneliness.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had
hoped would linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated condition,
disappeared on the second round. They talked excitedly about where they
should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbors were all disturbed
and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their own land;
indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner. Grandfather had
explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country was put under fence
and the roads were confined to section lines, two roads would cross
exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, "It makes no matter."
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some
superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the
cross-roads.
Jelinek said he did n't know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once
been such a custom in Bohemia. "Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind," he
added. "I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the
neighbors; but she say so it must be. 'There I will bury him, if I dig the
grave myself,' she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the
grave to-morrow."
Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. "I don't know whose
wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will
live to see the people of this country ride over that old man's head, she
is mistaken."
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 17 with the given context. | chapter 16|chapter 17|chapter 18 | After four days, Mr. Shimerda is laid into the ground. Jelinek and Ambrosch have to work at the grave all day long to dig the hole in the frozen ground. All the neighbors come despite the weather. Jim catches a glimpse of the body before it is buried. The only identifiable part is the hand which looks as it always did. After everyone in the family prays over the body, Mrs. Shimerda tells young Julka to touch the body and bless it. She is terrified to do so and Mrs. Shimerda attempts to force her to touch the body. Mrs. Burden stops her and tells her she will not stand by and watch her frighten the child into doing something she doesnt even understand. Someone asks Mr. Burden to speak over the grave. Jim remembers the prayer vividly. He says only God can judge anyone and that if anyone present has been remiss toward a stranger to their country, God will forgive him and soften his heart. Then he asks God to help the widow and her family. Jim notices that his grandmother looks satisfied with her husband and what he has said. She asks Otto to sing a song so it wont seem so "heathenish." |
----------CHAPTER 16---------
MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the barn four days, and on the fifth they buried
him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging the grave,
chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On Saturday we breakfasted
before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin. Jake and Jelinek
went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in
which it was frozen fast to the ground.
When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found the
women-folk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat
crouching by the stove, Antonia was washing dishes. When she saw me she
ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. "Oh, Jimmy," she
sobbed, "what you tink for my lovely papa!" It seemed to me that I could
feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.
Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her
shoulder toward the door while the neighbors were arriving. They came on
horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a wagon
over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from her farm
eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women into the
cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning to
fall, and every one was afraid of another storm and anxious to have the
burial over with.
Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to
start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors had brought,
Antonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her
father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill;
Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door, so
it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from the cave and
looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up.
His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was bandaged in white
muslin, like a mummy's; one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the
black cloth; that was all one could see of him.
Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Antonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward, and kept saying
something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down, shut her eyes, and put
out her hand a little way, but she drew it back and began to cry wildly.
She was afraid to touch the bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the
shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin, but grandmother interfered.
"No, Mrs. Shimerda," she said firmly, "I won't stand by and see that child
frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of
her. Let her alone."
At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the box,
and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look at
Antonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close to
her.
The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave,
it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the
coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about
watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and
shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek spoke in a
persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to grandfather.
"She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for
him here in English, for the neighbors to understand."
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the
other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember
it. He began, "Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the
sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee."
He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled
the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the
way before this widow and her children, and to "incline the hearts of men
to deal justly with her." In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at "Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat."
All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said "Amen," I thought she looked
satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, "Can't you start a
hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish."
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her
suggestion, then began, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and all the men and
women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has
made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the
bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:--
"While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high."
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass
had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the
prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran
about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr.
Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and
an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda
never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a
little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a
little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was
never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray
rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and
in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim
superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and
still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the
error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along
which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver
passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
----------CHAPTER 17---------
WHEN spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the
nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter
was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in
the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and
playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.
The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill,--bought on credit,--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April,
Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Antonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.
She gave me a shrewd glance. "He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know
about the wet and the dry."
I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.
When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.
She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.
"Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall."
While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand. "You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope
your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?"
"No, we did n't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a
lot."
Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were
stiff. "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother
can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work
as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land
one good farm."
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Antonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?" she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. "My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?"
"No," I said, "I will never forget him."
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers. Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in
Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day.
Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.
[Illustration: Antonia ploughing in the field]
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: "You take them ox to-morrow
and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart."
His sister laughed. "Don't be mad. I know it's awful hard work for break
sod. I milk the cow for you to-morrow, if you want."
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. "That cow not give so much milk like
what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him
back the cow."
"He does n't talk about the fifteen dollars," I exclaimed indignantly. "He
does n't find fault with people."
"He say I break his saw when we build, and I never," grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me.
Antonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table
and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother
had said, "Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose all her nice
ways and get rough ones." She had lost them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Antonia. She was out in the fields from
sun-up until sun-down. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making
me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she
helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased
with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, "She
will help some fellow get ahead in the world."
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much
she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too,
that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that
the farmhands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I
saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her
dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to
think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet
managed to say so much when he exclaimed, "My An-tonia!"
----------CHAPTER 18---------
AFTER I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians. We
were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback
and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making comrades of them I was getting even with
Antonia for her indifference. Since the father's death, Ambrosch was more
than ever the head of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings as
well as the fortunes of his women-folk. Antonia often quoted his opinions
to me, and she let me see that she admired him, while she thought of me
only as a little boy. Before the spring was over, there was a distinct
coldness between us and the Shimerdas. It came about in this way.
One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar which
Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful
blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses
along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower
stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and
their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet
gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.
We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was
cleaning out the stable, and Antonia and her mother were making garden,
off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill
tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake asked
for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar belonged to
grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
"Now, don't you say you have n't got it, Ambrosch, because I know you
have, and if you ain't a-going to look for it, I will."
Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the
stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he
returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used--trampled in the dirt
and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.
"This what you want?" he asked surlily.
Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough
stubble on his face. "That ain't the piece of harness I loaned you,
Ambrosch; or if it is, you've used it shameful. I ain't a-going to carry
such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden."
Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. "All right," he said coolly,
took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by the
belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch's feet had scarcely
touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at Jake's
stomach. Fortunately Jake was in such a position that he could dodge it.
This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they played at
fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head--it
sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over,
stunned.
We heard squeals, and looking up saw Antonia and her mother coming on the
run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged through the
muddy water, without even lifting their skirts. They came on, screaming
and clawing the air. By this time Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
sputtering with nose-bleed. Jake sprang into his saddle. "Let's get out of
this, Jim," he called.
Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were
going to pull down lightning. "Law, law!" she shrieked after us. "Law for
knock my Ambrosch down!"
"I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden," Antonia panted. "No
friends any more!"
Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. "Well, you're a damned
ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you," he shouted back. "I guess the
Burdens can get along without you. You've been a sight of trouble to them,
anyhow!"
We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for
us. I had n't a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and
trembling all over. It made him sick to get so angry. "They ain't the
same, Jimmy," he kept saying in a hurt tone. "These foreigners ain't the
same. You can't trust 'em to be fair. It's dirty to kick a feller. You
heard how the women turned on you--and after all we went through on account
of 'em last winter! They ain't to be trusted. I don't want to see you get
too thick with any of 'em."
"I'll never be friends with them again, Jake," I declared hotly. "I
believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath."
Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake to
ride to town to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had
knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was
inclined to make trouble--her son was still under age--she would be
forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market
the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after Jake had
started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving by, looking
neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight down the Black
Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would
follow the matter up.
Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for
that purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in town
that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had to sell
his pig to pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas great
satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met
Antonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road with her
work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing
voice:--
"Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!"
Otto pretended not to be surprised at Antonia's behavior. He only lifted
his brows and said, "You can't tell me anything new about a Czech; I'm an
Austrian."
Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the
Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Antonia always greeted him respectfully, and he
asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought
the future looked hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he
soon realized that his oxen were too heavy for any work except breaking
sod, and he succeeded in selling them to a newly arrived German. With the
money he bought another team of horses, which grandfather selected for
him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but he could never
teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The one idea that had ever got
through poor Marek's thick head was that all exertion was meritorious. He
always bore down on the handles of the cultivator and drove the blades so
deep into the earth that the horses were soon exhausted.
In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy's for a week, and took Marek
with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator;
she and Antonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses
got colic and gave them a terrible fright.
Antonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well
before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was swollen
about the middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted another
horse, without waiting to saddle him, and hammered on our door just as we
were going to bed. Grandfather answered her knock. He did not send one of
his men, but rode back with her himself, taking a syringe and an old piece
of carpet he kept for hot applications when our horses were sick. He found
Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern, groaning and wringing
her hands. It took but a few moments to release the gases pent up in the
poor beast, and the two women heard the rush of wind and saw the roan
visibly diminish in girth.
"If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden," Antonia exclaimed, "I never stay here
till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before morning."
When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy's, we learned that he had given
Marek's wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses for their father's
soul. Grandmother thought Antonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda
needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, "If he can spare six
dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes."
It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas.
One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well, he
thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July. He would
need more men, and if it were agreeable to every one he would engage
Ambrosch for the reaping and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small
grain of their own.
"I think, Emmaline," he concluded, "I will ask Antonia to come over and
help you in the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something, and it will
be a good time to end misunderstandings. I may as well ride over this
morning and make arrangements. Do you want to go with me, Jim?" His tone
told me that he had already decided for me.
After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she
ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she did not
want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse,
and we followed her.
Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been
grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal, pulled
up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to hide the
cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow
held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at her hind
quarters, trying to spank her into the draw-side.
Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch?
Which field?"
"He with the sod corn." She pointed toward the north, still standing in
front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.
"His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter," said grandfather
encouragingly. "And where is Antonia?"
"She go with." Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously
in the dust.
"Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me cut
my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good-morning. By the
way, Mrs. Shimerda," he said as he turned up the path, "I think we may as
well call it square about the cow."
She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not
understand, grandfather turned back. "You need not pay me anything more;
no more money. The cow is yours."
"Pay no more, keep cow?" she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes
snapping at us in the sunlight.
"Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow." He nodded.
Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and crouching down beside
grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had ever been
so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too. Somehow, that
seemed to bring the Old World very close.
We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: "I expect she thought we had
come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she would n't have
scratched a little if we'd laid hold of that lariat rope!"
Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.
Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She
presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, "Now you not come
any more for knock my Ambrosch down?"
Jake laughed sheepishly. "I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone."
"If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine," she said
insinuatingly.
Jake was not at all disconcerted. "Have the last word, mam," he said
cheerfully. "It's a lady's privilege."
|
My Antonia.book 2.chapter | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 2, chapter 2 based on the provided context. | book 2, chapter 1|book 2, chapter 2|book 2, chapter 3 | Grandmother really likes the Harlings as neighbors. They used to be farming people, too, and are Norwegian. Mr. Harling is a merchant and one of the most enterprising men in the county. He's away a lot on business. Mrs. Harling is strong and sturdy and energetic. She has bright eyes. They have lots of children, three of them close to Jim's age. Charley is sixteen, Julia is fourteen, and Sally is thirteen and a tomboy. Frances is their adult daughter and manages her father's business. She's very good at it. Sometimes she comes over to talk with Grandfather and together they figure out a way to save someone from Wick Cutter, the money-lender. Frances is also good at making women happy; she can get people to talk to her and she always attends social events. In August the Harlings' cook leaves and that's when Grandmother gets them to hire Antonia. She has to convince Ambrosch to let this happen. Mrs. Harling rides out to the Shimerdas' farm one day to see Mrs. Shimerda. She likes Antonia and she thinks that Mrs. Shimerda is amusing. They argue with Ambrosch to arrange the work. He wants to get every cent of Antonia's wages himself, but Mrs. Harling wants Antonia to get some of the money herself. Finally they work it out. Mrs. Harling thinks Antonia is pretty and decides to bring out some of her feminine side, also known as the cooking and cleaning side. Grandmother laments that Antonia has led such a difficult life since her father died. Mrs. Harling wants to know all the details of Mr. Shimerda's suicide, so Grandmother tells her. Mrs. Harling says that Antonia will be happy working for her. |
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 1---------
I HAD been living with my grandfather for nearly three years when he
decided to move to Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting old for the
heavy work of a farm, and as I was now thirteen they thought I ought to be
going to school. Accordingly our homestead was rented to "that good woman,
the Widow Steavens," and her bachelor brother, and we bought Preacher
White's house, at the north end of Black Hawk. This was the first town
house one passed driving in from the farm, a landmark which told country
people their long ride was over.
We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather had
fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention. Otto said he
would not be likely to find another place that suited him so well; that he
was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the
"wild West." Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure, decided
to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by
illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey
to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian
people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. He wanted
to be a prospector. He thought a silver mine was waiting for him in
Colorado.
Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down the
carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for grandmother's
kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they went, without
warning. Those two fellows had been faithful to us through sun and storm,
had given us things that cannot be bought in any market in the world. With
me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their speech and
manners out of care for me, and given me so much good comradeship. Now
they got on the west-bound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes,
with their oilcloth valises--and I never saw them again. Months afterward
we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down with mountain
fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl mine, and were
doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to
me, "unclaimed." After that we never heard from them.
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards
about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing
along the wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town there were two rows
of new brick "store" buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse, and
four white churches. Our own house looked down over the town, and from our
upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two
miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost
freedom of the farming country.
We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like town
people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church, grandmother
was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I was quite
another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was
over I could fight, play "keeps," tease the little girls, and use
forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from
utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbor,
kept an eye on me, and if my behavior went beyond certain bounds I was not
permitted to come into her yard or to play with her jolly children.
We saw more of our country neighbors now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their women-folk more
often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner, and
rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping. The more our
house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad, when I
came home from school at noon, to see a farm wagon standing in the back
yard, and I was always ready to run downtown to get beefsteak or baker's
bread for unexpected company. All through that first spring and summer I
kept hoping that Ambrosch would bring Antonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush furniture, and the
trumpet-blowing cherubs the German paper-hanger had put on our parlor
ceiling.
When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though he put his
horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner, or tell us anything
about his mother and sisters. If we ran out and questioned him as he was
slipping through the yard, he would merely work his shoulders about in his
coat and say, "They all right, I guess."
Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Antonia as we
had been, and always brought us news of her. All through the wheat season,
she told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went from
farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with the thrashers. The farmers
liked her and were kind to her; said they would rather have her for a hand
than Ambrosch. When fall came she was to husk corn for the neighbors until
Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from
this by getting her a place to work with our neighbors, the Harlings.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 2---------
GRANDMOTHER often said that if she had to live in town, she thanked God
she lived next the Harlings. They had been farming people, like ourselves,
and their place was like a little farm, with a big barn and a garden, and
an orchard and grazing lots,--even a windmill. The Harlings were
Norwegians, and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania until she was ten
years old. Her husband was born in Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and
cattle buyer, and was generally considered the most enterprising business
man in our county. He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little
towns along the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great
deal. In his absence his wife was the head of the household.
Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.
Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the
moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick
to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember
her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her
eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps
shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her
enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all
the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary,
at the Harlings'. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and
house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that
spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.
Three of the Harling children were near me in age. Charley, the only
son,--they had lost an older boy,--was sixteen; Julia, who was known as the
musical one, was fourteen when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short
hair, was a year younger. She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily
clever at all boys' sports. Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned yellow
hair, bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at "keeps," but
was such a quick shot one could n't catch her at it.
The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a very important person in our world.
She was her father's chief clerk, and virtually managed his Black Hawk
office during his frequent absences. Because of her unusual business
ability, he was stern and exacting with her. He paid her a good salary,
but she had few holidays and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the office to open the mail and read the
markets. With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already
preparing for Annapolis, Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him guns
and tools and electric batteries, and never asked what he did with them.
Frances was dark, like her father, and quite as tall. In winter she wore a
sealskin coat and cap, and she and Mr. Harling used to walk home together
in the evening, talking about grain-cars and cattle, like two men.
Sometimes she came over to see grandfather after supper, and her visits
flattered him. More than once they put their wits together to rescue some
unfortunate farmer from the clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling was as good a judge of
credits as any banker in the county. The two or three men who had tried to
take advantage of her in a deal acquired celebrity by their defeat. She
knew every farmer for miles about; how much land he had under cultivation,
how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were. Her interest in
these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in
her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play.
When Frances drove out into the country on business, she would go miles
out of her way to call on some of the old people, or to see the women who
seldom got to town. She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who
spoke no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would tell
her their story without realizing they were doing so. She went to country
funerals and weddings in all weathers. A farmer's daughter who was to be
married could count on a wedding present from Frances Harling.
In August the Harlings' Danish cook had to leave them. Grandmother
entreated them to try Antonia. She cornered Ambrosch the next time he came
to town, and pointed out to him that any connection with Christian Harling
would strengthen his credit and be of advantage to him. One Sunday Mrs.
Harling took the long ride out to the Shimerdas' with Frances. She said
she wanted to see "what the girl came from" and to have a clear
understanding with her mother. I was in our yard when they came driving
home, just before sunset. They laughed and waved to me as they passed, and
I could see they were in great good humor. After supper, when grandfather
set off to church, grandmother and I took my short cut through the willow
hedge and went over to hear about the visit to the Shimerdas.
We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and Sally on the front porch, resting
after her hard drive. Julia was in the hammock--she was fond of repose--and
Frances was at the piano, playing without a light and talking to her
mother through the open window.
Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us coming. "I expect you left your
dishes on the table to-night, Mrs. Burden," she called. Frances shut the
piano and came out to join us.
They had liked Antonia from their first glimpse of her; felt they knew
exactly what kind of girl she was. As for Mrs. Shimerda, they found her
very amusing. Mrs. Harling chuckled whenever she spoke of her. "I expect I
am more at home with that sort of bird than you are, Mrs. Burden. They're
a pair, Ambrosch and that old woman!"
They had had a long argument with Ambrosch about Antonia's allowance for
clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent of his sister's
wages should be paid over to him each month, and he would provide her with
such clothing as he thought necessary. When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for Antonia's own use, he
declared they wanted to take his sister to town and dress her up and make
a fool of her. Mrs. Harling gave us a lively account of Ambrosch's
behavior throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting on
his cap as if he were through with the whole business, and how his mother
tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian. Mrs. Harling finally
agreed to pay three dollars a week for Antonia's services--good wages in
those days--and to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute about the
shoes, Mrs. Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send Mrs.
Harling three fat geese every year to "make even." Ambrosch was to bring
his sister to town next Saturday.
"She'll be awkward and rough at first, like enough," grandmother said
anxiously, "but unless she's been spoiled by the hard life she's led, she
has it in her to be a real helpful girl."
Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh. "Oh, I'm not worrying, Mrs.
Burden! I can bring something out of that girl. She's barely seventeen,
not too old to learn new ways. She's good-looking, too!" she added warmly.
Frances turned to grandmother. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Burden, you did n't tell us
that! She was working in the garden when we got there, barefoot and
ragged. But she has such fine brown legs and arms, and splendid color in
her cheeks--like those big dark red plums."
We were pleased at this praise. Grandmother spoke feelingly. "When she
first came to this country, Frances, and had that genteel old man to watch
over her, she was as pretty a girl as ever I saw. But, dear me, what a
life she's led, out in the fields with those rough thrashers! Things would
have been very different with poor Antonia if her father had lived."
The Harlings begged us to tell them about Mr. Shimerda's death and the big
snowstorm. By the time we saw grandfather coming home from church we had
told them pretty much all we knew of the Shimerdas.
"The girl will be happy here, and she'll forget those things," said Mrs.
Harling confidently, as we rose to take our leave.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 3---------
ON Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back gate, and Antonia jumped down
from the wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she used to do. She was
wearing shoes and stockings, and was breathless and excited. She gave me a
playful shake by the shoulders. "You ain't forget about me, Jim?"
Grandmother kissed her. "God bless you, child! Now you've come, you must
try to do right and be a credit to us."
Antonia looked eagerly about the house and admired everything. "Maybe I be
the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town," she suggested
hopefully.
How good it was to have Antonia near us again; to see her every day and
almost every night! Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling found, was that she
so often stopped her work and fell to playing with the children. She would
race about the orchard with us, or take sides in our hay-fights in the
barn, or be the old bear that came down from the mountain and carried off
Nina. Tony learned English so quickly that by the time school began she
could speak as well as any of us.
I was jealous of Tony's admiration for Charley Harling. Because he was
always first in his classes at school, and could mend the water-pipes or
the door-bell and take the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort
of prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her. She
loved to put up lunches for him when he went hunting, to mend his
ball-gloves and sew buttons on his shooting-coat, baked the kind of
nut-cake he liked, and fed his setter dog when he was away on trips with
his father. Antonia had made herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr.
Harling's old coats, and in these she went padding about after Charley,
fairly panting with eagerness to please him.
Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best. Nina was only six, and she
was rather more complex than the other children. She was fanciful, had all
sorts of unspoken preferences, and was easily offended. At the slightest
disappointment or displeasure her velvety brown eyes filled with tears,
and she would lift her chin and walk silently away. If we ran after her
and tried to appease her, it did no good. She walked on unmollified. I
used to think that no eyes in the world could grow so large or hold so
many tears as Nina's. Mrs. Harling and Antonia invariably took her part.
We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: "You have
made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic."
I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were
lovely; but I often wanted to shake her.
We had jolly evenings at the Harlings when the father was away. If he was
at home, the children had to go to bed early, or they came over to my
house to play. Mr. Harling not only demanded a quiet house, he demanded
all his wife's attention. He used to take her away to their room in the
west ell, and talk over his business with her all evening. Though we did
not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience when we played, and we
always looked to her for suggestions. Nothing flattered one like her quick
laugh.
Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and his own easy-chair by the
window, in which no one else ever sat. On the nights when he was at home,
I could see his shadow on the blind, and it seemed to me an arrogant
shadow. Mrs. Harling paid no heed to any one else if he was there. Before
he went to bed she always got him a lunch of smoked salmon or anchovies
and beer. He kept an alcohol lamp in his room, and a French coffee-pot,
and his wife made coffee for him at any hour of the night he happened to
want it.
Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic
ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours,
moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on
Sunday. Mr. Harling, therefore, seemed to me autocratic and imperial in
his ways. He walked, talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a man
who felt that he had power. He was not tall, but he carried his head so
haughtily that he looked a commanding figure, and there was something
daring and challenging in his eyes. I used to imagine that the "nobles" of
whom Antonia was always talking probably looked very much like Christian
Harling, wore caped overcoats like his, and just such a glittering diamond
upon the little finger.
Except when the father was at home, the Harling house was never quiet.
Mrs. Harling and Nina and Antonia made as much noise as a houseful of
children, and there was usually somebody at the piano. Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of practicing, but they all played.
When Frances came home at noon, she played until dinner was ready. When
Sally got back from school, she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that negro minstrel troupes brought to town. Even
Nina played the Swedish Wedding March.
Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she
managed to practice every day. I soon learned that if I were sent over on
an errand and found Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait
quietly until she turned to me. I can see her at this moment; her short,
square person planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands moving
quickly and neatly over the keys, her eyes fixed on the music with
intelligent concentration.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book 2, chapter 4 with the given context. | book 2, chapter 4|book 2, chapter 5|book 2, chapter 6 | The kids all tease Antonia about how much she likes Charley. They are in the process of making popcorn balls at the Harlings' when the door rings. It is a pretty, dressed-up girl named Lena Lingard. Jim almost doesn't recognize her, because she was a farm girl too at one point. Lena explains that now she's come to town to work, just like Tony. Mrs. Harling comes in and looks Lena up and down disapprovingly. She wants to know where the girl is working, and Lena says she's working for the dressmaker, Mrs. Thomas. She says she's going to use the money to help out her mother, who is still back on the farm. Mrs. Harling is very rude to the girl, but Lena ignores it. Frances invites her to sit down with them. We learn that Lena was supposed to marry a boy named Nick, except his father wouldn't allow it. Now Nick is marrying some other girl. Lena doesn't mind though, because she says she's seen a lot of married life and has decided she doesn't want it. Another girl, Tiny Soderball, is in the same situation as Tony and Lena and has come to town to work to make money for her family back on the farm. She's working at a hotel in town run by Mrs. Gardener. Mrs. Harling doesn't like the idea of that. Before Lena goes, she takes Antonia aside and asks her to come visit sometime. Antonia is hesitant, because Mrs. Harling doesn't like her out and about. Lena insists. After Lena leaves, Frances asks Antonia why she wasn't more friendly to Lena. Antonia explains that she was afraid that Mrs. Harling wouldn't like a girl like that coming around, because Lena had a bad reputation out on the farm. Jim runs home to tell his grandmother that Lena came to town, and they're glad that she gets to leave her hard life on the farm. Lena lived on a farm in a Norwegian settlement and used to herd her father's cattle. Jim was always amazed that she managed to stay so feminine even though she was doing rough man's work. She has a gentle voice and violet eyes. Her father is a bad farmer and they have a big family. Lena always tries to take care of her brothers and sisters. She was talked about because a man named Ole Benson fell in love with her. Ole was lazy and had a crazy wife named Crazy Mary. She was put in an insane asylum after setting a barn on fire, but escaped and walked home two hundred miles and no one sent her back even though she made the landscape considerably less attractive. When Ole was out in the field he used to go sit with Lena and watch the cattle with her. The whole settlement got upset and the preacher's wife tried to get Lena to start coming to church, which would probably make her less desirable. The preacher's wife also gave Lena a dress to wear, because Lena's was ragged and had lots of holes in it. So Lena comes to church in one of the preacher's wife's dresses, and she looks so pretty dressed-up that everyone realizes how attractive she is, which means the preacher's wife really shot everyone in the foot. Ole is there too, and he makes a point of helping Lena onto her horse after the mass. This makes Crazy Mary angry, and so she runs after Lena with a knife. Lena finds the whole thing funny. Except Crazy Mary continues to chase Lena with a knife, which is not so funny. One day she chases Lena all the way to the Shimderdas' farm and demonstrates to everyone how sharp her knife is. Lena hides in Antonia's room and later Mrs. Shimerda tells her not to make eyes at Ole. Lena says she didn't provoke Ole, and she can't help it if he comes around staring at her. |
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 4---------
"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."
WE were singing rhymes to tease Antonia 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.
"Hello, Tony. Don't you know me?" she asked in a smooth, low voice,
looking in at us archly.
Antonia gasped and stepped back. "Why, it's Lena! Of course I did n't know
you, so dressed up!"
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.
"Hello, Jim," she said carelessly as she walked into the kitchen and
looked about her. "I've come to town to work, too, Tony."
"Have you, now? Well, ain't that funny!" Antonia stood ill at ease, and
did n't seem to know just what to do with her visitor.
The door was open into the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting
and Frances was reading. Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.
"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."
Mrs. 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 Antonia hung back--said she had
to get her cake into the oven.
"So you have come to town," said Mrs. Harling, her eyes still fixed on
Lena. "Where are you working?"
"For Mrs. 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."
"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 Mrs. Harling rather severely. "How
is your mother?"
"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."
"See that you don't forget to," said Mrs. Harling skeptically, as she took
up her crocheting again and sent the hook in and out with nimble fingers.
"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.
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?"
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."
Frances laughed. "And how do you feel about it?"
"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."
"That's right," said Frances. "And Mrs. Thomas thinks you can learn
dressmaking?"
"Yes, 'm. I've always liked to sew, but I never had much to do with. Mrs.
Thomas makes lovely things for all the town ladies. Did you know Mrs.
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.
Mrs. 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."
"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.
"Too many, like enough," said Mrs. Harling. "I don't think a hotel is a
good place for a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps an eye on her
waitresses."
Lena's candid eyes, that always looked a little sleepy under their long
lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration.
Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. "I guess I must be leaving," she
said irresolutely.
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.
She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Antonia to come and see her
often. "I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's, with a carpet."
Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers. "I'll come sometime, but
Mrs. Harling don't like to have me run much," she said evasively.
"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 Mrs. Harling sat.
When Lena was gone, Frances asked Antonia why she had n't been a little
more cordial to her.
"I did n't know if your mother would like her coming here," said Antonia,
looking troubled. "She was kind of talked about, out there."
"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?"
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow. We
were good friends, Frances and I.
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.
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.
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.
[Illustration: Lena Lingard knitting stockings]
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.
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.
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.
"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! {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}"
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.
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 Antonia'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. Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out
of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and was sorry when Antonia
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 Antonia and me to go with her,
and help get her cattle together; they were scattered and might be gorging
themselves in somebody's cornfield.
"Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes at
married men," Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.
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."
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 5---------
AFTER Lena came to Black Hawk I often met her downtown, where she would be
matching sewing silk or buying "findings" for Mrs. Thomas. If I happened
to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she was helping
to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with Tiny Soderball
at the hotel on Saturday nights.
The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and all
the commercial travelers in that territory tried to get into Black Hawk
for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlor after supper on Saturday
nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the piano and sang
all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped the cook wash the
dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the double doors between the
parlor and the dining-room, listening to the music and giggling at the
jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling man
when I grew up. They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on
trains all day and go to theaters when they were in big cities. Behind the
hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen opened their big
trunks and spread out their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk
merchants went to look at these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas,
though she was "retail trade," was permitted to see them and to "get
ideas." They were all generous, these traveling men; they gave Tiny
Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and
so many bottles of perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed
some of them on Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drug-store, gazing
in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's arks arranged in the frosty show
window. The boy had come to town with a neighbor to do his Christmas
shopping, for he had money of his own this year. He was only twelve, but
that winter he had got the job of sweeping out the Norwegian church and
making the fire in it every Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!
We went into Duckford's dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his
presents and showed them to me--something for each of the six younger than
himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of Tiny
Soderball's bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he would get
some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he had n't much
money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view at
Duckford's. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the corner, because
he had never seen any before. He studied them seriously, while Lena looked
over his shoulder, telling him she thought the red letters would hold
their color best. He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n't
enough money, after all. Presently he said gravely,--
"Sister, you know mother's name is Berthe. I don't know if I ought to get
B for Berthe, or M for Mother."
Lena patted his bristly head. "I'd get the B, Chrissy. It will please her
for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now."
That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds and
three blues. When the neighbor came in to say that it was time to start,
Lena wound Chris's comforter about his neck and turned up his jacket
collar--he had no overcoat--and we watched him climb into the wagon and
start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove. "I get awful
homesick for them, all the same," she murmured, as if she were answering
some remembered reproach.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 6---------
WINTER comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens
that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw
closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green
tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than
when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I
could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to
me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify--it was like
the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and
the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs
and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter
song, as if it said: "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All
those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of
green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was
underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for
loving the loveliness of summer.
If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office
for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it
would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone; the
frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were shining
pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the suppers cooking as I
passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying toward a
fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets. When one passed
an old man, one could see nothing of his face but a red nose sticking out
between a frosted beard and a long plush cap. The young men capered along
with their hands in their pockets, and sometimes tried a slide on the icy
sidewalk. The children, in their bright hoods and comforters, never
walked, but always ran from the moment they left their door, beating their
mittens against their sides. When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I
was about halfway home. I can remember how glad I was when there happened
to be a light in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us
as we came along the frozen street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for
color came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar.
Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church
when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude
reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there.
On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like the
painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color, too. After
supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive
through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. Of course, if Mr.
Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out on the blind of the west
room, I did not go in, but turned and walked home by the long way, through
the street, wondering what book I should read as I sat down with the two
old people.
Such disappointments only gave greater zest to the nights when we acted
charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlor, with Sally always
dressed like a boy. Frances taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Antonia would make the best dancer among us.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for
us,--"Martha," "Norma," "Rigoletto,"--telling us the story while she played.
Every Saturday night was like a party. The parlor, the back parlor, and
the dining-room were warm and brightly lighted, with comfortable chairs
and sofas, and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there.
Antonia brought her sewing and sat with us--she was already beginning to
make pretty clothes for herself. After the long winter evenings on the
prairie, with Ambrosch's sullen silences and her mother's complaints, the
Harlings' house seemed, as she said, "like Heaven" to her. She was never
too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us. If Sally whispered in
her ear, or Charley gave her three winks, Tony would rush into the kitchen
and build a fire in the range on which she had already cooked three meals
that day.
While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy
to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories--about the calf that
broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the
freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina
interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite of our
derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short
time before the Shimerdas left that country. We all liked Tony's stories.
Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky,
and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said
seemed to come right out of her heart.
One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy, Tony told
us a new story.
"Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the Norwegian
settlement last summer, when I was thrashing there? We were at Iversons',
and I was driving one of the grain wagons."
Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. "Could you throw the wheat
into the bin yourself, Tony?" She knew what heavy work it was.
"Yes, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern boy that
drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to
the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. The men put in the
horses and got the machine going, and Ole Iverson was up on the deck,
cutting bands. I was sitting against a straw stack, trying to get some
shade. My wagon was n't going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful
that day. The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up. After
a while I see a man coming across the stubble, and when he got close I see
it was a tramp. His toes stuck out of his shoes, and he had n't shaved for
a long while, and his eyes was awful red and wild, like he had some
sickness. He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: 'The ponds in this country is done got so low a man could n't
drownd himself in one of 'em.'
"I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n't have
rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle.
"'Oh, cattle,' he says, 'you'll all take care of your cattle! Ain't you
got no beer here?' I told him he'd have to go to the Bohemians for beer;
the Norwegians did n't have none when they thrashed. 'My God!' he says,
'so it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.'
"Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson, 'Hello,
partner, let me up there. I can cut bands, and I'm tired of trampin'. I
won't go no farther.'
"I tried to make signs to Ole, 'cause I thought that man was crazy and
might get the machine stopped up. But Ole, he was glad to get down out of
the sun and chaff--it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it's hot like that. So Ole jumped down and crawled under one of the
wagons for shade, and the tramp got on the machine. He cut bands all right
for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me and
jumped head-first right into the thrashing machine after the wheat.
"I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses, but the belt had
sucked him down, and by the time they got her stopped he was all beat and
cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain't never worked right since."
"Was he clear dead, Tony?" we cried.
"Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There, now, Nina's all upset. We won't
talk about it. Don't you cry, Nina. No old tramp won't get you while
Tony's here."
Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. "Stop crying, Nina, or I'll always send you
upstairs when Antonia tells us about the country. Did they never find out
where he came from, Antonia?"
"Never, mam. He had n't been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there was n't any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman had n't seen him. They
could n't find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old penknife
in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of
paper, and some poetry."
"Some poetry?" we exclaimed.
"I remember," said Frances. "It was 'The Old Oaken Bucket,' cut out of a
newspaper and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson brought it into the office and
showed it to me."
"Now, was n't that strange, Miss Frances?" Tony asked thoughtfully. "What
would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In thrashing time,
too! It's nice everywhere then."
"So it is, Antonia," said Mrs. Harling heartily. "Maybe I'll go home and
help you thrash next summer. Is n't that taffy nearly ready to eat? I've
been smelling it a long while."
There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had
strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and
were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and
animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to
prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white
beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people
and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there
was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but
very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly
conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any
other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings'.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 2, chapter 9 based on the provided context. | book 2, chapter 7|book 2, chapter 8|book 2, chapter 9 | Jim explains the social situation in Black Hawk. The men who live in town are attracted to the country girls. The country girls grew up with hard lives, like Antonia, and they aren't formally educated. But Jim thinks they are smarter and more interesting than those who are more privileged. Physically they are strong and fit, especially compared to the town girls who rarely go outside. This means they're better dancers. And yet, the town girls still think that they're better than the country girls. Jim notes that these girls' own families had just as hard a time when they were farmers, but that Americans weren't willing to send their daughters out to work the way the immigrants were. All the Americans' daughters can do is teach, but the immigrant daughters don't know English well-enough for that, so they have to do service work. This is why, says Jim, the foreign farmers are the ones who become successful first, and the younger generation ends up more wealthy than the American families they used to work for. Jim thinks it's dumb that the town people don't respect the hired girls. He knows that many of the immigrants used to be respectable in their old countries - Lena's grandfather was a clergyman, for example. Narrator-Jim is glad that he lived to see the day where the immigrants are more successful than the people they served once. The town boys plan on marrying the town girls, but they are attracted to the immigrant girls. Because of this, the immigrants threaten to upset the social order. But this is an empty threat, since the town boys wouldn't dare to marry any of them. Yet the immigrant girls are still a temptation for any young man of position. He would run into them all over town and be tempted by their beauty. Jim talks a bit about the three Marys, immigrant girls who also worked in town. Mary Dusak worked as a housekeeper for a bachelor, but he got her pregnant. Later she ended up working in the place of Mary Svoboda, who also got pregnant by her employer. Because of this, the three Marys are considered dangerous to have around. But they are very good at cooking and cleaning. The dancing tent brings together everyone in town from different social positions. Sylvester Lovett is a town boy who always dances with Lena on Saturday nights and even walks her home. But he tries to hide if his friends walk by. He reminds Jim of Ole. Jim finds out that Sylvester drove out to see Lena when she was visiting her family on the farm. He took her buggy riding. Jim hopes that Sylvester will marry Lena and erase the taboo about socializing with hired girls. But instead, Sylvester marries a widow who is six years his senior. Then he was no longer tempted by Lena. Jim dislikes Sylvester a lot on account of this. |
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 7---------
WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and
shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and
men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and
pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.
Through January and February I went to the river with the Harlings on
clear nights, and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the
frozen sand. But by March the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on
the river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and
the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long. There was only
one break in the dreary monotony of that month; when Blind d'Arnault, the
negro pianist, came to town. He gave a concert at the Opera House on
Monday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our
comfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She told
Antonia she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys' Home.
Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slipped
quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, and
the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two
rooms, and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cut
away. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove
glowed at either end of the room, and the grand piano in the middle stood
open.
There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, for
Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been having drinks
with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardener
who ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at the
desk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but no
manager.
Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove
the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh.
She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous
about them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with something
Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, and
she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a
favor when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling men were
flattered when Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment. The
patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes; those who had seen
Mrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.
When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was
at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with
friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did
not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture
salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about
good and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learned
that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were
to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success
in "A Winter's Tale," in London.
The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d'Arnault,--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with
his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show
of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay
motionless over his blind eyes.
"Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me
this evening?" It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in
it. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been
repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.
"She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs to-night."
The men gathered round him, as he began to play "My Old Kentucky Home."
They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old
he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old
enough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous
motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young negro wench
who was laundress for the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was
"not right" in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him
devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his "fidgets,"
that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from
the "Big House" were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her
other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get his
chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembered everything
he heard, and his mammy said he "was n't all wrong." She named him Samson,
because he was blind, but on the plantation he was known as "yellow
Martha's simple child." He was docile and obedient, but when he was six
years old he began to run away from home, always taking the same
direction. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up
to the south wing of the "Big House," where Miss Nellie d'Arnault
practiced the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than
anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness that
she could n't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught him
slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him
what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found
him near the "Big House." But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran
away again. If Miss d'Arnault stopped practicing for a moment and went
toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an
old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and
wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell
Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing
was nearly all he had,--though it did not occur to her that he might have
more of it than other children.
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson
to her music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the
piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door
close after them. He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence of any one in
a room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His mother
had told him over and over how his master would give him to the big
mastiff if he ever found him "meddling." Samson had got too near the
mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched
it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.
Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger tips along the slippery
sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape
and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its
mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be
done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this
highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of
him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out
passages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that were
already his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical little
skull, definite as animal desires. The door opened; Miss Nellie and her
music-master stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive to
presences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little keys. When he paused for a
moment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie
spoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the
dark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding
to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and
gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses,--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro
enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on
those black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling
them through his yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, "Somebody
dancing in there." He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room. "I
hear little feet,--girls, I 'spect."
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springing
down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tiny
and Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of the
floor. They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. "What's the matter with you girls?
Dancing out here by yourselves, when there's a roomful of lonesome men on
the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny."
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
"Mrs. Gardener would n't like it," she protested. "She'd be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us."
"Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl. Now, you're Lena, are you?--and you're
Tony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight?"
O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.
"Easy, boys, easy!" he entreated them. "You'll wake the cook, and there'll
be the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be down
the minute anything's moved in the dining-room."
"Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody'll tell tales."
Johnnie shook his head. "'S a fact, boys," he said confidentially. "If I
take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!"
His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, we'll make it all
right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie."
Molly was Mrs. Gardener's name, of course. "Molly Bawn" was painted in
large blue letters on the glossy white side of the hotel bus, and "Molly"
was engraved inside Johnnie's ring and on his watch-case--doubtless on his
heart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife a
wonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than a
clerk in some other man's hotel.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, d'Arnault spread himself out over the piano,
and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone
on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening
African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood. Whenever the
dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out
softly, "Who's that goin' back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet!
Now, you girls, you ain't goin' to let that floor get cold?"
Antonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at Lena
and Tiny over Willy O'Reilly's shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim and
slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles--she wore her dresses
very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than
the other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightly
marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and smooth, and her commanding
dark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold
and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were
handsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and in
their eyes that brilliancy which is called,--by no metaphor, alas!--"the
light of youth."
D'Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he left
us, he showed us his gold watch which struck the hours, and a topaz ring,
given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in negro melodies, and
had heard d'Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his way
upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I walked home with
Antonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered a
long while at the Harlings' gate, whispering in the cold until the
restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 8---------
THE Harling children and I were never happier, never felt more contented
and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter. We
were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony break
the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tie up
vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I could hear
Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new nests the birds
were building, throwing clods at each other, and playing hide-and-seek
with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer
every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not
even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether
they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia were preserving
cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion
had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.
That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore a
long gold watch chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I
overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and
confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and in
summer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught
dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.
The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacant lot
surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much like a
merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from the poles.
Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending their
children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o'clock one met little
girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collared shirts of the
time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent. Mrs. Vanni
received them at the entrance, always dressed in lavender with a great
deal of black lace, her important watch chain lying on her bosom. She wore
her hair on the top of her head, built up in a black tower, with red coral
combs. When she smiled, she showed two rows of strong, crooked yellow
teeth. She taught the little children herself, and her husband, the
harpist, taught the older ones.
Often the mothers brought their fancy-work and sat on the shady side of
the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under
the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good
trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish laundryman, used
to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the grass plot. Some ragged
little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under a white
umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came
to dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town.
Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and
the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in
the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from the laundryman's garden,
and the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the City Council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up "Home, Sweet Home," all Black Hawk knew it was ten o'clock.
You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the Round House
whistle.
At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place
where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh
aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed
to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by light-hearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in--one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why had
n't we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands
who lived near enough to ride into town after their day's work was over.
I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor,--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with "the hired
girls."
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 9---------
THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had "advantages," never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The
older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from
life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country
girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived
there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of
them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had
given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming
to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and
made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court
in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly
and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in
summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never
moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not
to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom,
gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief
that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out,"
were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as
their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had
borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the
Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters
go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they
sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get
positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the
language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from
debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they
had been when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others,
like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth
they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and
sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping
to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of
debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,--usually of like
nationality,--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman,
and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who could n't speak English.
There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation,
much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father. Yet people saw no
difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all
"hired girls."
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into
their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant
can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to
the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian
girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and
living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat
upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young
fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his
father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the
window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in
her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their
beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious
mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons.
The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk
youth.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who
swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the
jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor
where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in
and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home
from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the
sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their
long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only
made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to
see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at
him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there
were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with
their white throats and their pink cheeks.
The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which
the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the
drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from
Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire
from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the
place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The
three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about
the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on
neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank,
always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances
Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with
her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on
"popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood
trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times
I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He
reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena
herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Antonia that young Lovett drove all the way
out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I
hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls
a better position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work;
had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was
daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he
ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a
half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena
again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he
happened to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from
a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book 2, chapter 10, utilizing the provided context. | book 2, chapter 10|book 2, chapter 11|book 2, chapter 12 | Until the dances began, Antonia wasn't considered one of the more attractive hired girls. She was just a girl who worked for and lived with the Harlings. But once the dances start, she begins hanging out with Tiny and Lena a lot. Also, she is a great dancer. The boys start to talk about her the same way they talk about Tiny. Antonia is in love with the dances. She becomes a bit irresponsible around the house in her excitement. Everyone always waits to dance with Antonia at the Vannis'. Trouble begins. Delivery boys who come to the Harlings' stay longer because they want to flirt with Antonia. Boys come to visit her to ask for dances. Sometimes the boys who walk her home on Saturday night wake Mr. Harling up with their voices. One Saturday night Mr. Harling hears a scuffle and slap on the porch. It turns out that Antonia was with a boy named Harry Paine. He is engaged to be married on Monday, but Antonia let him walk her home from the dance because she thought he was just a nice guy. When he tried to kiss her she fought and slapped him. Mr. Harling is not happy to hear this. He tells Antonia that she brought this on herself by hanging out with girls like Lena and Tiny who have bad reputations. He tells her that she's not allowed to go to the dances anymore if she wants to live with them. Antonia decides to leave the Harlings' rather than stop going to the dances. Frances and her mother try to get her to change her mind, but Antonia is adamant. She says that she's going to go work for Wick Cutter. Mrs. Harling warns her against this, since Cutter has a reputation for knocking up the girls who work for him. She tells Antonia that if she goes to work for Cutter, she's not allowed to come back to the Harlings'. Antonia argues that she has to take her good times when she can get them. She worries there won't be a dancing tent next year. Mrs. Harling warns her again that she might get pregnant if she works for Cutter. Mrs. Harling is angry at Antonia for her decision. She says she wishes that she had never gotten to like the girl so much. |
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 10---------
IT was at the Vannis' tent that Antonia was discovered. Hitherto she had
been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the "hired
girls." She had lived in their house and yard and garden; her thoughts
never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after the tent came
to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends. The
Vannis often said that Antonia was the best dancer of them all. I
sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion that Mrs.
Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl. The young men began
to joke with each other about "the Harlings' Tony" as they did about "the
Marshalls' Anna" or "the Gardeners' Tiny."
Antonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the dance
tunes all day. When supper was late, she hurried with her dishes, dropped
and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she had n't time to dress, she merely flung off
her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went with her; the
moment the lighted tent came into view she would break into a run, like a
boy. There were always partners waiting for her; she began to dance before
she got her breath.
Antonia's success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered
too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought
the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping
through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to
parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with
her work, so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home
after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he
came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and
then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in
time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Antonia
was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry
his employer's daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Antonia to let him
walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he
was one of Miss Frances's friends, and she did n't mind. On the back porch
he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,--because he was going to be
married on Monday,--he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand
free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. "This is what I've
been expecting, Antonia. You've been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you've got the same
reputation. I won't have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard
all the time. This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can
quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over."
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Antonia, they found her agitated but determined. "Stop going to the tent?"
she panted. "I would n't think of it for a minute! My own father could n't
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!" she blazed out indignantly.
"You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia," Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. "I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house."
"Then I'll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the
Cutters' to work at the hotel, and I can have her place."
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. "Antonia, if you go to the Cutters to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you."
Tony snatched up the tea-kettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. "Oh, I can take care of myself! I'm a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there's no
children. The work's nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot
in the afternoons."
"I thought you liked children. Tony, what's come over you?"
"I don't know, something has." Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw. "A
girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there
won't be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls."
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. "If you go to work for the
Cutters, you're likely to have a fling that you won't get up from in a
hurry."
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that
every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked
out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had
never let herself get fond of Antonia.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 11---------
WICK CUTTER was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter's first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, "for
sentiment's sake," as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a
little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early
Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the "fast set" of Black Hawk business men. He
was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was
going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than
sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that
other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys.
When he came to our house on business, he quoted "Poor Richard's Almanack"
to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a
cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he
would begin at once to talk about "the good old times" and simple living.
I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and
glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her
hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as
if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud
baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had
lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had
taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted
her. He still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check traveling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no
change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash
his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that
a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-gray hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me; it was the very color and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-gray brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!"
They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town
at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether
he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her "people," whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her "to live by her brush."
Cutter was n't shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the
"privacy" which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed--easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 12---------
AFTER Antonia went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not
going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the
subject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener's new party dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs.
Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she
went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls'
Norwegian Anna. We High-School boys used to linger on the playground at
the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every
day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride that Antonia, like
Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still "fairest of them all."
Being a Senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the
girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlor, where they would
sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country. I
remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared she
had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. "I guess
you'll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won't he look
funny, girls?"
Lena laughed. "You'll have to hurry up, Jim. If you're going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies."
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
"Baptists don't believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?"
I told her I did n't know what they believed, and did n't care, and that I
certainly was n't going to be a preacher.
"That's too bad," Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. "You'd make
such a good one. You're so studious. Maybe you'd like to be a professor.
You used to teach Tony, did n't you?"
Antonia broke in. "I've set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You'd be good
with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother's trained you up so nice. My papa
always said you were an awful smart boy."
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. "Won't you be surprised, Miss
Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?"
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
High-School Principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy
bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly
one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no
interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he
was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at
once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl
Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the
people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I
was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every
morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like
the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me,
because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after
supper? Usually I had learned next day's lessons by the time I left the
school building, and I could n't sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the
familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the
houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply
sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk
had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to
be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had
rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon
there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the
lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept
rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please
the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the
talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the
shoulder.
"Jim," he said, "I am good friends with you and I always like to see you.
But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has
always treated me fine, and I don't like to have you come into my place,
because I know he don't like it, and it puts me in bad with him."
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drug-store, and listen to the old men who sat
there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could
go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries
for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him,
the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often
went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with
the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to
Omaha or Denver, "where there was some life." He was sure to bring out his
pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and
nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces.
For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another
malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials
requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go
trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say "there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he'd lost his twins."
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to
pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little,
sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back
porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light
wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.
Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness
some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to
me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save
washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This
guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's
speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice
in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over
the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders
in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming
process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced;
then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could
see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark
again.
After I refused to join "the Owls," as they were called, I made a bold
resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Firemen's Hall. I knew it
would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather did
n't approve of dancing anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance
I could go to the Masonic Hall, among "the people we knew." It was just my
point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove
in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my
shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet
and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and
went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I
felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to
think about it.
The dance at the Firemen's Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all
the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis' tent.
Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who came down
on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always
there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their
house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung
out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls
well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that
his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her
mother, and that he had been "trying to make up for it ever since." On
summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his
laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the
big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of
white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered
his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression
seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and
evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed
clothes, and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and
sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they
did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine
pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the
brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and
curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much
English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind,
simple girls and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one
smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with
rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen's garden.
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but every one
wanted a turn with Tony and Lena. Lena moved without exertion, rather
indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner's
shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music
seemed to put her into a soft, waking dream, and her violet-colored eyes
looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When
she sighed she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance "Home,
Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every
dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz--the waltz of coming
home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got
restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer
day.
When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you did n't return to
anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to
schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always
putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around
the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of
the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a
living with his fiddle, how different Antonia's life might have been!
Antonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor
who was a kind of professional ladies' man, as we said. I remember how
admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her
velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardener's black velvet. She was lovely to
see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she
danced. That constant, dark color in her cheeks never changed.
One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Antonia came to the hall with
Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we
were in the Cutter's yard, sheltered by the evergreens, I told her she
must kiss me good-night.
"Why, sure, Jim." A moment later she drew her face away and whispered
indignantly, "Why, Jim! You know you ain't right to kiss me like that.
I'll tell your grandmother on you!"
"Lena Lingard lets me kiss her," I retorted, "and I'm not half as fond of
her as I am of you."
"Lena does?" Tony gasped. "If she's up to any of her nonsense with you,
I'll scratch her eyes out!" She took my arm again and we walked out of the
gate and up and down the sidewalk. "Now, don't you go and be a fool like
some of these town boys. You're not going to sit around here and whittle
store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school
and make something of yourself. I'm just awful proud of you. You won't go
and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?"
"I don't care anything about any of them but you," I said. "And you'll
always treat me like a kid, I suppose."
She laughed and threw her arms around me. "I expect I will, but you're a
kid I'm awful fond of, anyhow! You can like me all you want to, but if I
see you hanging round with Lena much, I'll go to your grandmother, as sure
as your name's Jim Burden! Lena's all right, only--well, you know yourself
she's soft that way. She can't help it. It's natural to her."
If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high
as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters' gate softly behind
me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she
was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark,
silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid
young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women
were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!
I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it
was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have
pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding
down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over
and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.
One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was
in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them.
Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a
curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a
kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to
me with a soft sigh and said, "Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you
as much as I like."
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I
never did.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 2, chapter 13 based on the provided context. | book 2, chapter 13|book 2, chapter 15|chapter 1|chapter 2 | One afternoon Jim finds his grandmother crying. Finally she admits that she knows that he's been sneaking out to the Firemen's dances. Jim tries to tell her that there's nothing wrong with those dances and that he likes spending time with the country girls. But she argues that it isn't right for Jim to deceive his grandparents. People in town are saying that he is a bad boy. Jim doesn't care what people say, but he agrees to stop going to the dances to make his grandparents happy. Now it's Spring and Jim is more bored than ever. He stays at home at night and studies Latin. He's trying to get a lot of college work done over the summer so that he's ahead once he goes to college. Jim gets lonely and hangs out with the cigar-maker and the telegrapher. He hangs a May basket for Nina Harling, which makes him happy. Many nights he walks Frances Harling home and talks to her about his plans for the future. She tells him that her mother Mrs. Harling isn't too angry with Jim. She just doesn't understand why he likes girls like Tiny and Lena. But Frances says that she understands it. She thinks he is more mature than other boys his age. She assures him that her mother will like him after he passes his college exams. Jim claims that if Frances were a boy she would act like him. Frances thinks that Jim sees the hired girls with rose-colored glasses. She calls him a Romantic and asks what his speech is going to be about at graduation. Jim thinks that his oration is good. We don't get to hear any of it, but he assures us of this fact. Mrs. Harling is there listening to it and he looks at her while he delivers the speech. After graduation, Mrs. Harling tells Jim that the speech was great. Later, Jim gets a graduation present from her: a silk umbrella with his name on the handle. After the ceremony, while he is walking home, Jim runs into Lena and Tony and another hired girl named Anna Hansen. Tony congratulates Jim on the speech. Lena wants to know why Jim was so solemn as he gave his speech. Anna also thinks that he did a good job. She says that she always wanted to go to school. Antonia wishes that her father could have been there to hear it. Jim tells her that he dedicated the speech to her father. They share a moment while she cries. Narrator-Jim reflects that he never experienced as touching a moment as that one. |
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 13---------
I NOTICED one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed
to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I
was studying and went to her, asking if she did n't feel well, and if I
could n't help her with her work.
"No, thank you, Jim. I'm troubled, but I guess I'm well enough. Getting a
little rusty in the bones, maybe," she added bitterly.
I stood hesitating. "What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has
grandfather lost any money?"
"No, it ain't money. I wish it was. But I've heard things. You must 'a'
known it would come back to me sometime." She dropped into a chair, and
covering her face with her apron, began to cry. "Jim," she said, "I was
never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But
it came about so; there was n't any other way for you, it seemed like."
I put my arms around her. I could n't bear to see her cry.
"What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen's dances?"
She nodded.
"I'm sorry I sneaked off like that. But there's nothing wrong about the
dances, and I have n't done anything wrong. I like all those country
girls, and I like to dance with them. That's all there is to it."
"But it ain't right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People
say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain't just to us."
"I don't care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles
it. I won't go to the Firemen's Hall again."
I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I
sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that
was not in our High-School course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of
college requirement work in the summer, and to enter the freshman class at
the University without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as
soon as possible.
Disapprobation hurt me, I found,--even that of people whom I did not
admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely, and fell back
on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for companionship.
I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a May-basket for Nina
Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman who
always had more window plants than any one else, and spent an afternoon
trimming a little work-basket. When dusk came on, and the new moon hung in
the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings' front door with my offering, rang
the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I
could hear Nina's cries of delight, and I felt comforted.
On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home
with Frances, and talked to her about my plans and about the reading I was
doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously
offended with me.
"Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess. But you know she
was hurt about Antonia, and she can't understand why you like to be with
Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set."
"Can you?" I asked bluntly.
Frances laughed. "Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country, and
you like to take sides. In some ways you're older than boys of your age.
It will be all right with mama after you pass your college examinations
and she sees you're in earnest."
"If you were a boy," I persisted, "you would n't belong to the Owl Club,
either. You'd be just like me."
She shook her head. "I would and I would n't. I expect I know the country
girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The
trouble with you, Jim, is that you're romantic. Mama's going to your
Commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to
be about. She wants you to do well."
I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervor a great many things
I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House to hear the
Commencement exercises, and I looked at her most of the time while I made
my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterward she
came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with our diplomas in our
hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: "You surprised me, Jim. I did
n't believe you could do as well as that. You did n't get that speech out
of books." Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from
Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.
I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I passed the Methodist
Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under
the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush
June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me--Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.
"Oh, Jim, it was splendid!" Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. "There ain't a lawyer in Black Hawk
could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to
him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, did
n't he, girls?"
Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: "What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget."
Anna spoke wistfully. "It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know."
"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,"--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels,--"there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I
dedicated it to him."
She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.
I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.
----------BOOK 2, CHAPTER 15---------
LATE in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving Antonia
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, Antonia came over to see us. Grandmother
noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. "You've got something on
your mind, Antonia," she said anxiously.
"Yes, Mrs. Burden. I could n'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 had n'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 would n'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."
Antonia 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 did n'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 some one 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 could n'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
nightshirt, 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 hatrack, lay down on the parlor 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 discolored. 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
nightshirt, 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 Antonia 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 Antonia. But I lay with my disfigured
face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that
grandmother should keep every one 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 drug-store 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, Antonia 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 Antonia'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 Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to
leave it, the front-door bell 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 afterwards.
Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlor while she related to her just what had occurred the night
before. Antonia 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 horselike head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she had n'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 could
n't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!
----------CHAPTER 1---------
I HAD been living with my grandfather for nearly three years when he
decided to move to Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting old for the
heavy work of a farm, and as I was now thirteen they thought I ought to be
going to school. Accordingly our homestead was rented to "that good woman,
the Widow Steavens," and her bachelor brother, and we bought Preacher
White's house, at the north end of Black Hawk. This was the first town
house one passed driving in from the farm, a landmark which told country
people their long ride was over.
We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather had
fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention. Otto said he
would not be likely to find another place that suited him so well; that he
was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the
"wild West." Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure, decided
to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by
illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey
to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian
people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. He wanted
to be a prospector. He thought a silver mine was waiting for him in
Colorado.
Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down the
carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for grandmother's
kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they went, without
warning. Those two fellows had been faithful to us through sun and storm,
had given us things that cannot be bought in any market in the world. With
me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their speech and
manners out of care for me, and given me so much good comradeship. Now
they got on the west-bound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes,
with their oilcloth valises--and I never saw them again. Months afterward
we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down with mountain
fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl mine, and were
doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to
me, "unclaimed." After that we never heard from them.
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards
about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing
along the wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town there were two rows
of new brick "store" buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse, and
four white churches. Our own house looked down over the town, and from our
upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two
miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost
freedom of the farming country.
We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like town
people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church, grandmother
was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I was quite
another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was
over I could fight, play "keeps," tease the little girls, and use
forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from
utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbor,
kept an eye on me, and if my behavior went beyond certain bounds I was not
permitted to come into her yard or to play with her jolly children.
We saw more of our country neighbors now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their women-folk more
often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner, and
rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping. The more our
house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad, when I
came home from school at noon, to see a farm wagon standing in the back
yard, and I was always ready to run downtown to get beefsteak or baker's
bread for unexpected company. All through that first spring and summer I
kept hoping that Ambrosch would bring Antonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush furniture, and the
trumpet-blowing cherubs the German paper-hanger had put on our parlor
ceiling.
When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though he put his
horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner, or tell us anything
about his mother and sisters. If we ran out and questioned him as he was
slipping through the yard, he would merely work his shoulders about in his
coat and say, "They all right, I guess."
Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Antonia as we
had been, and always brought us news of her. All through the wheat season,
she told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went from
farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with the thrashers. The farmers
liked her and were kind to her; said they would rather have her for a hand
than Ambrosch. When fall came she was to husk corn for the neighbors until
Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from
this by getting her a place to work with our neighbors, the Harlings.
----------CHAPTER 2---------
GRANDMOTHER often said that if she had to live in town, she thanked God
she lived next the Harlings. They had been farming people, like ourselves,
and their place was like a little farm, with a big barn and a garden, and
an orchard and grazing lots,--even a windmill. The Harlings were
Norwegians, and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania until she was ten
years old. Her husband was born in Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and
cattle buyer, and was generally considered the most enterprising business
man in our county. He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little
towns along the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great
deal. In his absence his wife was the head of the household.
Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.
Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the
moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick
to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember
her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her
eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps
shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her
enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all
the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary,
at the Harlings'. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and
house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that
spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.
Three of the Harling children were near me in age. Charley, the only
son,--they had lost an older boy,--was sixteen; Julia, who was known as the
musical one, was fourteen when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short
hair, was a year younger. She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily
clever at all boys' sports. Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned yellow
hair, bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at "keeps," but
was such a quick shot one could n't catch her at it.
The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a very important person in our world.
She was her father's chief clerk, and virtually managed his Black Hawk
office during his frequent absences. Because of her unusual business
ability, he was stern and exacting with her. He paid her a good salary,
but she had few holidays and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the office to open the mail and read the
markets. With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already
preparing for Annapolis, Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him guns
and tools and electric batteries, and never asked what he did with them.
Frances was dark, like her father, and quite as tall. In winter she wore a
sealskin coat and cap, and she and Mr. Harling used to walk home together
in the evening, talking about grain-cars and cattle, like two men.
Sometimes she came over to see grandfather after supper, and her visits
flattered him. More than once they put their wits together to rescue some
unfortunate farmer from the clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling was as good a judge of
credits as any banker in the county. The two or three men who had tried to
take advantage of her in a deal acquired celebrity by their defeat. She
knew every farmer for miles about; how much land he had under cultivation,
how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were. Her interest in
these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in
her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play.
When Frances drove out into the country on business, she would go miles
out of her way to call on some of the old people, or to see the women who
seldom got to town. She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who
spoke no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would tell
her their story without realizing they were doing so. She went to country
funerals and weddings in all weathers. A farmer's daughter who was to be
married could count on a wedding present from Frances Harling.
In August the Harlings' Danish cook had to leave them. Grandmother
entreated them to try Antonia. She cornered Ambrosch the next time he came
to town, and pointed out to him that any connection with Christian Harling
would strengthen his credit and be of advantage to him. One Sunday Mrs.
Harling took the long ride out to the Shimerdas' with Frances. She said
she wanted to see "what the girl came from" and to have a clear
understanding with her mother. I was in our yard when they came driving
home, just before sunset. They laughed and waved to me as they passed, and
I could see they were in great good humor. After supper, when grandfather
set off to church, grandmother and I took my short cut through the willow
hedge and went over to hear about the visit to the Shimerdas.
We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and Sally on the front porch, resting
after her hard drive. Julia was in the hammock--she was fond of repose--and
Frances was at the piano, playing without a light and talking to her
mother through the open window.
Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us coming. "I expect you left your
dishes on the table to-night, Mrs. Burden," she called. Frances shut the
piano and came out to join us.
They had liked Antonia from their first glimpse of her; felt they knew
exactly what kind of girl she was. As for Mrs. Shimerda, they found her
very amusing. Mrs. Harling chuckled whenever she spoke of her. "I expect I
am more at home with that sort of bird than you are, Mrs. Burden. They're
a pair, Ambrosch and that old woman!"
They had had a long argument with Ambrosch about Antonia's allowance for
clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent of his sister's
wages should be paid over to him each month, and he would provide her with
such clothing as he thought necessary. When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for Antonia's own use, he
declared they wanted to take his sister to town and dress her up and make
a fool of her. Mrs. Harling gave us a lively account of Ambrosch's
behavior throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting on
his cap as if he were through with the whole business, and how his mother
tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian. Mrs. Harling finally
agreed to pay three dollars a week for Antonia's services--good wages in
those days--and to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute about the
shoes, Mrs. Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send Mrs.
Harling three fat geese every year to "make even." Ambrosch was to bring
his sister to town next Saturday.
"She'll be awkward and rough at first, like enough," grandmother said
anxiously, "but unless she's been spoiled by the hard life she's led, she
has it in her to be a real helpful girl."
Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh. "Oh, I'm not worrying, Mrs.
Burden! I can bring something out of that girl. She's barely seventeen,
not too old to learn new ways. She's good-looking, too!" she added warmly.
Frances turned to grandmother. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Burden, you did n't tell us
that! She was working in the garden when we got there, barefoot and
ragged. But she has such fine brown legs and arms, and splendid color in
her cheeks--like those big dark red plums."
We were pleased at this praise. Grandmother spoke feelingly. "When she
first came to this country, Frances, and had that genteel old man to watch
over her, she was as pretty a girl as ever I saw. But, dear me, what a
life she's led, out in the fields with those rough thrashers! Things would
have been very different with poor Antonia if her father had lived."
The Harlings begged us to tell them about Mr. Shimerda's death and the big
snowstorm. By the time we saw grandfather coming home from church we had
told them pretty much all we knew of the Shimerdas.
"The girl will be happy here, and she'll forget those things," said Mrs.
Harling confidently, as we rose to take our leave.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 3 using the context provided. | chapter 3|chapter 4|chapter 5 | Ambrosch brings Antonia over on Saturday. She rushes into the Burdens kitchen and thinks hopefully that she will soon be the kind of girl Jim likes best since shes now to live in the city. Antonia settles into work easily and her only problem is that she often drops her work to play with the children. Jim finds that he is jealous of Antonias care of Charley Harling. She does everything to please him. After Charley, she is very fond of Nina, the six- year-old Harling daughter. Nina is extraordinarily sensitive and often gets her feelings hurt. When Mr. Harling is away, Jim has fun evenings at the Harlings. When he is home, he demands his wifes full attention and the children usually come over to the Burdens to play. Jim notices how Mr. Harling makes Mrs. Harling make him coffee at any hour of the day or night, how Mrs. Harling ignores everyone else when he is home, and how the loss of her is painful since she always forms the appreciative audience for the childrens games. Jim notices that Mr. Harling is very different from the other fathers in Black Hawk. The other fathers have no apparent personal habits. They pay the bills and take care of their household duties. Jim notices that Mr. Harling reminds him of the nobles in Antonias stories of her homeland. When he is gone, the Harling house is never quiet. Someone is almost always at the piano. Jim still fondly remembers finding Mrs. Harling playing the piano when he used to come over to their house. |
----------CHAPTER 3---------
ON Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back gate, and Antonia jumped down
from the wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she used to do. She was
wearing shoes and stockings, and was breathless and excited. She gave me a
playful shake by the shoulders. "You ain't forget about me, Jim?"
Grandmother kissed her. "God bless you, child! Now you've come, you must
try to do right and be a credit to us."
Antonia looked eagerly about the house and admired everything. "Maybe I be
the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town," she suggested
hopefully.
How good it was to have Antonia near us again; to see her every day and
almost every night! Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling found, was that she
so often stopped her work and fell to playing with the children. She would
race about the orchard with us, or take sides in our hay-fights in the
barn, or be the old bear that came down from the mountain and carried off
Nina. Tony learned English so quickly that by the time school began she
could speak as well as any of us.
I was jealous of Tony's admiration for Charley Harling. Because he was
always first in his classes at school, and could mend the water-pipes or
the door-bell and take the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort
of prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her. She
loved to put up lunches for him when he went hunting, to mend his
ball-gloves and sew buttons on his shooting-coat, baked the kind of
nut-cake he liked, and fed his setter dog when he was away on trips with
his father. Antonia had made herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr.
Harling's old coats, and in these she went padding about after Charley,
fairly panting with eagerness to please him.
Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best. Nina was only six, and she
was rather more complex than the other children. She was fanciful, had all
sorts of unspoken preferences, and was easily offended. At the slightest
disappointment or displeasure her velvety brown eyes filled with tears,
and she would lift her chin and walk silently away. If we ran after her
and tried to appease her, it did no good. She walked on unmollified. I
used to think that no eyes in the world could grow so large or hold so
many tears as Nina's. Mrs. Harling and Antonia invariably took her part.
We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: "You have
made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic."
I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were
lovely; but I often wanted to shake her.
We had jolly evenings at the Harlings when the father was away. If he was
at home, the children had to go to bed early, or they came over to my
house to play. Mr. Harling not only demanded a quiet house, he demanded
all his wife's attention. He used to take her away to their room in the
west ell, and talk over his business with her all evening. Though we did
not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience when we played, and we
always looked to her for suggestions. Nothing flattered one like her quick
laugh.
Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and his own easy-chair by the
window, in which no one else ever sat. On the nights when he was at home,
I could see his shadow on the blind, and it seemed to me an arrogant
shadow. Mrs. Harling paid no heed to any one else if he was there. Before
he went to bed she always got him a lunch of smoked salmon or anchovies
and beer. He kept an alcohol lamp in his room, and a French coffee-pot,
and his wife made coffee for him at any hour of the night he happened to
want it.
Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic
ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours,
moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on
Sunday. Mr. Harling, therefore, seemed to me autocratic and imperial in
his ways. He walked, talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a man
who felt that he had power. He was not tall, but he carried his head so
haughtily that he looked a commanding figure, and there was something
daring and challenging in his eyes. I used to imagine that the "nobles" of
whom Antonia was always talking probably looked very much like Christian
Harling, wore caped overcoats like his, and just such a glittering diamond
upon the little finger.
Except when the father was at home, the Harling house was never quiet.
Mrs. Harling and Nina and Antonia made as much noise as a houseful of
children, and there was usually somebody at the piano. Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of practicing, but they all played.
When Frances came home at noon, she played until dinner was ready. When
Sally got back from school, she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that negro minstrel troupes brought to town. Even
Nina played the Swedish Wedding March.
Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she
managed to practice every day. I soon learned that if I were sent over on
an errand and found Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait
quietly until she turned to me. I can see her at this moment; her short,
square person planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands moving
quickly and neatly over the keys, her eyes fixed on the music with
intelligent concentration.
----------CHAPTER 4---------
"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."
WE were singing rhymes to tease Antonia 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.
"Hello, Tony. Don't you know me?" she asked in a smooth, low voice,
looking in at us archly.
Antonia gasped and stepped back. "Why, it's Lena! Of course I did n't know
you, so dressed up!"
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.
"Hello, Jim," she said carelessly as she walked into the kitchen and
looked about her. "I've come to town to work, too, Tony."
"Have you, now? Well, ain't that funny!" Antonia stood ill at ease, and
did n't seem to know just what to do with her visitor.
The door was open into the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting
and Frances was reading. Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.
"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."
Mrs. 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 Antonia hung back--said she had
to get her cake into the oven.
"So you have come to town," said Mrs. Harling, her eyes still fixed on
Lena. "Where are you working?"
"For Mrs. 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."
"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 Mrs. Harling rather severely. "How
is your mother?"
"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."
"See that you don't forget to," said Mrs. Harling skeptically, as she took
up her crocheting again and sent the hook in and out with nimble fingers.
"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.
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?"
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."
Frances laughed. "And how do you feel about it?"
"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."
"That's right," said Frances. "And Mrs. Thomas thinks you can learn
dressmaking?"
"Yes, 'm. I've always liked to sew, but I never had much to do with. Mrs.
Thomas makes lovely things for all the town ladies. Did you know Mrs.
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.
Mrs. 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."
"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.
"Too many, like enough," said Mrs. Harling. "I don't think a hotel is a
good place for a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps an eye on her
waitresses."
Lena's candid eyes, that always looked a little sleepy under their long
lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration.
Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. "I guess I must be leaving," she
said irresolutely.
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.
She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Antonia to come and see her
often. "I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's, with a carpet."
Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers. "I'll come sometime, but
Mrs. Harling don't like to have me run much," she said evasively.
"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 Mrs. Harling sat.
When Lena was gone, Frances asked Antonia why she had n't been a little
more cordial to her.
"I did n't know if your mother would like her coming here," said Antonia,
looking troubled. "She was kind of talked about, out there."
"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?"
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow. We
were good friends, Frances and I.
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.
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.
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.
[Illustration: Lena Lingard knitting stockings]
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.
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.
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.
"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! {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}"
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.
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 Antonia'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. Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out
of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and was sorry when Antonia
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 Antonia and me to go with her,
and help get her cattle together; they were scattered and might be gorging
themselves in somebody's cornfield.
"Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes at
married men," Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.
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."
----------CHAPTER 5---------
AFTER Lena came to Black Hawk I often met her downtown, where she would be
matching sewing silk or buying "findings" for Mrs. Thomas. If I happened
to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she was helping
to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with Tiny Soderball
at the hotel on Saturday nights.
The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and all
the commercial travelers in that territory tried to get into Black Hawk
for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlor after supper on Saturday
nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the piano and sang
all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped the cook wash the
dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the double doors between the
parlor and the dining-room, listening to the music and giggling at the
jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling man
when I grew up. They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on
trains all day and go to theaters when they were in big cities. Behind the
hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen opened their big
trunks and spread out their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk
merchants went to look at these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas,
though she was "retail trade," was permitted to see them and to "get
ideas." They were all generous, these traveling men; they gave Tiny
Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and
so many bottles of perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed
some of them on Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drug-store, gazing
in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's arks arranged in the frosty show
window. The boy had come to town with a neighbor to do his Christmas
shopping, for he had money of his own this year. He was only twelve, but
that winter he had got the job of sweeping out the Norwegian church and
making the fire in it every Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!
We went into Duckford's dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his
presents and showed them to me--something for each of the six younger than
himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of Tiny
Soderball's bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he would get
some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he had n't much
money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view at
Duckford's. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the corner, because
he had never seen any before. He studied them seriously, while Lena looked
over his shoulder, telling him she thought the red letters would hold
their color best. He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n't
enough money, after all. Presently he said gravely,--
"Sister, you know mother's name is Berthe. I don't know if I ought to get
B for Berthe, or M for Mother."
Lena patted his bristly head. "I'd get the B, Chrissy. It will please her
for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now."
That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds and
three blues. When the neighbor came in to say that it was time to start,
Lena wound Chris's comforter about his neck and turned up his jacket
collar--he had no overcoat--and we watched him climb into the wagon and
start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove. "I get awful
homesick for them, all the same," she murmured, as if she were answering
some remembered reproach.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 7 based on the provided context. | chapter 6|chapter 7 | Winter takes a very long time to leave a small Nebraska town. Jim notices the difference between his experience of the winters on the farm and his winter in town. On the farm, people continued in their work, but life in Black Hawk seems to shrink in the winter. One night, the monotony is broken when Blind dArnault, an African-American pianist comes to town. Mrs. Harling tells Antonia she should go to the hotel so she can hear the music. Jim goes too. The atmosphere in the hotel is more relaxed than usual because Mrs. Gardener is out of town and her husband is running the hotel. Mrs. Gardener was greatly respected in by her customers at the hotel. She is a strong and aloof woman. Her husband greets the customers but does not do anything substantial in running the hotel. He is not a good manager in her absence. Jim goes into the parlor and sees Johnny Gardener directing Blind dArnault to the piano. He sits down and addresses the men in the room. There are no women present. Jim remembers the story of Blind dArnaults childhood. He was born blind with a habit of swaying back and forth. His mother, Yellow Martha, was ashamed of him and kept him hidden away from everyone. She doted on him, bringing him delicacies from the white peoples kitchen. He began to escape the house when he got old enough. He always went to the "Big House" to listen outside the window to Nellie dArnault play the piano. She saw him, but felt too sorry for him to make him go away. One day she left the room and he climbed in the window and explored the piano. Then he started playing it. Suddenly he heard her voice and jumped down from the piano bench in terror. His mother had told him the white master would feed him to the guard dogs if he caught him near his house. Instead, Nellie dArnault helped him learn how to play the piano. He never learned to play with polish, but had his own style at the piano. In the hotel parlor, he is playing to an appreciative audience of salesmen. Suddenly he stops and says he hears girls dancing in the other room. Anson Kirkpatrick pushes aside the partition to find Tiny, Lena, Antonia, and Mary Dusak dancing. He pulls them into the parlor and convinces them to stay. Tiny warns everyone that Mrs. Gardener will be angry and Antonia looks very worried about what they are doing. They stay in the room and Blind dArnault plays until his manager comes to take him away. |
----------CHAPTER 6---------
WINTER comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens
that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw
closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green
tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than
when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I
could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to
me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify--it was like
the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and
the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs
and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter
song, as if it said: "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All
those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of
green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was
underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for
loving the loveliness of summer.
If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office
for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it
would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone; the
frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were shining
pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the suppers cooking as I
passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying toward a
fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets. When one passed
an old man, one could see nothing of his face but a red nose sticking out
between a frosted beard and a long plush cap. The young men capered along
with their hands in their pockets, and sometimes tried a slide on the icy
sidewalk. The children, in their bright hoods and comforters, never
walked, but always ran from the moment they left their door, beating their
mittens against their sides. When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I
was about halfway home. I can remember how glad I was when there happened
to be a light in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us
as we came along the frozen street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for
color came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar.
Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church
when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude
reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there.
On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like the
painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color, too. After
supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive
through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. Of course, if Mr.
Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out on the blind of the west
room, I did not go in, but turned and walked home by the long way, through
the street, wondering what book I should read as I sat down with the two
old people.
Such disappointments only gave greater zest to the nights when we acted
charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlor, with Sally always
dressed like a boy. Frances taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Antonia would make the best dancer among us.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for
us,--"Martha," "Norma," "Rigoletto,"--telling us the story while she played.
Every Saturday night was like a party. The parlor, the back parlor, and
the dining-room were warm and brightly lighted, with comfortable chairs
and sofas, and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there.
Antonia brought her sewing and sat with us--she was already beginning to
make pretty clothes for herself. After the long winter evenings on the
prairie, with Ambrosch's sullen silences and her mother's complaints, the
Harlings' house seemed, as she said, "like Heaven" to her. She was never
too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us. If Sally whispered in
her ear, or Charley gave her three winks, Tony would rush into the kitchen
and build a fire in the range on which she had already cooked three meals
that day.
While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy
to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories--about the calf that
broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the
freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina
interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite of our
derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short
time before the Shimerdas left that country. We all liked Tony's stories.
Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky,
and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said
seemed to come right out of her heart.
One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy, Tony told
us a new story.
"Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the Norwegian
settlement last summer, when I was thrashing there? We were at Iversons',
and I was driving one of the grain wagons."
Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. "Could you throw the wheat
into the bin yourself, Tony?" She knew what heavy work it was.
"Yes, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern boy that
drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to
the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. The men put in the
horses and got the machine going, and Ole Iverson was up on the deck,
cutting bands. I was sitting against a straw stack, trying to get some
shade. My wagon was n't going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful
that day. The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up. After
a while I see a man coming across the stubble, and when he got close I see
it was a tramp. His toes stuck out of his shoes, and he had n't shaved for
a long while, and his eyes was awful red and wild, like he had some
sickness. He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: 'The ponds in this country is done got so low a man could n't
drownd himself in one of 'em.'
"I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n't have
rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle.
"'Oh, cattle,' he says, 'you'll all take care of your cattle! Ain't you
got no beer here?' I told him he'd have to go to the Bohemians for beer;
the Norwegians did n't have none when they thrashed. 'My God!' he says,
'so it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.'
"Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson, 'Hello,
partner, let me up there. I can cut bands, and I'm tired of trampin'. I
won't go no farther.'
"I tried to make signs to Ole, 'cause I thought that man was crazy and
might get the machine stopped up. But Ole, he was glad to get down out of
the sun and chaff--it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it's hot like that. So Ole jumped down and crawled under one of the
wagons for shade, and the tramp got on the machine. He cut bands all right
for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me and
jumped head-first right into the thrashing machine after the wheat.
"I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses, but the belt had
sucked him down, and by the time they got her stopped he was all beat and
cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain't never worked right since."
"Was he clear dead, Tony?" we cried.
"Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There, now, Nina's all upset. We won't
talk about it. Don't you cry, Nina. No old tramp won't get you while
Tony's here."
Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. "Stop crying, Nina, or I'll always send you
upstairs when Antonia tells us about the country. Did they never find out
where he came from, Antonia?"
"Never, mam. He had n't been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there was n't any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman had n't seen him. They
could n't find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old penknife
in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of
paper, and some poetry."
"Some poetry?" we exclaimed.
"I remember," said Frances. "It was 'The Old Oaken Bucket,' cut out of a
newspaper and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson brought it into the office and
showed it to me."
"Now, was n't that strange, Miss Frances?" Tony asked thoughtfully. "What
would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In thrashing time,
too! It's nice everywhere then."
"So it is, Antonia," said Mrs. Harling heartily. "Maybe I'll go home and
help you thrash next summer. Is n't that taffy nearly ready to eat? I've
been smelling it a long while."
There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had
strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and
were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and
animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to
prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white
beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people
and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there
was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but
very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly
conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any
other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings'.
----------CHAPTER 7---------
WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and
shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and
men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and
pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.
Through January and February I went to the river with the Harlings on
clear nights, and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the
frozen sand. But by March the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on
the river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and
the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long. There was only
one break in the dreary monotony of that month; when Blind d'Arnault, the
negro pianist, came to town. He gave a concert at the Opera House on
Monday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our
comfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She told
Antonia she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys' Home.
Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slipped
quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, and
the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two
rooms, and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cut
away. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove
glowed at either end of the room, and the grand piano in the middle stood
open.
There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, for
Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been having drinks
with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardener
who ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at the
desk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but no
manager.
Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove
the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh.
She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous
about them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with something
Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, and
she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a
favor when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling men were
flattered when Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment. The
patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes; those who had seen
Mrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.
When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was
at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with
friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did
not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture
salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about
good and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learned
that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were
to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success
in "A Winter's Tale," in London.
The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d'Arnault,--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with
his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show
of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay
motionless over his blind eyes.
"Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me
this evening?" It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in
it. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been
repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.
"She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs to-night."
The men gathered round him, as he began to play "My Old Kentucky Home."
They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old
he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old
enough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous
motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young negro wench
who was laundress for the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was
"not right" in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him
devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his "fidgets,"
that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from
the "Big House" were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her
other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get his
chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembered everything
he heard, and his mammy said he "was n't all wrong." She named him Samson,
because he was blind, but on the plantation he was known as "yellow
Martha's simple child." He was docile and obedient, but when he was six
years old he began to run away from home, always taking the same
direction. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up
to the south wing of the "Big House," where Miss Nellie d'Arnault
practiced the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than
anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness that
she could n't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught him
slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him
what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found
him near the "Big House." But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran
away again. If Miss d'Arnault stopped practicing for a moment and went
toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an
old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and
wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell
Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing
was nearly all he had,--though it did not occur to her that he might have
more of it than other children.
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson
to her music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the
piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door
close after them. He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence of any one in
a room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His mother
had told him over and over how his master would give him to the big
mastiff if he ever found him "meddling." Samson had got too near the
mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched
it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.
Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger tips along the slippery
sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape
and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its
mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be
done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this
highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of
him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out
passages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that were
already his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical little
skull, definite as animal desires. The door opened; Miss Nellie and her
music-master stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive to
presences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little keys. When he paused for a
moment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie
spoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the
dark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding
to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and
gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses,--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro
enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on
those black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling
them through his yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, "Somebody
dancing in there." He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room. "I
hear little feet,--girls, I 'spect."
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springing
down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tiny
and Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of the
floor. They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. "What's the matter with you girls?
Dancing out here by yourselves, when there's a roomful of lonesome men on
the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny."
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
"Mrs. Gardener would n't like it," she protested. "She'd be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us."
"Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl. Now, you're Lena, are you?--and you're
Tony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight?"
O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.
"Easy, boys, easy!" he entreated them. "You'll wake the cook, and there'll
be the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be down
the minute anything's moved in the dining-room."
"Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody'll tell tales."
Johnnie shook his head. "'S a fact, boys," he said confidentially. "If I
take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!"
His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, we'll make it all
right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie."
Molly was Mrs. Gardener's name, of course. "Molly Bawn" was painted in
large blue letters on the glossy white side of the hotel bus, and "Molly"
was engraved inside Johnnie's ring and on his watch-case--doubtless on his
heart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife a
wonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than a
clerk in some other man's hotel.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, d'Arnault spread himself out over the piano,
and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone
on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening
African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood. Whenever the
dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out
softly, "Who's that goin' back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet!
Now, you girls, you ain't goin' to let that floor get cold?"
Antonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at Lena
and Tiny over Willy O'Reilly's shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim and
slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles--she wore her dresses
very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than
the other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightly
marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and smooth, and her commanding
dark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold
and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were
handsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and in
their eyes that brilliancy which is called,--by no metaphor, alas!--"the
light of youth."
D'Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he left
us, he showed us his gold watch which struck the hours, and a topaz ring,
given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in negro melodies, and
had heard d'Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his way
upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I walked home with
Antonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered a
long while at the Harlings' gate, whispering in the cold until the
restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 8 with the given context. | chapter 8|chapter 9|chapter 10|chapter 11 | Jim and the Harlings are thrilled with the spring. They are outside every day helping Mrs. Harling and Antonia plant the garden and maintain it. Jim writes that the summer that was to come would change everything, but that no one knew it the day the Vannis pull into town with their traveling dance company. They set up their tent in a vacant lot by the Danish laundry and children come for dance lessons during the day. They keep very good order with time and decorum. Every Saturday night they have a dance. The country boys come from the surrounding farms as do the country girls, including Antonia. The young men of the Progressive Euchre Club also come to the dances so they can dance with "the hired girls" despite the fact their girlfriends will be angry with them. |
----------CHAPTER 8---------
THE Harling children and I were never happier, never felt more contented
and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter. We
were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony break
the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tie up
vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I could hear
Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new nests the birds
were building, throwing clods at each other, and playing hide-and-seek
with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer
every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not
even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether
they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia were preserving
cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion
had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.
That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore a
long gold watch chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I
overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and
confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and in
summer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught
dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.
The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacant lot
surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much like a
merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from the poles.
Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending their
children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o'clock one met little
girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collared shirts of the
time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent. Mrs. Vanni
received them at the entrance, always dressed in lavender with a great
deal of black lace, her important watch chain lying on her bosom. She wore
her hair on the top of her head, built up in a black tower, with red coral
combs. When she smiled, she showed two rows of strong, crooked yellow
teeth. She taught the little children herself, and her husband, the
harpist, taught the older ones.
Often the mothers brought their fancy-work and sat on the shady side of
the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under
the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good
trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish laundryman, used
to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the grass plot. Some ragged
little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under a white
umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came
to dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town.
Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and
the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in
the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from the laundryman's garden,
and the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the City Council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up "Home, Sweet Home," all Black Hawk knew it was ten o'clock.
You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the Round House
whistle.
At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place
where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh
aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed
to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by light-hearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in--one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why had
n't we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands
who lived near enough to ride into town after their day's work was over.
I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor,--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with "the hired
girls."
----------CHAPTER 9---------
THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had "advantages," never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The
older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from
life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country
girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived
there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of
them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had
given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming
to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and
made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court
in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly
and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in
summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never
moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not
to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom,
gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief
that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out,"
were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as
their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had
borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the
Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters
go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they
sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get
positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the
language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from
debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they
had been when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others,
like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth
they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and
sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping
to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of
debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,--usually of like
nationality,--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman,
and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who could n't speak English.
There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation,
much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father. Yet people saw no
difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all
"hired girls."
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into
their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant
can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to
the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian
girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and
living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat
upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young
fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his
father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the
window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in
her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their
beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious
mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons.
The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk
youth.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who
swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the
jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor
where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in
and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home
from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the
sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their
long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only
made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to
see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at
him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there
were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with
their white throats and their pink cheeks.
The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which
the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the
drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from
Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire
from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the
place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The
three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about
the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on
neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank,
always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances
Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with
her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on
"popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood
trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times
I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He
reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena
herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Antonia that young Lovett drove all the way
out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I
hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls
a better position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work;
had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was
daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he
ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a
half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena
again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he
happened to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from
a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.
----------CHAPTER 10---------
IT was at the Vannis' tent that Antonia was discovered. Hitherto she had
been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the "hired
girls." She had lived in their house and yard and garden; her thoughts
never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after the tent came
to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends. The
Vannis often said that Antonia was the best dancer of them all. I
sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion that Mrs.
Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl. The young men began
to joke with each other about "the Harlings' Tony" as they did about "the
Marshalls' Anna" or "the Gardeners' Tiny."
Antonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the dance
tunes all day. When supper was late, she hurried with her dishes, dropped
and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she had n't time to dress, she merely flung off
her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went with her; the
moment the lighted tent came into view she would break into a run, like a
boy. There were always partners waiting for her; she began to dance before
she got her breath.
Antonia's success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered
too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought
the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping
through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to
parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with
her work, so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home
after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he
came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and
then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in
time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Antonia
was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry
his employer's daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Antonia to let him
walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he
was one of Miss Frances's friends, and she did n't mind. On the back porch
he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,--because he was going to be
married on Monday,--he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand
free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. "This is what I've
been expecting, Antonia. You've been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you've got the same
reputation. I won't have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard
all the time. This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can
quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over."
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Antonia, they found her agitated but determined. "Stop going to the tent?"
she panted. "I would n't think of it for a minute! My own father could n't
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!" she blazed out indignantly.
"You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia," Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. "I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house."
"Then I'll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the
Cutters' to work at the hotel, and I can have her place."
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. "Antonia, if you go to the Cutters to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you."
Tony snatched up the tea-kettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. "Oh, I can take care of myself! I'm a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there's no
children. The work's nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot
in the afternoons."
"I thought you liked children. Tony, what's come over you?"
"I don't know, something has." Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw. "A
girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there
won't be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls."
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. "If you go to work for the
Cutters, you're likely to have a fling that you won't get up from in a
hurry."
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that
every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked
out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had
never let herself get fond of Antonia.
----------CHAPTER 11---------
WICK CUTTER was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter's first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, "for
sentiment's sake," as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a
little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early
Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the "fast set" of Black Hawk business men. He
was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was
going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than
sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that
other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys.
When he came to our house on business, he quoted "Poor Richard's Almanack"
to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a
cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he
would begin at once to talk about "the good old times" and simple living.
I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and
glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her
hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as
if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud
baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had
lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had
taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted
her. He still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check traveling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no
change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash
his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that
a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-gray hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me; it was the very color and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-gray brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!"
They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town
at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether
he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her "people," whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her "to live by her brush."
Cutter was n't shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the
"privacy" which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed--easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 13 based on the provided context. | chapter 12|chapter 13 | One day Jim notices his grandmother has been crying. When he asks her the matter, she says she has heard talk about him. He apologizes for sneaking out of the house to go to the dances and promises that he will do it no longer. After that he decides to study Latin so he can enter college in the fall with no requirements hanging over him. He wants to leave town as soon as possible. He has to go back to talking to the telegrapher and the cigar maker. He makes a May basket for Nina Harling and leaves it on her doorstep as is customary. He hears her cries of delight and feels good. One evening he talks to Frances Harling who tells him Mrs. Harling is not so angry with him any more. She is only wondering why Jim wont socialize with people of his own set. She says that after he passes the college examinations and shows that he is in earnest, her mother will be fine with him. Jim tells her that if she were a boy, he thinks she too would go to the Firemens dances instead of the Owl Club. Frances tells him he has put glamour over the country girls, but that she knows them better. At his high school graduation, Jim gives the oration and it is a great success. He sees Mrs. Harling in the audience and looks at her the whole time he is giving the speech. She comes up to him afterward and congratulates him on doing so well. When he walks home, he finds Antonia, Lena and Anna Hansen waiting for him. They congratulate him enthusiastically. Anna says it must make him happy to have words to go with his thoughts like that. She wishes she had been able to go to school like he has. Antonia wishes her father had been able to hear his speech. Jim says he thought of Mr. Shimerda the whole time he was writing it and had dedicated it to him. He stands and watches them as they walk away. He feels that no success in his life has been greater. |
----------CHAPTER 12---------
AFTER Antonia went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not
going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the
subject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener's new party dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs.
Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she
went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls'
Norwegian Anna. We High-School boys used to linger on the playground at
the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every
day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride that Antonia, like
Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still "fairest of them all."
Being a Senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the
girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlor, where they would
sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country. I
remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared she
had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. "I guess
you'll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won't he look
funny, girls?"
Lena laughed. "You'll have to hurry up, Jim. If you're going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies."
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
"Baptists don't believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?"
I told her I did n't know what they believed, and did n't care, and that I
certainly was n't going to be a preacher.
"That's too bad," Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. "You'd make
such a good one. You're so studious. Maybe you'd like to be a professor.
You used to teach Tony, did n't you?"
Antonia broke in. "I've set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You'd be good
with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother's trained you up so nice. My papa
always said you were an awful smart boy."
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. "Won't you be surprised, Miss
Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?"
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
High-School Principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy
bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly
one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no
interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he
was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at
once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl
Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the
people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I
was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every
morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like
the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me,
because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after
supper? Usually I had learned next day's lessons by the time I left the
school building, and I could n't sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the
familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the
houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply
sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk
had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to
be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had
rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon
there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the
lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept
rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please
the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the
talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the
shoulder.
"Jim," he said, "I am good friends with you and I always like to see you.
But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has
always treated me fine, and I don't like to have you come into my place,
because I know he don't like it, and it puts me in bad with him."
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drug-store, and listen to the old men who sat
there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could
go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries
for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him,
the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often
went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with
the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to
Omaha or Denver, "where there was some life." He was sure to bring out his
pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and
nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces.
For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another
malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials
requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go
trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say "there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he'd lost his twins."
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to
pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little,
sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back
porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light
wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.
Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness
some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to
me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save
washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This
guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's
speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice
in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over
the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders
in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming
process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced;
then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could
see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark
again.
After I refused to join "the Owls," as they were called, I made a bold
resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Firemen's Hall. I knew it
would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather did
n't approve of dancing anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance
I could go to the Masonic Hall, among "the people we knew." It was just my
point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove
in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my
shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet
and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and
went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I
felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to
think about it.
The dance at the Firemen's Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all
the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis' tent.
Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who came down
on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always
there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their
house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung
out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls
well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that
his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her
mother, and that he had been "trying to make up for it ever since." On
summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his
laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the
big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of
white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered
his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression
seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and
evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed
clothes, and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and
sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they
did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine
pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the
brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and
curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much
English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind,
simple girls and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one
smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with
rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen's garden.
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but every one
wanted a turn with Tony and Lena. Lena moved without exertion, rather
indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner's
shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music
seemed to put her into a soft, waking dream, and her violet-colored eyes
looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When
she sighed she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance "Home,
Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every
dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz--the waltz of coming
home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got
restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer
day.
When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you did n't return to
anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to
schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always
putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around
the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of
the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a
living with his fiddle, how different Antonia's life might have been!
Antonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor
who was a kind of professional ladies' man, as we said. I remember how
admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her
velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardener's black velvet. She was lovely to
see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she
danced. That constant, dark color in her cheeks never changed.
One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Antonia came to the hall with
Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we
were in the Cutter's yard, sheltered by the evergreens, I told her she
must kiss me good-night.
"Why, sure, Jim." A moment later she drew her face away and whispered
indignantly, "Why, Jim! You know you ain't right to kiss me like that.
I'll tell your grandmother on you!"
"Lena Lingard lets me kiss her," I retorted, "and I'm not half as fond of
her as I am of you."
"Lena does?" Tony gasped. "If she's up to any of her nonsense with you,
I'll scratch her eyes out!" She took my arm again and we walked out of the
gate and up and down the sidewalk. "Now, don't you go and be a fool like
some of these town boys. You're not going to sit around here and whittle
store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school
and make something of yourself. I'm just awful proud of you. You won't go
and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?"
"I don't care anything about any of them but you," I said. "And you'll
always treat me like a kid, I suppose."
She laughed and threw her arms around me. "I expect I will, but you're a
kid I'm awful fond of, anyhow! You can like me all you want to, but if I
see you hanging round with Lena much, I'll go to your grandmother, as sure
as your name's Jim Burden! Lena's all right, only--well, you know yourself
she's soft that way. She can't help it. It's natural to her."
If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high
as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters' gate softly behind
me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she
was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark,
silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid
young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women
were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!
I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it
was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have
pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding
down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over
and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.
One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was
in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them.
Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a
curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a
kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to
me with a soft sigh and said, "Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you
as much as I like."
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I
never did.
----------CHAPTER 13---------
I NOTICED one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed
to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I
was studying and went to her, asking if she did n't feel well, and if I
could n't help her with her work.
"No, thank you, Jim. I'm troubled, but I guess I'm well enough. Getting a
little rusty in the bones, maybe," she added bitterly.
I stood hesitating. "What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has
grandfather lost any money?"
"No, it ain't money. I wish it was. But I've heard things. You must 'a'
known it would come back to me sometime." She dropped into a chair, and
covering her face with her apron, began to cry. "Jim," she said, "I was
never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But
it came about so; there was n't any other way for you, it seemed like."
I put my arms around her. I could n't bear to see her cry.
"What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen's dances?"
She nodded.
"I'm sorry I sneaked off like that. But there's nothing wrong about the
dances, and I have n't done anything wrong. I like all those country
girls, and I like to dance with them. That's all there is to it."
"But it ain't right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People
say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain't just to us."
"I don't care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles
it. I won't go to the Firemen's Hall again."
I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I
sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that
was not in our High-School course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of
college requirement work in the summer, and to enter the freshman class at
the University without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as
soon as possible.
Disapprobation hurt me, I found,--even that of people whom I did not
admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely, and fell back
on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for companionship.
I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a May-basket for Nina
Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman who
always had more window plants than any one else, and spent an afternoon
trimming a little work-basket. When dusk came on, and the new moon hung in
the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings' front door with my offering, rang
the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I
could hear Nina's cries of delight, and I felt comforted.
On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home
with Frances, and talked to her about my plans and about the reading I was
doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously
offended with me.
"Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess. But you know she
was hurt about Antonia, and she can't understand why you like to be with
Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set."
"Can you?" I asked bluntly.
Frances laughed. "Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country, and
you like to take sides. In some ways you're older than boys of your age.
It will be all right with mama after you pass your college examinations
and she sees you're in earnest."
"If you were a boy," I persisted, "you would n't belong to the Owl Club,
either. You'd be just like me."
She shook her head. "I would and I would n't. I expect I know the country
girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The
trouble with you, Jim, is that you're romantic. Mama's going to your
Commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to
be about. She wants you to do well."
I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervor a great many things
I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House to hear the
Commencement exercises, and I looked at her most of the time while I made
my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterward she
came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with our diplomas in our
hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: "You surprised me, Jim. I did
n't believe you could do as well as that. You did n't get that speech out
of books." Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from
Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.
I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I passed the Methodist
Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under
the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush
June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me--Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.
"Oh, Jim, it was splendid!" Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. "There ain't a lawyer in Black Hawk
could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to
him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, did
n't he, girls?"
Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: "What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget."
Anna spoke wistfully. "It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know."
"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,"--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels,--"there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I
dedicated it to him."
She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.
I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.
|
My Antonia.book 3.chapter | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book 3, chapter 1 using the context provided. | book 3, chapter 1|book 3, chapter 2|chapter 1 | Jim goes off to college in Lincoln, Nebraska. He gets a tutor he likes named Gaston Cleric, who is the head of the Latin department. For his first summer vacation Jim chooses to stay in Lincoln and get ahead on his studies again rather than go home. His tutor stays around, too, so the two of them spend a lot of time together. Narrator-Jim considers this period of his life to be one of the happiest in his life. There are different kinds of people at the university with Jim. Some of them come from the farms and can barely feed themselves while they study. The instructors are also an eclectic bunch. The students have very free personal lives. They don't have dorms so they live wherever they want. Jim lives with an old couple at the edge of town. He gets two rooms for the price of one so he uses one as a study. He has a wardrobe and a table and bookshelf. He puts a large map of Rome on the wall that he got from Cleric. Jim buys a nice big chair so that Gaston has a place to sit when he comes to visit. He also buys Benedictine and Gaston's favorite cigarettes so the man will stay and talk for a long time when he's there. Gaston doesn't talk much in a crowd but he is verbose when alone with Jim. Jim thinks that Gaston could have been a great poet. He gets Jim to appreciate ancient cultures like the Romans and Greeks. We learn that Gaston used to live in Italy. One night while they talk about Dante, Cleric repeats passages from the Divine Comedy. Jim knows that he will never be a scholar himself. He is always distracted looking back at his own childhood memories. |
----------BOOK 3, CHAPTER 1---------
AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.
I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.
In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the University from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through
the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few
enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an
atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the
young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years
before.
Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near
the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.
When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of old
Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.
I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"
Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
----------BOOK 3, CHAPTER 2---------
ONE March evening in my Sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down,
the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star
hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon
the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the
dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics
where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.
"Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit." I turned back to the beginning of the third
book, which we had read in class that morning. "Primus ego in patriam
mecum {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the
Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here
meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood
on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately
come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the
palatia Romana, but to his own little "country"; to his father's fields,
"sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops."
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to
leave the AEneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him
unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of
the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to
the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a
good man, "I was the first to bring the Muse into my country."
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the
wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately
enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at
my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the
page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New
England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried
to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
"I expect you hardly know me, Jim."
The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped
into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard! She was so quietly
conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and
a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her
yellow hair.
I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.
She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with
the naive curiosity I remembered so well. "You are quite comfortable here,
are n't you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for myself.
I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've made
a real good start."
"But, Lena, when did you come?"
"Oh, I've been here all winter. Did n't your grandmother ever write you?
I've thought about looking you up lots of times. But we've all heard what
a studious young man you've got to be, and I felt bashful. I did n't know
whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that
was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.
"You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course. Do
you think I've changed?"
"Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps it's
your clothes that make a difference."
"You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business." She
took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft,
flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into
it, as she did into everything. She told me her business was going well,
and she had saved a little money.
"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so
long. I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it
before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I'll take her down new
furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all
winter."
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared-for, and
thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the
snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the
cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well
in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.
"You must feel proud of yourself, Lena," I said heartily. "Look at me;
I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."
"Tony says you're going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She's
always bragging about you, you know."
"Tell me, how _is_ Tony?"
"She's fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She's
housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see
after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in Tony.
Tony's made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond of her
that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things."
"Is she still going with Larry Donovan?"
"Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess they're engaged. Tony talks about
him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about it,
because she was never a girl to be soft. She won't hear a word against
him. She's so sort of innocent."
I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.
Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't
do any good. She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's failing, you know;
if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."
"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.
"I think you had." Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. "It's a good
thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry's afraid of them.
They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people.
What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my
book toward her. I caught a faint odor of violet sachet. "So that's Latin,
is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater sometimes, though, for I've
seen you there. Don't you just love a good play, Jim? I can't stay at home
in the evening if there's one in town. I'd be willing to work like a
slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where there are theaters."
"Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to see
you, are n't you?"
"Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased. I'm never busy after six
o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to save
time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one
for you. Well,"--she began to put on her white gloves,--"it's been awful
good to see you, Jim."
"You need n't hurry, need you? You've hardly told me anything yet."
"We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don't often have lady
visitors. The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very
much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!" Lena
laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat she shook her head. "No, I don't want you to go
with me. I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store. You would n't care for
them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I
must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always so
afraid some one will run off with you!" Lena slipped her silk sleeves into
the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it
slowly. I walked with her to the door. "Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you want. Have you?"
She turned her soft cheek to me. "Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my
ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I
loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed
my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and
the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.
----------CHAPTER 1---------
AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.
I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.
In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the University from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through
the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few
enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an
atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the
young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years
before.
Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near
the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.
When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of old
Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.
I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"
Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 2 with the given context. | null | At the university, Jim comes under the mentorship of Gaston Cleric, a romantic Latin scholar with ruined health. He has been sent to Nebraska for his health. Jim has to stay in Lincoln after his first terms at school so he can finish a years worth of Greek. He finds this time of mental awakening one of the best times of his life. The university is only a few years old. The students and the professors are a mixed lot. Some are students who came straight from the farms with very little money who work extraordinarily hard on their studies. The professors are a mix of fresh graduate school graduates, "stranded ministers of the Gospel," and "wandering pioneer school teachers. There are no college dormitories, so Jim rents rooms from an old couple on the edge of town. He sets up his room carefully and buys a comfortable plush chair so that when Gaston Cleric comes to see him, he will stay a long time. Jim thinks Gaston Cleric could have been a great poet, but wasted all his poetic energy on intense conversation. He remembers one night when Gaston Cleric stayed up with him talking about Dantes relationship with Virgil and quoting the Paradiso. Though Jim admires his mentors scholarship, he is sure he wont be one himself since he cant get his mind away from his friends and acquaintances in Black Hawk. |
----------CHAPTER 2---------
ONE March evening in my Sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down,
the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star
hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon
the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the
dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics
where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.
"Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit." I turned back to the beginning of the third
book, which we had read in class that morning. "Primus ego in patriam
mecum {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the
Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here
meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood
on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately
come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the
palatia Romana, but to his own little "country"; to his father's fields,
"sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops."
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to
leave the AEneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him
unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of
the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to
the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a
good man, "I was the first to bring the Muse into my country."
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the
wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately
enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at
my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the
page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New
England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried
to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
"I expect you hardly know me, Jim."
The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped
into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard! She was so quietly
conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and
a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her
yellow hair.
I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.
She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with
the naive curiosity I remembered so well. "You are quite comfortable here,
are n't you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for myself.
I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've made
a real good start."
"But, Lena, when did you come?"
"Oh, I've been here all winter. Did n't your grandmother ever write you?
I've thought about looking you up lots of times. But we've all heard what
a studious young man you've got to be, and I felt bashful. I did n't know
whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that
was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.
"You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course. Do
you think I've changed?"
"Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps it's
your clothes that make a difference."
"You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business." She
took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft,
flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into
it, as she did into everything. She told me her business was going well,
and she had saved a little money.
"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so
long. I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it
before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I'll take her down new
furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all
winter."
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared-for, and
thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the
snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the
cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well
in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.
"You must feel proud of yourself, Lena," I said heartily. "Look at me;
I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."
"Tony says you're going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She's
always bragging about you, you know."
"Tell me, how _is_ Tony?"
"She's fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She's
housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see
after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in Tony.
Tony's made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond of her
that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things."
"Is she still going with Larry Donovan?"
"Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess they're engaged. Tony talks about
him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about it,
because she was never a girl to be soft. She won't hear a word against
him. She's so sort of innocent."
I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.
Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't
do any good. She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's failing, you know;
if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."
"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.
"I think you had." Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. "It's a good
thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry's afraid of them.
They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people.
What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my
book toward her. I caught a faint odor of violet sachet. "So that's Latin,
is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater sometimes, though, for I've
seen you there. Don't you just love a good play, Jim? I can't stay at home
in the evening if there's one in town. I'd be willing to work like a
slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where there are theaters."
"Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to see
you, are n't you?"
"Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased. I'm never busy after six
o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to save
time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one
for you. Well,"--she began to put on her white gloves,--"it's been awful
good to see you, Jim."
"You need n't hurry, need you? You've hardly told me anything yet."
"We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don't often have lady
visitors. The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very
much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!" Lena
laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat she shook her head. "No, I don't want you to go
with me. I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store. You would n't care for
them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I
must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always so
afraid some one will run off with you!" Lena slipped her silk sleeves into
the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it
slowly. I walked with her to the door. "Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you want. Have you?"
She turned her soft cheek to me. "Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my
ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I
loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed
my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and
the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.
----------CHAPTER 3---------
IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in "Rip Van Winkle," and to a war play called "Shenandoah." She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business
now, and she would n't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked
to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything
was true. It was like going to revival meetings with some one who was
always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a
kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant
much more to her than to me. She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and
hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which
two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille."
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked
down to the theater. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a
holiday humor. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people
come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the "incidental
music" would be from the opera "Traviata," which was made from the same
story as the play. We had neither of us read the play, and we did not know
what it was about--though I seemed to remember having heard it was a piece
in which great actresses shone. "The Count of Monte Cristo," which I had
seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I
knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family
resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not
have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody
Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there
was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theater lines
that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which
passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her
friends entered. This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne
bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen them opened
anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it
then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me, was
delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged
hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling
whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing
young men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or
less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I
saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world
in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every
pleasantry enlarged one's horizon. One could experience excess and satiety
without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a
drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of
the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my
ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.
The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though
historic. She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and
afterward a "star" under his direction. She was a woman who could not be
taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried
with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not
squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique
curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty--I think she was lame--I
seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was
disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the
extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to
fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent,
reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I
wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the
frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in
the world. Her sudden illness, when the gayety was at its height, her
pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she
smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano
lightly--it all wrung my heart. But not so much as her cynicism in the long
dialogue with her lover which followed. How far was I from questioning her
unbelief! While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded with
her--accompanied by the orchestra in the old "Traviata" duet, "misterioso,
misterioso!"--she maintained her bitter skepticism, and the curtain fell on
her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away
with his flower.
Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away
at the "Traviata" music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so
clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left Lena in
tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to
smoke. As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not
brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior
dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth. Lena was at least
a woman, and I was a man.
Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept
unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of
idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable
happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.
I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and
temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who
first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was as heavy
and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the
consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.
Lightness of stress or behavior was far from her. Her voice was heavy and
deep: "Ar-r-r-mond!" she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the
bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them.
They created the character in spite of her.
The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never
been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in
Olympe's salon for the fourth act. There were chandeliers hung from the
ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men
played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made
their entrance. After all the others had gathered round the card tables,
and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the
staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her
face! One knew at a glance how it was with her. When Armand, with the
terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the
gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside
me and covered her face with her hands.
The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By this time there was n't a nerve
in me that had n't been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me cry. I
loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow! The
New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now. I
wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for
elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund
woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.
When we reached the door of the theater, the streets were shining with
rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement
present, and I took Lena home under its shelter. After leaving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The
lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the
rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with
a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the
showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only
yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and
which had reached me only that night, across long years and several
languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The idea is one
that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is
put on, it is April.
|
My Antonia.book 4.chapter | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 4, chapter 1 based on the provided context. | book 4, chapter 1|book 4, chapter 2|book 4, chapter 3 | Two years later Jim graduates from Harvard and is ready to start law school there. He comes home for the summer vacation. The night he gets back some of the Harlings come over to see him. Afterwards he walks them home and Frances she tells him about Antonia. Jim already knows some of the story because his grandmother wrote him while he was away at school. It turns out that Antonia went away to marry Larry Donovan and that he deserted her and now she has his baby and is a single mom. She lives at home with Ambrosch. Jim is disappointed in Antonia. He notes that everyone pities her now while everyone respects Lena. We learn that Tiny ended up conducting a lodging-house in Seattle. Jim reflects that he never knew her that well, and that she was always a little intimidating. It turns out that after she set up her lodging house in Seattle she ended up going to Alaska in a gold rush. She ran a hotel up there and made a ton of money from the prospecting men who needed a place to stay. Once she nursed a Swede who ended up dying. He deeded Tiny his claim on a piece of land. Tiny ended up buying other claims from other men and making a lot of money. She came to live in San Francisco. Jim met her in 1908 in Salt Lake City. She reminded him of Mrs. Gardener. It turned out that by this time Lena was living with her in San Francisco and still making dresses. Tiny limped a bit on account of an injury but was doing fine. |
----------BOOK 4, CHAPTER 1---------
TWO years after I left Lincoln I completed my academic course at Harvard.
Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On
the night of my arrival Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her
husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in
grandmother's parlor, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at
her gate, she said simply, "You know, of course, about poor Antonia."
Poor Antonia! Every one would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Antonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted
her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
"He never married her," Frances said. "I have n't seen her since she came
back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She
brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's settled down
to be Ambrosch's drudge for good."
I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart
away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had
got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to
think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used
to stop at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the water-front
in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his
empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors' lodging-house. This,
every one said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running
a decent place, she could n't keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses
were alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well
as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the
dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce traveling men, and contemptuously at
the scrubby ones--who were so afraid of her that they did n't dare to ask
for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we would have been, as we sat
talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we could have known
what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous
life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for
Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went
in dog sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came
into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike
farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and
her friends, and nearly every one else in Circle City, started for the
Klondike fields on the last steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze
for the winter. That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed
a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their
placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for
it in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one
night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The
poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be
amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a
working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from
the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on
Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson
building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off
into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged
miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable
fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake City in 1908.
She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in
manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener, for whom she
had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about some of the
desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but the thrill of
them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing interested her much now
but making money. The only two human beings of whom she spoke with any
feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given her his claim, and Lena
Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco and go into
business there.
"Lincoln was never any place for her," Tiny remarked. "In a town of that
size Lena would always be gossiped about. Frisco's the right field for
her. She has a fine class of trade. Oh, she's just the same as she always
was! She's careless, but she's level-headed. She's the only person I know
who never gets any older. It's fine for me to have her there; somebody who
enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me and won't let me be
shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress, she makes it and sends it
home--with a bill that's long enough, I can tell you!"
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took toll
from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of weather,
like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those pretty little
feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed slippers and striped
stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casually--did n't seem
sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her success, but not elated.
She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn
out.
----------BOOK 4, CHAPTER 2---------
SOON after I got home that summer I persuaded my grandparents to have
their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer's
shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of
his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on
his walls: girls in Commencement dresses, country brides and grooms
holding hands, family groups of three generations. I noticed, in a heavy
frame, one of those depressing "crayon enlargements" often seen in
farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses.
The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.
"That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You remember her; she used to be the
Harling's Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; would n't
hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for
it Saturday."
I went away feeling that I must see Antonia again. Another girl would have
kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its picture on
exhibition at the town photographer's, in a great gilt frame. How like
her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she had n't thrown herself
away on such a cheap sort of fellow.
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that some one may ask them to put up a
car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of
official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to
compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently
from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and
his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the
station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of the utmost importance
to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was
usually cold and distant with men, but with all women he had a silent,
grave familiarity, a special handshake, accompanied by a significant,
deliberate look. He took women, married or single, into his confidence;
walked them up and down in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he
had made by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much
better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver
than the roughshod man who then bore that title. His unappreciated worth
was the tender secret Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always
able to make some foolish heart ache over it.
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard,
digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now
no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere
on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate--it was with a feeling of
pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I liked the feel
of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while I
loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down on the steps and talked
about the oriole family that had a nest in its branches.
"Mrs. Harling," I said presently, "I wish I could find out exactly how
Antonia's marriage fell through."
"Why don't you go out and see your grandfather's tenant, the Widow
Steavens? She knows more about it than anybody else. She helped Antonia
get ready to be married, and she was there when Antonia came back. She
took care of her when the baby was born. She could tell you everything.
Besides, the Widow Steavens is a good talker, and she has a remarkable
memory."
----------BOOK 4, CHAPTER 3---------
ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out
for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was
over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of
smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now
being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was
disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were
wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards,
and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men
who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the
blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat
tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in
long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a
great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found
that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the
modeling of human faces.
When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet
me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was
little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator's. I
told her at once why I had come.
"You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I'll talk to you after supper. I
can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You've no prejudice
against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days."
While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at
my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him
at six.
After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room,
while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm
papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining
outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess
put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the
heat. She sat down in her favorite rocking-chair and settled a little
stool comfortably under her tired feet. "I'm troubled with callouses, Jim;
getting old," she sighed cheerfully. She crossed her hands in her lap and
sat as if she were at a meeting of some kind.
"Now, it's about that dear Antonia you want to know? Well, you've come to
the right person. I've watched her like she'd been my own daughter.
"When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be
married, she was over here about every day. They've never had a sewing
machine at the Shimerdas', and she made all her things here. I taught her
hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at
that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it--she was so
strong--and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the
happiest thing in the world.
"'Antonia,' I used to say, 'don't run that machine so fast. You won't
hasten the day none that way.'
"Then she'd laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and
begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to
housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had
given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We
hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes. Tony
told me just how she meant to have everything in her house. She'd even
bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk. She was always
coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man did write her real
often, from the different towns along his run.
"The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been
changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. 'I'm a country
girl,' she said, 'and I doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in
a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.' She soon
cheered up, though.
"At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by
it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that
she'd begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she'd never let me see
it.
"Then there was a great time of packing. It was in March, if I remember
rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad for hauling
her things to town. And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing. He
went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver in a purple
velvet box, good enough for her station. He gave her three hundred dollars
in money; I saw the check. He'd collected her wages all those first years
she worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this
room. 'You're behaving like a man, Ambrosch,' I said, 'and I'm glad to see
it, son.'
"'T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk
to take the night train for Denver--the boxes had been shipped before. He
stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her
arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I'd done for her. She
was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red
cheeks was all wet with rain.
"'You're surely handsome enough for any man,' I said, looking her over.
"She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, 'Good-bye, dear house!'
and then ran out to the wagon. I expect she meant that for you and your
grandmother, as much as for me, so I'm particular to tell you. This house
had always been a refuge to her.
"Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe, and he
was there to meet her. They were to be married in a few days. He was
trying to get his promotion before he married, she said. I did n't like
that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka got a postal card, saying
she was 'well and happy.' After that we heard nothing. A month went by,
and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky with me
as if I'd picked out the man and arranged the match.
"One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the
fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west
road. There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another
behind. In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her
veils, he thought 't was Antonia Shimerda, or Antonia Donovan, as her name
ought now to be.
"The next morning I got brother to drive me over. I can walk still, but my
feet ain't what they used to be, and I try to save myself. The lines
outside the Shimerdas' house was full of washing, though it was the middle
of the week. As we got nearer I saw a sight that made my heart sink--all
those underclothes we'd put so much work on, out there swinging in the
wind. Yulka came bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but she darted
back into the house like she was loath to see us. When I went in, Antonia
was standing over the tubs, just finishing up a big washing. Mrs. Shimerda
was going about her work, talking and scolding to herself. She did n't so
much as raise her eyes. Tony wiped her hand on her apron and held it out
to me, looking at me steady but mournful. When I took her in my arms she
drew away. 'Don't, Mrs. Steavens,' she says, 'you'll make me cry, and I
don't want to.'
"I whispered and asked her to come out of doors with me. I knew she could
n't talk free before her mother. She went out with me, bareheaded, and we
walked up toward the garden.
"'I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens,' she says to me very quiet and
natural-like, 'and I ought to be.'
"'Oh, my child,' says I, 'what's happened to you? Don't be afraid to tell
me!'
"She sat down on the draw-side, out of sight of the house. 'He's run away
from me,' she said. 'I don't know if he ever meant to marry me.'
"'You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?' says I.
"'He did n't have any job. He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking down
fares. I did n't know. I thought he had n't been treated right. He was
sick when I got there. He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived with
me till my money gave out, and afterwards I found he had n't really been
hunting work at all. Then he just did n't come back. One nice fellow at
the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up. He
said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and would n't come back any more. I
guess he's gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there,
collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was
always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way.'
"I asked her, of course, why she did n't insist on a civil marriage at
once--that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, 'I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me.'
"Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried
like a young thing. I could n't help it. I was just about heart-broke. It
was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the
colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that
Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out
so well, and was coming home here every summer in her silks and her
satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give credit where credit is
due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great difference in
the principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that had
come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marveled at her calm. As we
went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they
was drying well, and seemed to take pride in their whiteness--she said
she'd been living in a brick block, where she did n't have proper
conveniences to wash them.
"The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it
seemed to be an understood thing. Ambrosch did n't get any other hand to
help him. Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution
a good while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She did
n't take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and steady. Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd put on airs. She was
so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her. She never
went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At first I
was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in
from the fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about
the grain and the weather as if she'd never had another interest, and if I
went over at night she always looked dead weary. She was afflicted with
toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated, and she went about with her
face swollen half the time. She would n't go to Black Hawk to a dentist
for fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell
long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Antonia work so hard and pull herself down. He said, 'If you put that in
her head, you better stay home.' And after that I did.
"Antonia worked on through harvest and thrashing, though she was too
modest to go out thrashing for the neighbors, like when she was young and
free. I did n't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to
herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and
I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty
cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she
would n't have brought them so far.
"It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she had
n't gone too far.
"'It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,' she
said one day, 'but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on.
It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all
over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father
used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long, so
I'm just enjoying every day of this fall.'
"After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots, and a
man's felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and
I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the
snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Antonia driving her cattle
homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to
face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual. 'Deary me,' I says
to myself, 'the girl's stayed out too late. It'll be dark before she gets
them cattle put into the corral.' I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too
miserable to get up and drive them.
"That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and
shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay
down on the bed and bore her child.
"I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the
basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:--
"'Baby come, baby come!' she says. 'Ambrosch much like devil!'
"Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to
a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and
went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as
quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for
Antonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud:--
"'Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that strong yellow soap near that baby.
You'll blister its little skin.' I was indignant.
[Illustration: Antonia driving her cattle home]
"'Mrs. Steavens,' Antonia said from the bed, 'if you'll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap.' That was the first word she
spoke.
"After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was
muttering behind the stove and would n't look at it.
"'You'd better put it out in the rain barrel,' he says.
"'Now, see here, Ambrosch,' says I, 'there's a law in this land, don't
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world
sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.' I pride
myself I cowed him.
"Well, I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Antonia's got on
fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months old now,
and no baby was ever better cared-for. Antonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know as there's much
chance now."
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the
ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn
and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow
against the blue sky.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter 2, utilizing the provided context. | book 4, chapter 4|chapter 1|chapter 2 | After two years at Harvard in which he completes his academic courses, Jim returns to Black Hawk for a visit. He finds Antonia has been disgraced with an out of wedlock baby and a desertion by her lover, Larry Donovan. He is disgusted with her and refuses to go visit her on her brothers farm. He also hears about Tiny Soderball, who has gone west, to Seattle, to open a boarding house for sailors. Everyone thinks she will become an immoral person, but Jim tells the story of her life. She went to Seattle and opened a boarding house for sailors. Then heard about the first gold rush in Alaska and went north with a carpenter and his wife. They arrived in Circle City and immediately heard of a gold strike further north. After an arduous journey, they arrived and helped found Dawson City. Tiny built a hotel and was very successful. A Swedish man, Johnson, hurt himself prospecting and lived in her hotel as he was dying. He was so taken with her that he left her his claim when he died. She sold her hotel, bought property in Dawson City, then went out to his claim and began buying and selling other claims until she became quite rich. Then she moved to San Francisco after she had been in the Klondike for ten years. Jim saw her as a "thin, hard- faced woman" who reminds him of Mrs. Gardener, her former boss in Black Hawk. She told him about her life, but with little feeling for the excitement of it. She only had feeling for Lena Lingard and Johnson, the man who gave her his claim. She convinced Lena to move to San Francisco and enjoyed her company. |
----------BOOK 4, CHAPTER 4---------
THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She
stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I
came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.
"I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day."
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens
said, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.
"Of course it means you are going away from us for good," she said with a
sigh. "But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's been
dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody
else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the
time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand
him."
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. "I'd always be
miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know
every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live
and die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for
something, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that my little
girl has a better chance than ever I had. I'm going to take care of that
girl, Jim."
I told her I knew she would. "Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world.
I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of
my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of
times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them
slowly. "How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when
I've disappointed you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can
mean to each other? I'm so glad we had each other when we were little. I
can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her about all the
things we used to do. You'll always remember me when you think about old
times, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the
happiest people."
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a
great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in
the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color,
thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two
luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on
opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and
shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain,
drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields
seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn
magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a
little boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands
and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and
good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things
they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About
us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her
face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face,
under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.
"I'll come back," I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
"Perhaps you will"--I felt rather than saw her smile. "But even if you
don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome."
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that
a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing
and whispering to each other in the grass.
----------CHAPTER 1---------
TWO years after I left Lincoln I completed my academic course at Harvard.
Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On
the night of my arrival Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her
husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in
grandmother's parlor, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at
her gate, she said simply, "You know, of course, about poor Antonia."
Poor Antonia! Every one would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Antonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted
her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
"He never married her," Frances said. "I have n't seen her since she came
back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She
brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's settled down
to be Ambrosch's drudge for good."
I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart
away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had
got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to
think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used
to stop at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the water-front
in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his
empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors' lodging-house. This,
every one said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running
a decent place, she could n't keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses
were alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well
as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the
dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce traveling men, and contemptuously at
the scrubby ones--who were so afraid of her that they did n't dare to ask
for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we would have been, as we sat
talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we could have known
what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous
life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for
Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went
in dog sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came
into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike
farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and
her friends, and nearly every one else in Circle City, started for the
Klondike fields on the last steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze
for the winter. That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed
a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their
placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for
it in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one
night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The
poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be
amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a
working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from
the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on
Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson
building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off
into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged
miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable
fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake City in 1908.
She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in
manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener, for whom she
had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about some of the
desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but the thrill of
them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing interested her much now
but making money. The only two human beings of whom she spoke with any
feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given her his claim, and Lena
Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco and go into
business there.
"Lincoln was never any place for her," Tiny remarked. "In a town of that
size Lena would always be gossiped about. Frisco's the right field for
her. She has a fine class of trade. Oh, she's just the same as she always
was! She's careless, but she's level-headed. She's the only person I know
who never gets any older. It's fine for me to have her there; somebody who
enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me and won't let me be
shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress, she makes it and sends it
home--with a bill that's long enough, I can tell you!"
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took toll
from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of weather,
like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those pretty little
feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed slippers and striped
stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casually--did n't seem
sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her success, but not elated.
She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn
out.
----------CHAPTER 2---------
SOON after I got home that summer I persuaded my grandparents to have
their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer's
shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of
his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on
his walls: girls in Commencement dresses, country brides and grooms
holding hands, family groups of three generations. I noticed, in a heavy
frame, one of those depressing "crayon enlargements" often seen in
farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses.
The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.
"That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You remember her; she used to be the
Harling's Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; would n't
hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for
it Saturday."
I went away feeling that I must see Antonia again. Another girl would have
kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its picture on
exhibition at the town photographer's, in a great gilt frame. How like
her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she had n't thrown herself
away on such a cheap sort of fellow.
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that some one may ask them to put up a
car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of
official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to
compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently
from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and
his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the
station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of the utmost importance
to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was
usually cold and distant with men, but with all women he had a silent,
grave familiarity, a special handshake, accompanied by a significant,
deliberate look. He took women, married or single, into his confidence;
walked them up and down in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he
had made by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much
better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver
than the roughshod man who then bore that title. His unappreciated worth
was the tender secret Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always
able to make some foolish heart ache over it.
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard,
digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now
no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere
on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate--it was with a feeling of
pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I liked the feel
of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while I
loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down on the steps and talked
about the oriole family that had a nest in its branches.
"Mrs. Harling," I said presently, "I wish I could find out exactly how
Antonia's marriage fell through."
"Why don't you go out and see your grandfather's tenant, the Widow
Steavens? She knows more about it than anybody else. She helped Antonia
get ready to be married, and she was there when Antonia came back. She
took care of her when the baby was born. She could tell you everything.
Besides, the Widow Steavens is a good talker, and she has a remarkable
memory."
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 3 based on the provided context. | null | At the beginning of August, Jim goes to see the Widow Steavens. He notices the great changes that have happened in the land. The red prairies have almost completely disappeared and the sod houses have been replaced with wood-framed houses. He approves of these changes greatly. When he gets to Mrs. Steavens house, the house he grew up in, she invites him to spend the night. After dinner she tells him Antonias story. Antonia got word from Larry Donovan that they would be married, so she came to Mrs. Steavens house every day to sew her linens and clothes. She was very excited about the wedding and setting up house in Black Hawk. The wait was a long one and when she finally got a letter, Mrs. Steavens noticed that she had begun to lose heart. Larry wrote that they would be living in Denver, a decision Antonia was not happy with but soon accepted. Ambrosch gave her three hundred dollars and drove her to the station. They got a letter that she was there and he had met her, but that the wedding had been delayed while he was working on getting his promotion. Then they heard nothing. Soon everyone began to get very worried. One day, William Steavens, Mrs. Steavens brother, came home to report that he had seen Antonia in a wagon along with all her trunks. Mrs. Steavens went to see her and Antonia told her she was not married, but should be. She said Larry had fooled her into believing he was getting promoted, when in fact he had been fired and blacklisted for cheating customers. He had stayed with her until all her money was gone and then had abandoned her. She thought he must have gone to Mexico to try his hand at railroad cheating there. Mrs. Steavens watched Antonia over the next months as she worked in the field doing mens work. She saw that Antonia was pregnant and watched her get slower and slower in her movements. Then one night, Mrs. Shimerda came over to say the baby came. Antonia had come in from the fields where she was herding cattle, gone to her room, and gave birth to her child alone. Ambrosch was in a fury. Mrs. Steavens went immediately to the Shimerdas and helped Antonia get cleaned up and wrapped the baby. Antonia was very silent. When Mrs. Steavens took the baby out of the room, Ambrosch told her she should put it in the rain barrel. She told him he had better remember there was a law in the land and that she was a witness that the baby was born healthy. Mrs. Steavens reports that the baby grew well and Antonia was very happy with it. She wishes Antonia could get married and raise a family, but fears that she probably wont be able to. That night Jim stays in his old room. He lies awake watching the moon outside his window. |
----------CHAPTER 3---------
ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out
for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was
over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of
smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now
being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was
disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were
wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards,
and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men
who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the
blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat
tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in
long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a
great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found
that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the
modeling of human faces.
When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet
me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was
little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator's. I
told her at once why I had come.
"You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I'll talk to you after supper. I
can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You've no prejudice
against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days."
While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at
my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him
at six.
After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room,
while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm
papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining
outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess
put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the
heat. She sat down in her favorite rocking-chair and settled a little
stool comfortably under her tired feet. "I'm troubled with callouses, Jim;
getting old," she sighed cheerfully. She crossed her hands in her lap and
sat as if she were at a meeting of some kind.
"Now, it's about that dear Antonia you want to know? Well, you've come to
the right person. I've watched her like she'd been my own daughter.
"When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be
married, she was over here about every day. They've never had a sewing
machine at the Shimerdas', and she made all her things here. I taught her
hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at
that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it--she was so
strong--and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the
happiest thing in the world.
"'Antonia,' I used to say, 'don't run that machine so fast. You won't
hasten the day none that way.'
"Then she'd laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and
begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to
housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had
given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We
hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes. Tony
told me just how she meant to have everything in her house. She'd even
bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk. She was always
coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man did write her real
often, from the different towns along his run.
"The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been
changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. 'I'm a country
girl,' she said, 'and I doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in
a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.' She soon
cheered up, though.
"At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by
it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that
she'd begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she'd never let me see
it.
"Then there was a great time of packing. It was in March, if I remember
rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad for hauling
her things to town. And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing. He
went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver in a purple
velvet box, good enough for her station. He gave her three hundred dollars
in money; I saw the check. He'd collected her wages all those first years
she worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this
room. 'You're behaving like a man, Ambrosch,' I said, 'and I'm glad to see
it, son.'
"'T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk
to take the night train for Denver--the boxes had been shipped before. He
stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her
arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I'd done for her. She
was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red
cheeks was all wet with rain.
"'You're surely handsome enough for any man,' I said, looking her over.
"She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, 'Good-bye, dear house!'
and then ran out to the wagon. I expect she meant that for you and your
grandmother, as much as for me, so I'm particular to tell you. This house
had always been a refuge to her.
"Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe, and he
was there to meet her. They were to be married in a few days. He was
trying to get his promotion before he married, she said. I did n't like
that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka got a postal card, saying
she was 'well and happy.' After that we heard nothing. A month went by,
and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky with me
as if I'd picked out the man and arranged the match.
"One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the
fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west
road. There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another
behind. In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her
veils, he thought 't was Antonia Shimerda, or Antonia Donovan, as her name
ought now to be.
"The next morning I got brother to drive me over. I can walk still, but my
feet ain't what they used to be, and I try to save myself. The lines
outside the Shimerdas' house was full of washing, though it was the middle
of the week. As we got nearer I saw a sight that made my heart sink--all
those underclothes we'd put so much work on, out there swinging in the
wind. Yulka came bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but she darted
back into the house like she was loath to see us. When I went in, Antonia
was standing over the tubs, just finishing up a big washing. Mrs. Shimerda
was going about her work, talking and scolding to herself. She did n't so
much as raise her eyes. Tony wiped her hand on her apron and held it out
to me, looking at me steady but mournful. When I took her in my arms she
drew away. 'Don't, Mrs. Steavens,' she says, 'you'll make me cry, and I
don't want to.'
"I whispered and asked her to come out of doors with me. I knew she could
n't talk free before her mother. She went out with me, bareheaded, and we
walked up toward the garden.
"'I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens,' she says to me very quiet and
natural-like, 'and I ought to be.'
"'Oh, my child,' says I, 'what's happened to you? Don't be afraid to tell
me!'
"She sat down on the draw-side, out of sight of the house. 'He's run away
from me,' she said. 'I don't know if he ever meant to marry me.'
"'You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?' says I.
"'He did n't have any job. He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking down
fares. I did n't know. I thought he had n't been treated right. He was
sick when I got there. He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived with
me till my money gave out, and afterwards I found he had n't really been
hunting work at all. Then he just did n't come back. One nice fellow at
the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up. He
said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and would n't come back any more. I
guess he's gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there,
collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was
always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way.'
"I asked her, of course, why she did n't insist on a civil marriage at
once--that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, 'I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me.'
"Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried
like a young thing. I could n't help it. I was just about heart-broke. It
was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the
colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that
Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out
so well, and was coming home here every summer in her silks and her
satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give credit where credit is
due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great difference in
the principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that had
come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marveled at her calm. As we
went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they
was drying well, and seemed to take pride in their whiteness--she said
she'd been living in a brick block, where she did n't have proper
conveniences to wash them.
"The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it
seemed to be an understood thing. Ambrosch did n't get any other hand to
help him. Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution
a good while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She did
n't take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and steady. Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd put on airs. She was
so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her. She never
went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At first I
was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in
from the fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about
the grain and the weather as if she'd never had another interest, and if I
went over at night she always looked dead weary. She was afflicted with
toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated, and she went about with her
face swollen half the time. She would n't go to Black Hawk to a dentist
for fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell
long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Antonia work so hard and pull herself down. He said, 'If you put that in
her head, you better stay home.' And after that I did.
"Antonia worked on through harvest and thrashing, though she was too
modest to go out thrashing for the neighbors, like when she was young and
free. I did n't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to
herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and
I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty
cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she
would n't have brought them so far.
"It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she had
n't gone too far.
"'It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,' she
said one day, 'but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on.
It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all
over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father
used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long, so
I'm just enjoying every day of this fall.'
"After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots, and a
man's felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and
I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the
snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Antonia driving her cattle
homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to
face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual. 'Deary me,' I says
to myself, 'the girl's stayed out too late. It'll be dark before she gets
them cattle put into the corral.' I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too
miserable to get up and drive them.
"That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and
shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay
down on the bed and bore her child.
"I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the
basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:--
"'Baby come, baby come!' she says. 'Ambrosch much like devil!'
"Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to
a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and
went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as
quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for
Antonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud:--
"'Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that strong yellow soap near that baby.
You'll blister its little skin.' I was indignant.
[Illustration: Antonia driving her cattle home]
"'Mrs. Steavens,' Antonia said from the bed, 'if you'll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap.' That was the first word she
spoke.
"After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was
muttering behind the stove and would n't look at it.
"'You'd better put it out in the rain barrel,' he says.
"'Now, see here, Ambrosch,' says I, 'there's a law in this land, don't
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world
sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.' I pride
myself I cowed him.
"Well, I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Antonia's got on
fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months old now,
and no baby was ever better cared-for. Antonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know as there's much
chance now."
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the
ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn
and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow
against the blue sky.
----------CHAPTER 4---------
THE next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the
baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter.
I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She
stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I
came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.
"I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day."
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens
said, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.
"Of course it means you are going away from us for good," she said with a
sigh. "But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's been
dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody
else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the
time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand
him."
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. "I'd always be
miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know
every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live
and die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for
something, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that my little
girl has a better chance than ever I had. I'm going to take care of that
girl, Jim."
I told her I knew she would. "Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world.
I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of
my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of
times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them
slowly. "How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when
I've disappointed you so? Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can
mean to each other? I'm so glad we had each other when we were little. I
can't wait till my little girl's old enough to tell her about all the
things we used to do. You'll always remember me when you think about old
times, won't you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the
happiest people."
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a
great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in
the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color,
thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two
luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on
opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and
shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain,
drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields
seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn
magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a
little boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands
and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and
good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things
they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About
us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her
face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face,
under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.
"I'll come back," I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
"Perhaps you will"--I felt rather than saw her smile. "But even if you
don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome."
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that
a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing
and whispering to each other in the grass.
|
My Antonia.book 5.chapter | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book 5, chapter 3 based on the provided context. | Jim finally says good-bye and leaves for Black Hawk. Jim is sad to leave Ambrosch, whom he likes so much. He tells him and Rudolph that they'll go hunting together next summer. Jim doesn't enjoy his day in Black Hawk because he doesn't recognize most of the people there. He hangs out with Anton Jelinek and an old lawyer who fills him in on the details of the Cutter case. He walks outside of the town to look at the landscape. He feels at home again. He stumbles on the old road that leads out to his grandfather's old farm. It's mostly been ploughed under. Jim sits down and looks out at the sun. He remembers the night he arrived on the train from Virginia. He feels as though he and Antonia walked on the road of destiny to get where they are today, and that they possess the past together. |
----------BOOK 5, CHAPTER 3---------
AFTER dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to
take the train for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children gathered round my
buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with
friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When I
reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still there
by the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron.
At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the
wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.
"That's like him," his brother said with a shrug. "He's a crazy kid. Maybe
he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of anybody
mother makes a fuss over, even the priest."
I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the
wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
"Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the
Niobrara next summer," I said. "Your father's agreed to let you off after
harvest."
He smiled. "I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys," he
added, blushing.
"Oh, yes you do!" I said, gathering up my reins.
He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure
and affection as I drove away.
My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead
or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing
in the Harlings' big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut
down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that
used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with
Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel, I met one of
the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office
and talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how
to put in the time until the night express was due.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land
was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of
early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I
felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of
autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see
the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold color I remembered so well.
Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the
wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes of
golden-rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with gold
threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over
little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to
take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the
boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along
a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.
As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble
upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had
almost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would
not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was
easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used
to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on
the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.
This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got
off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering
children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to
hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by
that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of
coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for
us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to
bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.
----------CHAPTER 3---------
AFTER dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to
take the train for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children gathered round my
buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with
friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When I
reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still there
by the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron.
At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the
wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.
"That's like him," his brother said with a shrug. "He's a crazy kid. Maybe
he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of anybody
mother makes a fuss over, even the priest."
I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the
wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.
"Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the
Niobrara next summer," I said. "Your father's agreed to let you off after
harvest."
He smiled. "I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys," he
added, blushing.
"Oh, yes you do!" I said, gathering up my reins.
He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure
and affection as I drove away.
My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead
or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing
in the Harlings' big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut
down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that
used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with
Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel, I met one of
the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office
and talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how
to put in the time until the night express was due.
I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land
was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of
early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I
felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of
autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see
the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold color I remembered so well.
Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the
wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes of
golden-rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with gold
threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over
little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to
take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the
boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along
a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.
As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble
upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had
almost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would
not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was
easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used
to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on
the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.
This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got
off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering
children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to
hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by
that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of
coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for
us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to
bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.
|
|
My Antonia.book i.chapter | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book i, chapter i, utilizing the provided context. | chapter xiii|chapter xix|book i, chapter i | The story begins with the narrator Jim Burden, age 10, travelling by rail across the country to Nebraska. Having just lost both his parents in Virginia, he is travelling with a hired man Jake Marpole to live with his grandparents. During the journey Jim reads the "Life of Jesse James," which he thoroughly enjoys. Jim first hears of Antonia on this journey, when a friendly conductor tells him that a Bohemian immigrant family, which can't really speak English, is going to Black Hawk, Nebraska and that they have a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl. Jim travels all day through the huge expanse of Nebraska, and in the middle of the night they finally get off the train. There Jim catches his first glimpse of the immigrant family. Soon Otto Fuchs, a hired man, comes to pick them up. He looks like a cowboy desperado, and Jim is impressed. They get into a wagon, and Jim stares into the night, seeing nothing but land and darkness. He feels like he has entered into a completely different, empty world and that everything he has known before has been left behind. |
----------CHAPTER XIII---------
THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all
the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about
examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting
upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen
she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said:
"You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-minded of grandmother
to give the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better."
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawn-tree."
"People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said
severely. "We don't make them come here."
"He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: 'America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls.' My papa, he cry for leave his old
friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the
long horn like this"--she indicated a slide trombone. "They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle."
"Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them
and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more than she did any one
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n't
come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. "She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
would n't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in 'The Prince of
the House of David.' Let's forget the Bohemians."
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:--
"You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you."
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle--they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but to-morrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap
so that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other's backs. "This'll take the bile out of 'em!" Fuchs remarked
gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the
henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their
ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done--just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a
strange, unnatural sort of day.
----------CHAPTER XIX---------
JULY came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains
of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if
we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a
faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered
stalks stood so juicy and green. If all the great plain from the Missouri
to the Rocky Mountains had been under glass, and the heat regulated by a
thermometer, it could not have been better for the yellow tassels that
were ripening and fertilizing each other day by day. The cornfields were
far apart in those times, with miles of wild grazing land between. It took
a clear, meditative eye like my grandfather's to foresee that they would
enlarge and multiply until they would be, not the Shimerdas' cornfields,
or Mr. Bushy's, but the world's cornfields; that their yield would be one
of the great economic facts, like the wheat crop of Russia, which underlie
all the activities of men, in peace or war.
The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night,
secured the corn. After the milky ears were once formed, we had little to
fear from dry weather. The men were working so hard in the wheatfields
that they did not notice the heat,--though I was kept busy carrying water
for them,--and grandmother and Antonia had so much to do in the kitchen
that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another.
Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Antonia went with me
up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner. Grandmother made her
wear a sunbonnet, but as soon as we reached the garden she threw it on the
grass and let her hair fly in the breeze. I remember how, as we bent over
the pea-vines, beads of perspiration used to gather on her upper lip like
a little mustache.
"Oh, better I like to work out of doors than in a house!" she used to sing
joyfully. "I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I
like to be like a man." She would toss her head and ask me to feel the
muscles swell in her brown arm.
We were glad to have her in the house. She was so gay and responsive that
one did not mind her heavy, running step, or her clattery way with pans.
Grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Antonia worked for
us.
All the nights were close and hot during that harvest season. The
harvesters slept in the hayloft because it was cooler there than in the
house. I used to lie in my bed by the open window, watching the heat
lightning play softly along the horizon, or looking up at the gaunt frame
of the windmill against the blue night sky. One night there was a
beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the cut
grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when
the dishes were washed Antonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof of
the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic,
like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags
across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a
moment. Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the
west was luminous and clear: in the lightning-flashes it looked like deep
blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and the mottled part of the
sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid sea-coast
city, doomed to destruction. Great warm splashes of rain fell on our
upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted out
into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward. All about us we
could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the
farmyard. Grandmother came to the door and said it was late, and we would
get wet out there.
"In a minute we come," Antonia called back to her. "I like your
grandmother, and all things here," she sighed. "I wish my papa live to see
this summer. I wish no winter ever come again."
"It will be summer a long while yet," I reassured her. "Why are n't you
always nice like this, Tony?"
"How nice?"
"Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be
like Ambrosch?"
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. "If I
live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But
they will be hard for us."
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER I---------
I FIRST heard of Antonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey
across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;
I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia
relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I
traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands"
on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to
work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider
than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we
set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with
each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered
him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a
"Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory
books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a
friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we
were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our
confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of
distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of
different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons
were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an
Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the
immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose
destination was the same as ours.
"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she
can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older than you,
twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you
want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes,
too!"
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to
"Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to
get diseases from foreigners.
I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long
day's journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so
many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about
Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when
we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled
down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with
lanterns. I could n't see any town, or even distant lights; we were
surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its
long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood
huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew
this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The
woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little
tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old
man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding
oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts.
Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting
and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time
I had ever heard a foreign tongue.
Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: "Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,
ain't you scared to come so far west?"
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of "Jesse James." He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.
I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon
began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.
Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and
peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no
fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I
could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:
not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often
our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and
lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was
left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's
jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a
familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of
heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and
mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me
at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to
the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon
jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and
that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:
here, I felt, what would be would be.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book i, chapter iii, utilizing the provided context. | book i, chapter ii|book i, chapter iii|book i, chapter iv | On Sunday morning Otto, Grandmother, and Jim drive across fields of red grass to visit the new Bohemian family that has recently settled in the area. They are the first Bohemian family to move to this area, and they purchased their farm from another Bohemian man named Peter Krajiek. The farm and house are not particularly good, and the familythe Shimerdaspaid too much for it. In addition, the father knows nothing about farming. He was a weaver and a fiddler in his native land, is dignified and neatly dressed, and has white, skilled hands. The mother has shrewd eyes, and when she sees Grandmother, she points to her dugout house and says it's no good. She thanks Grandmother for bringing over bread and pies. The oldest son Ambrosch, age nineteen, looks sturdy and has shrewd eyes. There is also a pretty little girl named Yulka, but Jim thinks that Antonia is the prettiest, with big eyes and brown hair and skin. Marek, another son, is mentally challenged and has webbed fingers. Suddenly Antonia comes up to Jim, and they run through the fields hand in hand, with Yulka following them. It is very windy, and after Jim tells Antonia his name and the word for "sky," they lie down next to each other in the middle of a field and stare up at the blue sky. Antonia tries to give Jim one of her rings, but Jim doesn't think it's appropriate and refuses. Antonia's father calls them back and stares deep into Jim's face. When they return to the dugout, he takes out a Bohemian-English dictionary and gives it to Jim's grandmother. Extremely earnestly, he begs her to teach Antonia English. Since the Shimerdas do not speak English, they are dependent on anybody who speaks their language, and they are thus taken advantage of by Krajiek. People who immigrate to the United States need a network of reliable people who can help them accommodate to their new environment, and since the Shimerdas lack this, they are unable to learn the basics of farming and keeping house on the frontier. Jim's grandparents do not really realize this yet and attribute the Shimerdas' destituteness to either cultural differences or Mrs. Shimerda's overbearing personality. They do not know exactly how much help the Shimerdas need, but they are prevented from finding out because of differences in language and culture. The theme of cultural separation between new immigrant families and "Americans" is a central one in the novel. Despite their differences in language and culture, however, Jim and Antonia immediately hit it off. Though the narrator doesn't say that much about their first interaction, Antonia seems to be the leader and the initiator in their relationship. She grabs Jim's hand, speaks excitedly while he listens, and tries to give him her ring. Jim is clearly fascinated by her and is content to follow her around and observe her, and this dynamic will continue to be played out in the rest of the novel. The chapter concludes with Mr. Shimerda begging Grandmother to teach Antonia English. Mr. Shimerda recognizes the value of education and is a learned man, and he wants his daughter to have a fair chance in America. As the novel progresses, the role of education in Antonia's life shifts a great deal, and it is important to notice what factors account for this shift |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER II---------
I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather's farm sometime before
daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.
When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely
larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was
flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and
black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my
grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes
she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
"Had a good sleep, Jimmy?" she asked briskly. Then in a very different
tone she said, as if to herself, "My, how you do look like your father!" I
remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have
come to wake him like this when he overslept. "Here are your clean
clothes," she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she
talked. "But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice
warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there's nobody about."
"Down to the kitchen" struck me as curious; it was always "out in the
kitchen" at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her
through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This
basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a
kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed--the plaster
laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor
was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little
half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew
in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of
gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel
trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,
and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When
she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my
bath without help.
"Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right
smart little boy."
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water
through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed
himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my
grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,
"Grandmother, I'm afraid the cakes are burning!" Then she came laughing,
waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry
her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were
looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew
older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often
thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic
in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often
spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that
everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high,
and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it.
She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was
dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a
stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of
the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from
work.
While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden
bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat--he caught not only
rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on
the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked
about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she
said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm
in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men
came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then
she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors
there.
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke
kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his
deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The
thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,
snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of
an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather's eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were
bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and
regular--so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a
delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man
his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at
each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he
was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an
adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His
iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had
drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in
Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he
had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he
had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was
a "perfect gentleman," and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I
wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was
a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for
me before sundown next day. He got out his "chaps" and silver spurs to
show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in
bold design--roses, and true-lover's knots, and undraped female figures.
These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for
prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several
Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I
wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I
was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah." "_He shall choose our
inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah._" I had
no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it
became oracular, the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been
told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk--until you came
to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived
in sod houses and dugouts--comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame
house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east
end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the
kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the
barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare,
and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at
the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow
bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by
our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond
which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.
There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much
larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum
patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as
far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red
grass, most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look
very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against
the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over
the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of
wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.
I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,
curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to
it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my
attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a
leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I
must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had
killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who
lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all
summer.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my
grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.
Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than
anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing
morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort
of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,
galloping {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps, for the big
yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines--and I
felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk
straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which
could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world
ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a
little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off
into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow
shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found
standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out
of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at
the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in
the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. "Are n't you afraid of
snakes?"
"A little," I admitted, "but I'd like to stay anyhow."
"Well, if you see one, don't have anything to do with him. The big yellow
and brown ones won't hurt you; they're bull-snakes and help to keep the
gophers down. Don't be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in
the bank over there. That's a badger hole. He's about as big as a big
'possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once
in a while, but I won't let the men harm him. In a new country a body
feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me
when I'm at work."
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the
path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the
draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I
was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There
were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I
turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and
ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever
seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers
scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.
Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.
Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as
I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was
something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did
not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like
that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun
and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it
comes as naturally as sleep.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER III---------
ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance
of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as
they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or
chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of
potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed
some loaves of Saturday's bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies
in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and
jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big
cornfield.
I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was
only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high
wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild
thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and
shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;
some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many
branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the
prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a
plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in
time to his bites as he ate down toward them.
The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the
homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more
than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the
old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs.
Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this
part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell
them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for
advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs
said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father
was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by
trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.
He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n't be of much use here,
though he used to pick up money by it at home.
"If they're nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in
that cave of Krajiek's," said grandmother. "It's no better than a badger
hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he's made them pay twenty
dollars for his old cookstove that ain't worth ten."
"Yes'm," said Otto; "and he's sold 'em his oxen and his two bony old
horses for the price of good work-teams. I'd have interfered about the
horses--the old man can understand some German--if I'd 'a' thought it would
do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians."
Grandmother looked interested. "Now, why is that, Otto?"
Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. "Well, ma'm, it's politics. It would
take me a long while to explain."
The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw
Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas' place and made the
land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy
clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering
tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some
of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining
white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.
As we approached the Shimerdas' dwelling, I could still see nothing but
rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging
out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those
banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass
that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had
no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a
door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a
woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A
little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same
embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted
from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not
young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little
eyes. She shook grandmother's hand energetically.
"Very glad, very glad!" she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the
bank out of which she had emerged and said, "House no good, house no
good!"
Grandmother nodded consolingly. "You'll get fixed up comfortable after
while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house."
My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they
were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our
visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled
them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, "Much good,
much thank!"--and again she wrung grandmother's hand.
The oldest son, Ambroz,--they called it Ambrosch,--came out of the cave and
stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and
broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His
hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother's, but more sly and
suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on
corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.
The little girl was pretty, but An-tonia-- they accented the name thus,
strongly, when they spoke to her--was still prettier. I remembered what the
conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of
light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was
brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her
brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called
Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood
awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see
what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance
one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he
approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to
show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck's
foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, "Hoo,
hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!" like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly,
"Marek!" then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.
"She wants me to tell you he won't hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born
like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer." He struck
Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.
At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no
hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his
forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him
look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and
slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,
then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and
well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.
His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face
was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes--like something from which
all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was
in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his
coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf
of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral
pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me
and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep
drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.
When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed
toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how
glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop
until the ground itself stopped--fell away before us so abruptly that the
next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the
edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below
us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls'
skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like it; she held her
little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed
to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes
fairly blazing with things she could not say.
"Name? What name?" she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my
name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into
the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, "What
name?"
We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a
baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the sky
and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not
satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word,
making it sound like "ice." She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes,
then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she
distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees
and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then
to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.
"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."
She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused
her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of
words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we
could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of
us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Antonia had said the new words over
and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on
her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite
sternly. I did n't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless
and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never
seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was
how they behaved.
While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,
"An-tonia, An-tonia!" She sprang up like a hare. "Tatinek, Tatinek!" she
shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Antonia
reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched
my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.
I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted
by my elders.
We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was
waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his
pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English
and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother's hands,
looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall
never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my An-tonia!"
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER IV---------
ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony,
under Otto's direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the
post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time
by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or
to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I
was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after
working hours.
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences
in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,
trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the
sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to
find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of
the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered
sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the
sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's
story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to
visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see
the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a
hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they
had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about
them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the
scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown,
earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We
had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about.
They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were
quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable
houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was
always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under
the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that
must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any
pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the
desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that
some of the holes must go down to water--nearly two hundred feet,
hereabouts. Antonia said she did n't believe it; that the dogs probably
lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.
Antonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them
known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her
reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was
important that one member of the family should learn English. When the
lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the
garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out the
hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers. The
white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with
curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in,
and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were
famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of
the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.
Antonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about
cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every
movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good
housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:
the conditions were bad enough, certainly!
I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her
family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin
peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste
out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the
measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this
residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff
down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek
encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be
mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they
clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk
or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the
two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown
owls housed the rattlesnakes--because they did not know how to get rid of
him.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book i, chapter vi based on the provided context. | book i, chapter v|book i, chapter vi|book i, chapter vii | One afternoon Jim and "Tony" are sitting outside in the sun for their English lesson. Tony begins talking about badgers and how they are hunted by special dogs in her native country. It is almost winter, so all the insects, except one, are dead. Tony picks the bug up and begins to speak to it in Bohemian, and it starts to chirp back at her. She begins to cry a little bit because the bug reminds her of an old beggar woman she once knew who used to sing songs for children. When they decide to go back, Antonia puts the bug in her hair. As they walk back, Jim marvels at the prairie surrounding them, covered in red grass and cornfields. Every day they walked back through the fields, and the moment seems triumphant, "like a hero's deathheroes who died young and gloriously. They see Mr. Shimerda up ahead and run to overtake him. Antonia confides that her father is sick, and he shows them three rabbits that he killed for food and fur. As Antonia shows her father the bug from her hair, Jim looks at Mr. Shimerda's gun. With Antonia translating, the father tells Jim that he can have the gun when he grows up. The gun is a gift from a very wealthy man whose wedding Mr. Shimerda played at. Jim wonders that the Shimerdas are always wanting to give away their possessions, and he is touched by the old man's look of sadness and pity. |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER V---------
WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two
girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to
forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,
scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.
I remember Antonia's excitement when she came into our kitchen one
afternoon and announced: "My papa find friends up north, with Russian
mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.
Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody
laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very
nice!"
I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big
dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in
that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a
little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other
country--farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all
the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were
the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,
so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to
people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could
understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they
avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he
had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations
and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this
supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great
frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn
tight over his high cheek-bones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always
had a cough.
Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,
bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met
people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well
as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair
and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the
sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its
snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was
usually called "Curly Peter," or "Rooshian Peter."
The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out
together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter
always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor
homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to
church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a
low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked
apologetically under the seat.
After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost
every evening, and sometimes took Antonia with him. She said they came
from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from
Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for
me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there
together on my pony.
The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass
well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch,
and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We
found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub. He was working
so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down
as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head
and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of
perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard.
Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us
down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He
told Antonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any
man could have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for
Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream
with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks
and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it
in a new place.
After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up
the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere
helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men
who were "batching." Besides the kitchen, there was a living-room, with a
wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham
sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window,
where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That
day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and
beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in
the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies
and sunshine alike.
Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over
them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them,
they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us
knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with
juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate.
He assured us that they were good for one--better than medicine; in his
country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable
and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Antonia, he sighed and told us
that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have
had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said
he had left his country because of a "great trouble."
When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that
would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily
painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart
began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very
doleful, and he sang words to some of them.
Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and
gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of
cooking cucumbers, but Antonia assured me they were very good. We had to
walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER VI---------
ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank
where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a
shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little
horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the
tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy
green.
Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was
comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full
blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.
That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the
badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of
dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down
into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle
underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog
dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and
petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for
every badger he had killed.
The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all
about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of
some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all
dead--all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a
little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the
buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,
fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae
quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.
Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and
indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us--a thin, rusty
little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment
afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her
village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs
and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked
voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see
her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.
When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf
of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on
quickly when the sun got low, and Antonia's dress was thin. What were we
to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false
pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put
the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over
her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and
then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the
magical light of the late afternoon.
All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As
far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in
sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day.
The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw
long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire
and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of
triumphant ending, like a hero's death--heroes who died young and
gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.
How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prairie under
that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or
followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.
We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and
nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the
upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet
along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.
"My papa sick all the time," Tony panted as we flew. "He not look good,
Jim."
As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered
about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her
cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from
the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and
showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Antonia with a wintry
flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.
"My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for win-ter!"
she exclaimed joyfully. "Meat for eat, skin for hat,"--she told off these
benefits on her fingers.
Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted
it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata.
He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood
looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he
listened as if it were a beautiful sound.
I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,
short and heavy, with a stag's head on the cock. When he saw me examining
it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if
I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and
Antonia translated:--
"My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine, from
Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got
here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his
wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you."
[Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over
his shoulder]
I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such
people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even
the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected
substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while
the feeble minstrel sheltered in Antonia's hair went on with its scratchy
chirp. The old man's smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of
pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it. As the sun sank there
came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.
Antonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket
and raced my shadow home.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER VII---------
MUCH as I liked Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of
the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more
like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off on
foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been
another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as
wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled--hundreds of
miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling,
burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get
warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,
heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,
Antonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of
the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were
horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get
some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the
town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an
orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude
down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would
be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on
their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they
barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the
mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the
town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.
If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.
We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into
the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors
united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which
much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I
heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and
shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of
those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was
sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when
Antonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter "W." He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big
snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones could n't crush the disgusting vitality
out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I did n't run
because I did n't think of it--if my back had been against a stone wall I
could n't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten--now he would
spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head
with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia,
barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly
head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back
on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. Antonia came
after me, crying, "O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why you not run
when I say?"
"What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!" I said petulantly.
"I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared." She took my handkerchief
from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away
from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.
"I never know you was so brave, Jim," she went on comfortingly. "You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for
him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show
everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you
kill."
She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for
this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly
in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.
"Look, Tony, that's his poison," I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to
taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained
to Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must
have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over--would n't let us come near
him.
We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her
exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big
and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that
no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward
the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the edge
of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antonia called him
to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but
scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.
"Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?"
"Up at the dog-town," I answered laconically.
"Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?"
"We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch."
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. "It was just luck you had a tool," he said cautiously. "Gosh! I
would n't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane would n't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?"
Antonia broke in: "He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's boots.
I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was
crazy."
Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: "Got him in the head
first crack, did n't you? That was just as well."
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I
found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with
a great deal of color.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it,
a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world does n't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for
many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the
snake was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and
admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book i, chapter ix using the context provided. | book i, chapter viii|book i, chapter ix | In December it snows for the first time. A little way from the house, there is a circle in the grass where the Indians used to ride their horses around, and Jim thinks that the pattern in the snow looks like a good omen. Jim begins to ride around in the snow in a sleigh that Otto Fuchs makes him. One day Jim takes Antonia and Yulka for a ride. Though they do not have adequate winter clothes and are very cold, they are excited to be away from their shabby home and scolding mother, and they go all the way to Russian Peter's house. The two girls want to stay there forever. When they go back, it becomes unbearably cold, and after dropping the Shimerdas off, Jim drives back alone and catches quinsy, which keeps him in the house for two weeks. Jim is cozy indoors and reads "The Swiss Family Robinson" to his grandmother. During the winter, the family's life revolves around eating food and keeping warm. Sometimes they sing and eat popcorn or taffy around the fire. Jim greatly admires Otto and Jake. Otto has done all sorts of work, while Jake is barely literate and often violent, although very soft-hearted. Both are very hard workers. Otto tells a funny story about how he had to accompany a woman on the boat to America and how he got a very bad reputation because she had three babies on the way over. |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER VIII---------
WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles
to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a
mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was
Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could
give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew
that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty--that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew
faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with
mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow-workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill
indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the
log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The
Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to
put them out of mind.
One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just
as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,
and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch
them. When Antonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated
grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I
would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning. My plan
must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about
humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,
and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches
and doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I sat in the
straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a
cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in
the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of
the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept
sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would
never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew
magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the
world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his
land, too, some such belief.
The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that
we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided
us--the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.
We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I
sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in
front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the
thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept
moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then
swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore
down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me
think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying
desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in
one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up
with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together--to tell us
that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed,--a long
complaining cry,--as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some
old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor
by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap--then the
high whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.
"He is scared of the wolves," Antonia whispered to me. "In his country
there are very many, and they eat men and women." We slid closer together
along the bench.
I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging
open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell
horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the
tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of
spirits went through the room.
Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and
slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted
some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous,
unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so
simple and docile.
Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper.
He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Antonia took my hand under
the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to
hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his
bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.
"It's wolves, Jimmy," Antonia whispered. "It's awful, what he says!"
The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who
had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could
hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which
fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to
his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots--I thought I had
never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to
the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for
breath, like a child with croup. Antonia's father uncovered one of his
long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see
what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out
like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That
sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.
Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over.
Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got
up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home.
Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under
the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.
On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and
rattling Antonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did
not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days
afterward.
When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were
asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another
village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom's party went over to
the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom's sledge, and
six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.
After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the
parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a
supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and
drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and
blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his
sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and
Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove.
The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom's
sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for
merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.
The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they
heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too
much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and
echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together.
There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove
came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like
streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were
hundreds of them.
Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,--he was
probably very drunk,--the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a
clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow,
and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed
made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The
groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest--all the others carried
from six to a dozen people.
Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible
to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the
wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who
were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.
The little bride hid her face on the groom's shoulder and sobbed. Pavel
sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the
groom's three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm
and to guide them carefully.
At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked
back. "There are only three sledges left," he whispered.
"And the wolves?" Pavel asked.
"Enough! Enough for all of us."
Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down
the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a
whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his
father's sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as
if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even
then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the
heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness
hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom's movement had given
Pavel an idea.
They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left
out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel's middle horse was
failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;
Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the
horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in
the harness, and overturned the sledge.
When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone
upon the familiar road. "They still come?" he asked Peter.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Twenty, thirty--enough."
Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave
Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He
called to the groom that they must lighten--and pointed to the bride. The
young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away.
In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the
sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly
how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front
seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound
that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it
before--the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early
prayers.
Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever
since. They were run out of their village. Pavel's own mother would not
look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned
where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who
had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed
them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.
They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always
unfortunate. When Pavel's health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.
Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and
was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left
the country--went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of
Russians were employed.
At his sale we bought Peter's wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During
the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes.
He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held
mortgages on Peter's live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes
at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow
before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but
this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans
had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and
bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons
that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in
their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping
beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.
The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.
When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit
there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows
penned him in his cave. For Antonia and me, the story of the wedding party
was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel's secret to any one, but
guarded it jealously--as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that
night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a
painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often
found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country
that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER IX---------
THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff
willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the
Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like
strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in
a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the
old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job
if I had n't hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the
next day I went over to take Yulka and Antonia for a sleigh-ride.
It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box,
and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the
Shimerdas' I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the
bottom of the draw and called. Antonia and Yulka came running out, wearing
little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard
about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in
beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to
be broken.
The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white
stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Antonia said, the whole world
was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.
The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft
between snow-drifts--very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops
that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they
would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were
so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind
had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if
some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same
time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we
stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their
color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the
sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with
tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual
impression of the stinging lash in the wind.
The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering
beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were
so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that
they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter's house. The great
fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like
wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go
home again. Could n't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house,
Yulka asked, and could n't I go to town and buy things for us to keep
house with?
All the way to Russian Peter's we were extravagantly happy, but when we
turned back,--it must have been about four o'clock,--the east wind grew
stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky
became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it
around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head
under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins
clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It
was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with
them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a
fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home
directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of
quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks.
The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days--like a
tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day,
husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down
over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think
they were like Arctic explorers.
In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making
husking-gloves, I read "The Swiss Family Robinson" aloud to her, and I
felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an
adventurous life. I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the
cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about
keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when
she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was
not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, "very little to
do with." On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on
other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or
cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,
striped with currants and boiled in a bag.
Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most
interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth
and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands
cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously:
feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs.
When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of
their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather
read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the
stove, "easing" their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their
cracked hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to
sing, "For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong," or, "Bury Me Not on
the Lone Prairee." He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing
when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.
I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see
the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good
fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept
faith with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name
with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him
behave like a crazy man--tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.
But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. If he, as
he said, "forgot himself" and swore before grandmother, he went about
depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the
cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and
to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare
themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do
anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.
On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed
us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling
down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys
of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies,
wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be
persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.
I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was
working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with
her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:--
When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his
relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join
her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it
was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he
"got on fine with the kids," and liked the mother, though she played a
sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but
three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he
was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him,
the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who
made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and
often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken
ashore at New York, he had, as he said, "to carry some of them." The trip
to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very
difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The
mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could
feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture
factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was
rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in
some fashion to blame. "I was sure glad," Otto concluded, "that he did n't
take his hard feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for
me, all right! Now, did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard
luck, Mrs. Burden?"
Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to
his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he did n't
realize that he was being protected by Providence.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book i, chapter xiii, utilizing the provided context. | book i, chapter x|book i, chapter xi|book i, chapter xii|book i, chapter xiii | During the week after Christmas, the snow starts to thaw for awhile, and Antonia and her mother come over to visit. Mrs. Shimerda had never been to the house before, and the entire time she looks at everything enviously and complains that the Burdens have so much more than she does. She asks Grandmother for a pot, which she gives to her. Jim is annoyed by Mrs. Shimerda, who lacks humility despite her misfortune. Antonia explains to Jim that her father is sick and depressed at having left the old country. He misses playing the fiddle with his friends, and he had not wanted to come over originally. Mrs. Shimerda wanted to come to America because she thought that Ambrosch would be able to become rich here. Ambrosch is considered the most important person in the Shimerda family, and even Antonia is in awe of him. For three weeks it seems like it is almost spring. The bulls get into a fight across the fence between them and have to be separated. On January 20, Jim's eleventh birthday, however, a huge blizzard starts. It was the biggest storm in ten years, and Otto and Jack have to dig tunnels through the snow to get to the barn and the henhouse. All the water is frozen, and as soon as they finish the chores, they have to start over with them again. Jim calls that day very strange and unnatural. |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER X---------
FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the
Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold
which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to
have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr.
Shimerda out hunting.
"He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that
he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em
over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of
cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
"All but the crazy boy," Jake put in. "He never wears the coat. Krajiek
says he's turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be
getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield
yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot.
He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on,
to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter'n me and put 'em back
in his sack and walked off."
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. "Josiah, you
don't suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do
you?"
"You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline," he
replied gravely.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and
ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.
I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat
family.
When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake
packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.
"Now, Jake," grandmother was saying, "if you can find that old rooster
that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we'll take him
along. There's no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n't have got hens
from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she
was confused and did n't know where to begin. I've come strange to a new
country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no
matter what you don't have."
"Just as you say, mam," said Jake, "but I hate to think of Krajiek getting
a leg of that old rooster." He tramped out through the long cellar and
dropped the heavy door behind him.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and
climbed into the cold front wagon-seat. As we approached the Shimerdas' we
heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and
her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the
pump-handle as it went up and down. She heard our wagon, looked back over
her shoulder, and catching up her pail of water, started at a run for the
hole in the bank.
Jake helped grandmother to the ground, saying he would bring the
provisions after he had blanketed his horses. We went slowly up the icy
path toward the door sunk in the drawside. Blue puffs of smoke came from
the stovepipe that stuck out through the grass and snow, but the wind
whisked them roughly away.
Mrs. Shimerda opened the door before we knocked and seized grandmother's
hand. She did not say "How do!" as usual, but at once began to cry,
talking very fast in her own language, pointing to her feet which were
tied up in rags, and looking about accusingly at every one.
The old man was sitting on a stump behind the stove, crouching over as if
he were trying to hide from us. Yulka was on the floor at his feet, her
kitten in her lap. She peeped out at me and smiled, but, glancing up at
her mother, hid again. Antonia was washing pans and dishes in a dark
corner. The crazy boy lay under the only window, stretched on a gunnysack
stuffed with straw. As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the
crack at the bottom of the door. The air in the cave was stifling, and it
was very dark, too. A lighted lantern, hung over the stove, threw out a
feeble yellow glimmer.
Mrs. Shimerda snatched off the covers of two barrels behind the door, and
made us look into them. In one there were some potatoes that had been
frozen and were rotting, in the other was a little pile of flour.
Grandmother murmured something in embarrassment, but the Bohemian woman
laughed scornfully, a kind of whinny-laugh, and catching up an empty
coffee-pot from the shelf, shook it at us with a look positively
vindictive.
Grandmother went on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting
their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the
hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches. Then the
poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid
her face on her knees, and sat crying bitterly. Grandmother paid no heed
to her, but called Antonia to come and help empty the basket. Tony left
her corner reluctantly. I had never seen her crushed like this before.
"You not mind my poor mamenka, Mrs. Burden. She is so sad," she whispered,
as she wiped her wet hands on her skirt and took the things grandmother
handed her.
The crazy boy, seeing the food, began to make soft, gurgling noises and
stroked his stomach. Jake came in again, this time with a sack of
potatoes. Grandmother looked about in perplexity.
"Have n't you got any sort of cave or cellar outside, Antonia? This is no
place to keep vegetables. How did your potatoes get frozen?"
"We get from Mr. Bushy, at the post-office,--what he throw out. We got no
potatoes, Mrs. Burden," Tony admitted mournfully.
When Jake went out, Marek crawled along the floor and stuffed up the
door-crack again. Then, quietly as a shadow, Mr. Shimerda came out from
behind the stove. He stood brushing his hand over his smooth gray hair, as
if he were trying to clear away a fog about his head. He was clean and
neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin. He took
grandmother's arm and led her behind the stove, to the back of the room.
In the rear wall was another little cave; a round hole, not much bigger
than an oil barrel, scooped out in the black earth. When I got up on one
of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw.
The old man held the lantern. "Yulka," he said in a low, despairing voice,
"Yulka; my Antonia!"
Grandmother drew back. "You mean they sleep in there,--your girls?" He
bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm. "It is very cold on the floor, and this is
warm like the badger hole. I like for sleep there," she insisted eagerly.
"My mamenka have nice bed, with pillows from our own geese in Bohemie.
See, Jim?" She pointed to the narrow bunk which Krajiek had built against
the wall for himself before the Shimerdas came.
Grandmother sighed. "Sure enough, where _would_ you sleep, dear! I don't
doubt you're warm there. You'll have a better house after while, Antonia,
and then you'll forget these hard times."
Mr. Shimerda made grandmother sit down on the only chair and pointed his
wife to a stool beside her. Standing before them with his hand on
Antonia's shoulder, he talked in a low tone, and his daughter translated.
He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he
made good wages, and his family were respected there. He left Bohemia with
more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was
paid. He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway
fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected. By the time they paid
Krajiek for the land, and bought his horses and oxen and some old farm
machinery, they had very little money left. He wished grandmother to know,
however, that he still had some money. If they could get through until
spring came, they would buy a cow and chickens and plant a garden, and
would then do very well. Ambrosch and Antonia were both old enough to work
in the fields, and they were willing to work. But the snow and the bitter
weather had disheartened them all.
Antonia explained that her father meant to build a new house for them in
the spring; he and Ambrosch had already split the logs for it, but the
logs were all buried in the snow, along the creek where they had been
felled.
While grandmother encouraged and gave them advice, I sat down on the floor
with Yulka and let her show me her kitten. Marek slid cautiously toward us
and began to exhibit his webbed fingers. I knew he wanted to make his
queer noises for me--to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,--but he did
not dare in the presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be
agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up
for his deficiencies.
Mrs. Shimerda grew more calm and reasonable before our visit was over,
and, while Antonia translated, put in a word now and then on her own
account. The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she
heard English spoken. As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and
brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and
half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy
began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the
contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent,
even among the other odors of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied
it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.
"For cook," she announced. "Little now; be very much when cook," spreading
out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon.
"Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my
country."
"Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda," grandmother said drily. "I can't say but I
prefer our bread to yours, myself."
[Illustration: Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms in a Bohemian forest]
Antonia undertook to explain. "This very good, Mrs. Burden,"--she clasped
her hands as if she could not express how good,--"it make very much when
you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in
the gravy,--oh, so good!"
All the way home grandmother and Jake talked about how easily good
Christian people could forget they were their brothers' keepers.
"I will say, Jake, some of our brothers and sisters are hard to keep.
Where's a body to begin, with these people? They're wanting in everything,
and most of all in horse-sense. Nobody can give 'em that, I guess. Jimmy,
here, is about as able to take over a homestead as they are. Do you reckon
that boy Ambrosch has any real push in him?"
"He's a worker, all right, mam, and he's got some ketch-on about him; but
he's a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and
then, ag'in, they can be too mean."
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package
Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked
like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the
most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor. We
could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
"They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain't dried
fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I'm afraid of 'em. Anyhow, I
should n't want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old
clothes and goose pillows."
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the
chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the
strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little
brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so
jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some
deep Bohemian forest {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XI---------
DURING the week before Christmas, Jake was the most important person of
our household, for he was to go to town and do all our Christmas shopping.
But on the 21st of December, the snow began to fall. The flakes came down
so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the
windmill--its frame looked dim and gray, unsubstantial like a shadow. The
snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The
cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless. The men could
not go farther than the barns and corral. They sat about the house most of
the day as if it were Sunday; greasing their boots, mending their
suspenders, plaiting whiplashes.
On the morning of the 22d, grandfather announced at breakfast that it
would be impossible to go to Black Hawk for Christmas purchases. Jake was
sure he could get through on horseback, and bring home our things in
saddle-bags; but grandfather told him the roads would be obliterated, and
a newcomer in the country would be lost ten times over. Anyway, he would
never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.
We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town. I had
wanted to get some picture-books for Yulka and Antonia; even Yulka was
able to read a little now. Grandmother took me into the ice-cold
storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut
squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound
it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico,
representing scenes from a circus. For two days I sat at the dining-room
table, pasting this book full of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those
good old family magazines which used to publish colored lithographs of
popular paintings, and I was allowed to use some of these. I took
"Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine" for my frontispiece. On the
white pages I grouped Sunday-School cards and advertising cards which I
had brought from my "old country." Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and
made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and
baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar
and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the
Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather's gray gelding.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung
to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was
planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from
the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west
hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a
coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my
cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he
was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my
father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten
how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner
of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all
gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table,
looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five
feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals,
strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into
pasteboard sockets. Its real splendors, however, came from the most
unlikely place in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never seen
anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a
fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker's
wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly
colored paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand
alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in
Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were
the three kings, gorgeously appareled, and the ox and the ass and the
shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels,
singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the
three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends
and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it
reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under
it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.
I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in the
lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face
seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar
that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache. As
I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness
and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner
behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had
only their hard fists to batter at the world with. Otto was already one of
those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of
their own. Yet he was so fond of children!
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XII---------
ON Christmas morning, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just
coming in from their morning chores--the horses and pigs always had their
breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted "Merry Christmas"! to me,
and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the stove.
Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat. Morning
prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from St. Matthew
about the birth of Christ, and as we listened it all seemed like something
that had happened lately, and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the
Lord for the first Christmas, and for all that it had meant to the world
ever since. He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and prayed for the
poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder
than it was here with us. Grandfather's prayers were often very
interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he
talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull
from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the
time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and
his views about things.
After we sat down to our waffles and sausage, Jake told us how pleased the
Shimerdas had been with their presents; even Ambrosch was friendly and
went to the creek with him to cut the Christmas tree. It was a soft gray
day outside, with heavy clouds working across the sky, and occasional
squalls of snow. There were always odd jobs to be done about the barn on
holidays, and the men were busy until afternoon. Then Jake and I played
dominoes, while Otto wrote a long letter home to his mother. He always
wrote to her on Christmas Day, he said, no matter where he was, and no
matter how long it had been since his last letter. All afternoon he sat in
the dining-room. He would write for a while, then sit idle, his clenched
fist lying on the table, his eyes following the pattern of the oilcloth.
He spoke and wrote his own language so seldom that it came to him
awkwardly. His effort to remember entirely absorbed him.
At about four o'clock a visitor appeared: Mr. Shimerda, wearing his
rabbit-skin cap and collar, and new mittens his wife had knitted. He had
come to thank us for the presents, and for all grandmother's kindness to
his family. Jake and Otto joined us from the basement and we sat about the
stove, enjoying the deepening gray of the winter afternoon and the
atmosphere of comfort and security in my grandfather's house. This feeling
seemed completely to take possession of Mr. Shimerda. I suppose, in the
crowded clutter of their cave, the old man had come to believe that peace
and order had vanished from the earth, or existed only in the old world he
had left so far behind. He sat still and passive, his head resting against
the back of the wooden rocking-chair, his hands relaxed upon the arms. His
face had a look of weariness and pleasure, like that of sick people when
they feel relief from pain. Grandmother insisted on his drinking a glass
of Virginia apple-brandy after his long walk in the cold, and when a faint
flush came up in his cheeks, his features might have been cut out of a
shell, they were so transparent. He said almost nothing, and smiled
rarely; but as he rested there we all had a sense of his utter content.
[Illustration: Jake bringing home a Christmas tree]
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas tree before
the lamp was brought. When the candle ends sent up their conical yellow
flames, all the colored figures from Austria stood out clear and full of
meaning against the green boughs. Mr. Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and
quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body
formed a letter "S." I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather.
He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and
hurt people's feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree
before, but now, with some one kneeling before it,--images, candles, {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable
head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little
urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to
look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his
deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into
the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his
overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern
and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took
grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly,
"Good wo-man!" He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and
went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather
looked at me searchingly. "The prayers of all good people are good," he
said quietly.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XIII---------
THE week following Christmas brought in a thaw, and by New Year's Day all
the world about us was a broth of gray slush, and the guttered slope
between the windmill and the barn was running black water. The soft black
earth stood out in patches along the roadsides. I resumed all my chores,
carried in the cobs and wood and water, and spent the afternoons at the
barn, watching Jake shell corn with a hand-sheller.
One morning, during this interval of fine weather, Antonia and her mother
rode over on one of their shaggy old horses to pay us a visit. It was the
first time Mrs. Shimerda had been to our house, and she ran about
examining our carpets and curtains and furniture, all the while commenting
upon them to her daughter in an envious, complaining tone. In the kitchen
she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said:
"You got many, Shimerdas no got." I thought it weak-minded of grandmother
to give the pot to her.
After dinner, when she was helping to wash the dishes, she said, tossing
her head: "You got many things for cook. If I got all things like you, I
make much better."
She was a conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not
humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and
listened unsympathetically when she told me her father was not well.
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music
any more. At home he play violin all the time; for weddings and for dance.
Here never. When I beg him for play, he shake his head no. Some days he
take his violin out of his box and make with his fingers on the strings,
like this, but never he make the music. He don't like this kawn-tree."
"People who don't like this country ought to stay at home," I said
severely. "We don't make them come here."
"He not want to come, nev-er!" she burst out. "My mamenka make him come.
All the time she say: 'America big country; much money, much land for my
boys, much husband for my girls.' My papa, he cry for leave his old
friends what make music with him. He love very much the man what play the
long horn like this"--she indicated a slide trombone. "They go to school
together and are friends from boys. But my mama, she want Ambrosch for be
rich, with many cattle."
"Your mama," I said angrily, "wants other people's things."
"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely. "Why he not help my
papa? Ambrosch be rich, too, after while, and he pay back. He is very
smart boy. For Ambrosch my mama come here."
Ambrosch was considered the important person in the family. Mrs. Shimerda
and Antonia always deferred to him, though he was often surly with them
and contemptuous toward his father. Ambrosch and his mother had everything
their own way. Though Antonia loved her father more than she did any one
else, she stood in awe of her elder brother.
After I watched Antonia and her mother go over the hill on their miserable
horse, carrying our iron pot with them, I turned to grandmother, who had
taken up her darning, and said I hoped that snooping old woman would n't
come to see us any more.
Grandmother chuckled and drove her bright needle across a hole in Otto's
sock. "She's not old, Jim, though I expect she seems old to you. No, I
would n't mourn if she never came again. But, you see, a body never knows
what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to
see her children want for things. Now read me a chapter in 'The Prince of
the House of David.' Let's forget the Bohemians."
We had three weeks of this mild, open weather. The cattle in the corral
ate corn almost as fast as the men could shell it for them, and we hoped
they would be ready for an early market. One morning the two big bulls,
Gladstone and Brigham Young, thought spring had come, and they began to
tease and butt at each other across the barbed wire that separated them.
Soon they got angry. They bellowed and pawed up the soft earth with their
hoofs, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads. Each withdrew to a far
corner of his own corral, and then they made for each other at a gallop.
Thud, thud, we could hear the impact of their great heads, and their
bellowing shook the pans on the kitchen shelves. Had they not been
dehorned, they would have torn each other to pieces. Pretty soon the fat
steers took it up and began butting and horning each other. Clearly, the
affair had to be stopped. We all stood by and watched admiringly while
Fuchs rode into the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again
and again, finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the 20th of
January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in
white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began
to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:--
"You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a
full-grown blizzard ordered for you."
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
spilled out of heaven, like thousands of feather-beds being emptied. That
afternoon the kitchen was a carpenter-shop; the men brought in their tools
and made two great wooden shovels with long handles. Neither grandmother
nor I could go out in the storm, so Jake fed the chickens and brought in a
pitiful contribution of eggs.
Next day our men had to shovel until noon to reach the barn--and the snow
was still falling! There had not been such a storm in the ten years my
grandfather had lived in Nebraska. He said at dinner that we would not try
to reach the cattle--they were fat enough to go without their corn for a
day or two; but to-morrow we must feed them and thaw out their water-tap
so that they could drink. We could not so much as see the corrals, but we
knew the steers were over there, huddled together under the north bank.
Our ferocious bulls, subdued enough by this time, were probably warming
each other's backs. "This'll take the bile out of 'em!" Fuchs remarked
gleefully.
At noon that day the hens had not been heard from. After dinner Jake and
Otto, their damp clothes now dried on them, stretched their stiff arms and
plunged again into the drifts. They made a tunnel under the snow to the
henhouse, with walls so solid that grandmother and I could walk back and
forth in it. We found the chickens asleep; perhaps they thought night had
come to stay. One old rooster was stirring about, pecking at the solid
lump of ice in their water-tin. When we flashed the lantern in their eyes,
the hens set up a great cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering
down-feathers. The mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of
captivity, ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their
ugly, painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done--just when it was time to begin them all over again! That was a
strange, unnatural sort of day.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book i, chapter xv based on the provided context. | book i, chapter xiv|book i, chapter xv | After returning from Black Hawk, Otto tells them that a coroner will arrive shortly but that it is impossible for the priest to come. He brings with him a young, strong, and confident Bohemian man named Anton Jelinek, who tells Grandfather that it is very bad that a priest is unavailable. Jelinek tells about how, during a war with the Austrians in his native land, he helped the priest carry the Sacrament around to dying men. Everyone except them got really sick with cholera, and ever since he has appreciated the power of the Sacrament and wishes that Mr. Shimerda could receive it. Jelinek starts to break a road through the snow to the Shimerda's house, while Otto, who is the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, begins making a coffin. Otto is a good carpenter, and the sawing and planing noises are pleasant in the house. The postmaster Mr. Bushy and some neighbors drop by to talk about the news, and Jim is excited because he is not used to people being so unusually talkative. Later in the day the postmaster returns to tell Grandmother that the Norwegians refuse to let Mr. Shimerda be buried in their graveyard. Grandmother is upset and vows to start a more "liberal-minded" American graveyard in the spring. The coroner decides that Mr. Shimerda did in fact commit suicide, even though Krajiek is continuing to act like a guilty man. Krajiek probably just feels bad for being so ruthless and unhelpful. During dinner the family talks about how Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch want Mr. Shimerda to be buried at the southwest corner of their land, which will someday become a crossroads. Nobody really understands, but they assume that there must be some Bohemian superstition about burying suicides at a crossroads. |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XIV---------
ON the morning of the 22d I wakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes,
I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in
the kitchen--grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What
could it be, I wondered, as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn
had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was
lost in the storm.
Down in the kitchen grandfather was standing before the stove with his
hands behind him. Jake and Otto had taken off their boots and were rubbing
their woolen socks. Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both
looked exhausted. On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with
a blanket. Grandmother motioned me to the dining-room. I obeyed
reluctantly. I watched her as she came and went, carrying dishes. Her lips
were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear
Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have
prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do. Old Mr. Shimerda
is dead, and his family are in great distress. Ambrosch came over here in
the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him. The boys
have had a hard night, and you must not bother them with questions. That
is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench. Come in to breakfast, boys."
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to
talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances. I held my
tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
"No, sir," Fuchs said in answer to a question from grandfather, "nobody
heard the gun go off. Ambrosch was out with the ox team, trying to break a
road, and the women folks was shut up tight in their cave. When Ambrosch
come in it was dark and he did n't see nothing, but the oxen acted kind of
queer. One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--bolted clean out of
the stable. His hands is blistered where the rope run through. He got a
lantern and went back and found the old man, just as we seen him."
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned. "I'd like to think he never
done it. He was always considerate and un-wishful to give trouble. How
could he forget himself and bring this on us!"
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden," Fuchs
declared. "He done everything natural. You know he was always sort of
fixy, and fixy he was to the last. He shaved after dinner, and washed
hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes. Antonia heated the
water for him. Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he
was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he
was going out to hunt rabbits. He must have gone right down to the barn
and done it then. He layed down on that bunk-bed, close to the ox stalls,
where he always slept. When we found him, everything was decent
except,"--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,--"except what he could n't
nowise foresee. His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the
bed. He'd took off that silk neckcloth he always wore, and folded it
smooth and stuck his pin through it. He turned back his shirt at the neck
and rolled up his sleeves."
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
Otto misunderstood her. "Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the
trigger with his big toe. He layed over on his side and put the end of the
barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger. He
found it all right!"
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly. "There's something mighty queer about
it."
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
"Well, mam, I found Krajiek's axe under the manger, and I picks it up and
carries it over to the corpse, and I take my oath it just fit the gash in
the front of the old man's face. That there Krajiek had been sneakin'
round, pale and quiet, and when he seen me examinin' the axe, he begun
whimperin', 'My God, man, don't do that!' 'I reckon I'm a-goin' to look
into this,' says I. Then he begun to squeal like a rat and run about
wringin' his hands. 'They'll hang me!' says he. 'My God, they'll hang me
sure!'"
Fuchs spoke up impatiently. "Krajiek's gone silly, Jake, and so have you.
The old man would n't have made all them preparations for Krajiek to
murder him, would he? It don't hang together. The gun was right beside him
when Ambrosch found him."
"Krajiek could 'a' put it there, could n't he?" Jake demanded.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go
trying to add murder to suicide. We're deep enough in trouble. Otto reads
you too many of them detective stories."
"It will be easy to decide all that, Emmaline," said grandfather quietly.
"If he shot himself in the way they think, the gash will be torn from the
inside outward."
"Just so it is, Mr. Burden," Otto affirmed. "I seen bunches of hair and
stuff sticking to the poles and straw along the roof. They was blown up
there by gunshot, no question."
Grandmother told grandfather she meant to go over to the Shimerdas with
him.
"There is nothing you can do," he said doubtfully. "The body can't be
touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a
matter of several days, this weather."
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to
them poor little girls. The oldest one was his darling, and was like a
right hand to him. He might have thought of her. He's left her alone in a
hard world." She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his
breakfast at the kitchen table.
Fuchs, although he had been up in the cold nearly all night, was going to
make the long ride to Black Hawk to fetch the priest and the coroner. On
the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the
country with no roads to guide him.
"Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on
a second pair of socks. "I've got a good nose for directions, and I never
did need much sleep. It's the gray I'm worried about. I'll save him what I
can, but it'll strain him, as sure as I'm telling you!"
"This is no time to be over-considerate of animals, Otto; do the best you
can for yourself. Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner. She's a good
woman, and she'll do well by you."
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch. I saw a side of him I had
not seen before. He was deeply, even slavishly, devout. He did not say a
word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now
silently, now aloud. He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his
hands except to cross himself. Several times the poor boy fell asleep
where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that
would be a day's job. Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big
black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him. She wore her
black hood and was bundled up in shawls. Grandfather tucked his bushy
white beard inside his overcoat. They looked very Biblical as they set
off, I thought. Jake and Ambrosch followed them, riding the other black
and my pony, carrying bundles of clothes that we had got together for Mrs.
Shimerda. I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted
cornfield. Then, for the first time, I realized that I was alone in the
house.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to
acquit myself creditably. I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar,
and filled both the stoves. I remembered that in the hurry and excitement
of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not
been gathered. Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn,
emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water. After
the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat
down to get warm. The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the
most pleasant of companions. I got "Robinson Crusoe" and tried to read,
but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours. Presently, as I
looked with satisfaction about our comfortable sitting-room, it flashed
upon me that if Mr. Shimerda's soul were lingering about in this world at
all, it would be here, in our house, which had been more to his liking
than any other in the neighborhood. I remembered his contented face when
he was with us on Christmas Day. If he could have lived with us, this
terrible thing would never have happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered
whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his
own country. I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia,
to Baltimore,--and then the great wintry ocean. No, he would not at once
set out upon that long journey. Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of
cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting
now in this quiet house.
I was not frightened, but I made no noise. I did not wish to disturb him.
I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly
underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house. There,
on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda.
Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow. It
was as if I had let the old man in out of the tormenting winter, and were
sitting there with him. I went over all that Antonia had ever told me
about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the
fiddle at weddings and dances. I thought about the friends he had mourned
to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,--belonging,
as Antonia said, to the "nobles,"--from which she and her mother used to
steal wood on moonlight nights. There was a white hart that lived in that
forest, and if any one killed it, he would be hanged, she said. Such vivid
pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not
yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was
so tired that she went at once to bed. Jake and I got supper, and while we
were washing the dishes he told me in loud whispers about the state of
things over at the Shimerdas'. Nobody could touch the body until the
coroner came. If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently.
The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you
hang out to freeze," Jake said. The horses and oxen would not go into the
barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of
blood. They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was
no other place to keep them. A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr.
Shimerda's head. Antonia and Ambrosch and the mother took turns going down
to pray beside him. The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel
the cold. I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to
be thought insensible to it. He was always coveting distinction, poor
Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed
him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and
about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and
would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal
for him. "As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of
years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly. "I almost know it is n't true." I
did not, of course, say that I believed he had been in that very kitchen
all afternoon, on his way back to his own country. Nevertheless, after I
went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me
crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.
But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so
unhappy that he could not live any longer.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XV---------
OTTO FUCHS got back from Black Hawk at noon the next day. He reported that
the coroner would reach the Shimerdas' sometime that afternoon, but the
missionary priest was at the other end of his parish, a hundred miles
away, and the trains were not running. Fuchs had got a few hours' sleep at
the livery barn in town, but he was afraid the gray gelding had strained
himself. Indeed, he was never the same horse afterward. That long trip
through the deep snow had taken all the endurance out of him.
Fuchs brought home with him a stranger, a young Bohemian who had taken a
homestead near Black Hawk, and who came on his only horse to help his
fellow-countrymen in their trouble. That was the first time I ever saw
Anton Jelinek. He was a strapping young fellow in the early twenties then,
handsome, warm-hearted, and full of life, and he came to us like a miracle
in the midst of that grim business. I remember exactly how he strode into
our kitchen in his felt boots and long wolfskin coat, his eyes and cheeks
bright with the cold. At sight of grandmother, he snatched off his fur
cap, greeting her in a deep, rolling voice which seemed older than he.
"I want to thank you very much, Mrs. Burden, for that you are so kind to
poor strangers from my kawn-tree."
He did not hesitate like a farmer boy, but looked one eagerly in the eye
when he spoke. Everything about him was warm and spontaneous. He said he
would have come to see the Shimerdas before, but he had hired out to husk
corn all the fall, and since winter began he had been going to the school
by the mill, to learn English, along with the little children. He told me
he had a nice "lady-teacher" and that he liked to go to school.
At dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to
strangers.
"Will they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?" he asked.
Jelinek looked serious. "Yes, sir, that is very bad for them. Their father
has done a great sin," he looked straight at grandfather. "Our Lord has
said that."
Grandfather seemed to like his frankness. "We believe that, too, Jelinek.
But we believe that Mr. Shimerda's soul will come to its Creator as well
off without a priest. We believe that Christ is our only intercessor."
The young man shook his head. "I know how you think. My teacher at the
school has explain. But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the
dead. I have seen too much."
We asked him what he meant.
He glanced around the table. "You want I shall tell you? When I was a
little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I make
my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me. By
'n' by war-times come, when the Austrians fight us. We have very many
soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that camp,
and the men die like flies. All day long our priest go about there to give
the Sacrament to dying men, and I go with him to carry the vessels with
the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go near that camp catch the sickness
but me and the priest. But we have no sickness, we have no fear, because
we carry that blood and that body of Christ, and it preserve us." He
paused, looking at grandfather. "That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened
to myself. All the soldiers know, too. When we walk along the road, the
old priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers marching and officers on
horse. All those officers, when they see what I carry under the cloth,
pull up their horses and kneel down on the ground in the road until we
pass. So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die without the Sacrament,
and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad for his family."
We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank,
manly faith.
"I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these
things," said grandfather, "and I would never be the one to say you were
not in God's care when you were among the soldiers."
After dinner it was decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong
black farmhorses to the scraper and break a road through to the
Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was
the only cabinet-maker in the neighborhood, was set to work on a coffin.
Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us
that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who "batched"
with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made the coat.
From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn with the blacks,
and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield. Sometimes he was
completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him; then he and
the horses would emerge black and shining.
Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for
the oats bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold drafts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his work-table and watched him. He did
not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of
paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus
engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his
half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At
last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.
"The hardest part of my job's done," he announced. "It's the head end of
it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The last
time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden," he continued, as he sorted and
tried his chisels, "was for a fellow in the Black Tiger mine, up above
Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face of
the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a
trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket traveled across a box
canon three hundred feet deep, and about a third full of water. Two Swedes
had fell out of that bucket once, and hit the water, feet down. If you'll
believe it, they went to work the next day. You can't kill a Swede. But in
my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned out
different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I happened
to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It's a handy
thing to know, when you knock about like I've done."
"We'd be hard put to it now, if you did n't know, Otto," grandmother said.
"Yes, 'm," Fuchs admitted with modest pride. "So few folks does know how
to make a good tight box that'll turn water. I sometimes wonder if
there'll be anybody about to do it for me. However, I'm not at all
particular that way."
All afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting
wheeze of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such
cheerful noises, seeming to promise new things for living people: it was a
pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put underground so
soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of frost, and the
boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of yellow
shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck to
cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He handled
the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his hands
went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he
were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if
this occupation brought back old times to him.
At four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbor who lived
east of us, stopped in to get warm. They were on their way to the
Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over there had somehow got
abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother gave the visitors
sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were gone, the brother of
the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road, drew up at our door,
and after him came the father of the German family, our nearest neighbors
on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room. They were
all eager for any details about the suicide, and they were greatly
concerned as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried. The nearest Catholic
cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be weeks before a wagon could get
so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother were sure that a man who had
killed himself could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. There was a
burying-ground over by the Norwegian church, west of Squaw Creek; perhaps
the Norwegians would take Mr. Shimerda in.
After our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to
the kitchen. Grandmother began to make the icing for a chocolate cake, and
Otto again filled the house with the exciting, expectant song of the
plane. One pleasant thing about this time was that everybody talked more
than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything but "Only
papers, to-day," or, "I've got a sackful of mail for ye," until this
afternoon. Grandmother always talked, dear woman; to herself or to the
Lord, if there was no one else to listen; but grandfather was naturally
taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often so tired after supper that I used
to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall of silence. Now every one seemed
eager to talk. That afternoon Fuchs told me story after story; about the
Black Tiger mine, and about violent deaths and casual buryings, and the
queer fancies of dying men. You never really knew a man, he said, until
you saw him die. Most men were game, and went without a grudge.
The postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring
the coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the
Norwegian church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the
Norwegian graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother was indignant. "If these foreigners are so clannish, Mr.
Bushy, we'll have to have an American graveyard that will be more
liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to start one in the spring. If
anything was to happen to me, I don't want the Norwegians holding
inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be laid amongst
'em."
Soon grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that
important person, the coroner. He was a mild, flurried old man, a Civil
War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty. He seemed to find this case
very perplexing, and said if it had not been for grandfather he would have
sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. "The way he acted, and the way his
axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man."
Although it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake
and the coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he
behaved like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps
he even felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old
man's misery and loneliness.
At supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had
hoped would linger on until to-morrow in a mutilated condition,
disappeared on the second round. They talked excitedly about where they
should bury Mr. Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbors were all disturbed
and shocked about something. It developed that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch
wanted the old man buried on the southwest corner of their own land;
indeed, under the very stake that marked the corner. Grandfather had
explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the country was put under fence
and the roads were confined to section lines, two roads would cross
exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, "It makes no matter."
Grandfather asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some
superstition to the effect that a suicide must be buried at the
cross-roads.
Jelinek said he did n't know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once
been such a custom in Bohemia. "Mrs. Shimerda is made up her mind," he
added. "I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all the
neighbors; but she say so it must be. 'There I will bury him, if I dig the
grave myself,' she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch make the
grave to-morrow."
Grandfather smoothed his beard and looked judicial. "I don't know whose
wish should decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will
live to see the people of this country ride over that old man's head, she
is mistaken."
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book i, chapter xvii using the context provided. | book i, chapter xvi|book i, chapter xvii|book i, chapter xviii | Finally spring comes, and Jim says that the coming of spring in Nebraska is much different than anything he had experienced in Virginia. Spring is everywhere, and you can just tell that it's there. People are burning their pastures before the new grass starts to grow, and the smell pervades the prairie. Neighbors are helping the Shimerdas a lot and extending them credit, so now they have a new log house, a windmill, and farm animals. One day Jim visits the Shimerdas to give Yulka her English lesson since Antonia is now busy working in the fields. Mrs. Shimerda is very suspicious of everyone and thinks that people are trying to cheat her. When Antonia returns from plowing the fields, Jim is amazed at what a strong, young girl of fifteen she has become. She is proud of how much work she can do and says she doesn't want to go to school because she is happy to be working with Ambrosch like a man. Jim worries that Antonia is becoming boastful like her mother, but then he notices that she is secretly crying. As he helps her with some chores, she makes him promise to tell her the things he learns in school and not to forget her father, who also went to school. Jim stays for dinner but is not having a good time. Antonia and Ambrosch quarrel about who can do more work, Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch wrongly accuse Grandfather of trying to cheat them, and it is apparent that Antonia has lost her gentle, ladylike ways. Jim is sad because Antonia is always working and has no time for him anymore. He knows that Ambrosch is overworking her and that people are gossiping about it, and he imagines how sad her father would be if he were alive. |
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XVI---------
MR. SHIMERDA lay dead in the barn four days, and on the fifth they buried
him. All day Friday Jelinek was off with Ambrosch digging the grave,
chopping out the frozen earth with old axes. On Saturday we breakfasted
before daylight and got into the wagon with the coffin. Jake and Jelinek
went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in
which it was frozen fast to the ground.
When grandmother and I went into the Shimerdas' house, we found the
women-folk alone; Ambrosch and Marek were at the barn. Mrs. Shimerda sat
crouching by the stove, Antonia was washing dishes. When she saw me she
ran out of her dark corner and threw her arms around me. "Oh, Jimmy," she
sobbed, "what you tink for my lovely papa!" It seemed to me that I could
feel her heart breaking as she clung to me.
Mrs. Shimerda, sitting on the stump by the stove, kept looking over her
shoulder toward the door while the neighbors were arriving. They came on
horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a wagon
over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from her farm
eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women into the
cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning to
fall, and every one was afraid of another storm and anxious to have the
burial over with.
Grandfather and Jelinek came to tell Mrs. Shimerda that it was time to
start. After bundling her mother up in clothes the neighbors had brought,
Antonia put on an old cape from our house and the rabbit-skin hat her
father had made for her. Four men carried Mr. Shimerda's box up the hill;
Krajiek slunk along behind them. The coffin was too wide for the door, so
it was put down on the slope outside. I slipped out from the cave and
looked at Mr. Shimerda. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up.
His body was draped in a black shawl, and his head was bandaged in white
muslin, like a mummy's; one of his long, shapely hands lay out on the
black cloth; that was all one could see of him.
Mrs. Shimerda came out and placed an open prayer-book against the body,
making the sign of the cross on the bandaged head with her fingers.
Ambrosch knelt down and made the same gesture, and after him Antonia and
Marek. Yulka hung back. Her mother pushed her forward, and kept saying
something to her over and over. Yulka knelt down, shut her eyes, and put
out her hand a little way, but she drew it back and began to cry wildly.
She was afraid to touch the bandage. Mrs. Shimerda caught her by the
shoulders and pushed her toward the coffin, but grandmother interfered.
"No, Mrs. Shimerda," she said firmly, "I won't stand by and see that child
frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of
her. Let her alone."
At a look from grandfather, Fuchs and Jelinek placed the lid on the box,
and began to nail it down over Mr. Shimerda. I was afraid to look at
Antonia. She put her arms round Yulka and held the little girl close to
her.
The coffin was put into the wagon. We drove slowly away, against the fine,
icy snow which cut our faces like a sand-blast. When we reached the grave,
it looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste. The men took the
coffin to the edge of the hole and lowered it with ropes. We stood about
watching them, and the powdery snow lay without melting on the caps and
shoulders of the men and the shawls of the women. Jelinek spoke in a
persuasive tone to Mrs. Shimerda, and then turned to grandfather.
"She says, Mr. Burden, she is very glad if you can make some prayer for
him here in English, for the neighbors to understand."
Grandmother looked anxiously at grandfather. He took off his hat, and the
other men did likewise. I thought his prayer remarkable. I still remember
it. He began, "Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the
sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee."
He prayed that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come
to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart. He recalled
the promises to the widow and the fatherless, and asked God to smooth the
way before this widow and her children, and to "incline the hearts of men
to deal justly with her." In closing, he said we were leaving Mr. Shimerda
at "Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat."
All the time he was praying, grandmother watched him through the black
fingers of her glove, and when he said "Amen," I thought she looked
satisfied with him. She turned to Otto and whispered, "Can't you start a
hymn, Fuchs? It would seem less heathenish."
Fuchs glanced about to see if there was general approval of her
suggestion, then began, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and all the men and
women took it up after him. Whenever I have heard the hymn since, it has
made me remember that white waste and the little group of people; and the
bluish air, full of fine, eddying snow, like long veils flying:--
"While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high."
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass
had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the
prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran
about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr.
Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and
an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda
never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a
little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a
little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was
never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray
rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and
in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim
superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and
still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the
error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along
which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver
passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XVII---------
WHEN spring came, after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the
nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter
was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch
in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring
itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it
everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in
the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and
playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If
I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known
that it was spring.
Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. Our neighbors burned
off their pasture before the new grass made a start, so that the fresh
growth would not be mixed with the dead stand of last year. Those light,
swift fires, running about the country, seemed a part of the same kindling
that was in the air.
The Shimerdas were in their new log house by then. The neighbors had
helped them to build it in March. It stood directly in front of their old
cave, which they used as a cellar. The family were now fairly equipped to
begin their struggle with the soil. They had four comfortable rooms to
live in, a new windmill,--bought on credit,--a chicken-house and poultry.
Mrs. Shimerda had paid grandfather ten dollars for a milk cow, and was to
give him fifteen more as soon as they harvested their first crop.
When I rode up to the Shimerdas' one bright windy afternoon in April,
Yulka ran out to meet me. It was to her, now, that I gave reading lessons;
Antonia was busy with other things. I tied my pony and went into the
kitchen where Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she
worked. By this time she could speak enough English to ask me a great many
questions about what our men were doing in the fields. She seemed to think
that my elders withheld helpful information, and that from me she might
get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked me very craftily when
grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I told her, adding that he
thought we should have a dry spring and that the corn would not be held
back by too much rain, as it had been last year.
She gave me a shrewd glance. "He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know
about the wet and the dry."
I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when
Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda
at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep
warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers. I have
seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot. When the
neighbors were there building the new house they saw her do this, and the
story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food in their feather beds.
When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with her
team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come to us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.
She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.
"Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall."
While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand. "You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope
your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?"
"No, we did n't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a
lot."
Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were
stiff. "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother
can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work
as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land
one good farm."
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.
I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.
Antonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?" she asked with a sudden rush of
feeling in her voice. "My father, he went much to school. He know a great
deal; how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn
and violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie come to
talk to him. You won't forget my father, Jim?"
"No," I said, "I will never forget him."
Mrs. Shimerda asked me to stay for supper. After Ambrosch and Antonia had
washed the field dust from their hands and faces at the wash-basin by the
kitchen door, we sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Mrs. Shimerda
ladled meal mush out of an iron pot and poured milk on it. After the mush
we had fresh bread and sorghum molasses, and coffee with the cake that had
been kept warm in the feathers. Antonia and Ambrosch were talking in
Bohemian; disputing about which of them had done more ploughing that day.
Mrs. Shimerda egged them on, chuckling while she gobbled her food.
[Illustration: Antonia ploughing in the field]
Presently Ambrosch said sullenly in English: "You take them ox to-morrow
and try the sod plough. Then you not be so smart."
His sister laughed. "Don't be mad. I know it's awful hard work for break
sod. I milk the cow for you to-morrow, if you want."
Mrs. Shimerda turned quickly to me. "That cow not give so much milk like
what your grandpa say. If he make talk about fifteen dollars, I send him
back the cow."
"He does n't talk about the fifteen dollars," I exclaimed indignantly. "He
does n't find fault with people."
"He say I break his saw when we build, and I never," grumbled Ambrosch.
I knew he had broken the saw, and then hid it and lied about it. I began
to wish I had not stayed for supper. Everything was disagreeable to me.
Antonia ate so noisily now, like a man, and she yawned often at the table
and kept stretching her arms over her head, as if they ached. Grandmother
had said, "Heavy field work'll spoil that girl. She'll lose all her nice
ways and get rough ones." She had lost them already.
After supper I rode home through the sad, soft spring twilight. Since
winter I had seen very little of Antonia. She was out in the fields from
sun-up until sun-down. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing,
she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her
plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making
me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she
helped her mother make garden or sewed all day. Grandfather was pleased
with Antonia. When we complained of her, he only smiled and said, "She
will help some fellow get ahead in the world."
Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much
she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too,
that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that
the farmhands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. Whenever I
saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her
dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to
think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet
managed to say so much when he exclaimed, "My An-tonia!"
----------BOOK I, CHAPTER XVIII---------
AFTER I began to go to the country school, I saw less of the Bohemians. We
were sixteen pupils at the sod schoolhouse, and we all came on horseback
and brought our dinner. My schoolmates were none of them very interesting,
but I somehow felt that by making comrades of them I was getting even with
Antonia for her indifference. Since the father's death, Ambrosch was more
than ever the head of the house and he seemed to direct the feelings as
well as the fortunes of his women-folk. Antonia often quoted his opinions
to me, and she let me see that she admired him, while she thought of me
only as a little boy. Before the spring was over, there was a distinct
coldness between us and the Shimerdas. It came about in this way.
One Sunday I rode over there with Jake to get a horse-collar which
Ambrosch had borrowed from him and had not returned. It was a beautiful
blue morning. The buffalo-peas were blooming in pink and purple masses
along the roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower
stalks, were singing straight at the sun, their heads thrown back and
their yellow breasts a-quiver. The wind blew about us in warm, sweet
gusts. We rode slowly, with a pleasant sense of Sunday indolence.
We found the Shimerdas working just as if it were a week-day. Marek was
cleaning out the stable, and Antonia and her mother were making garden,
off across the pond in the draw-head. Ambrosch was up on the windmill
tower, oiling the wheel. He came down, not very cordially. When Jake asked
for the collar, he grunted and scratched his head. The collar belonged to
grandfather, of course, and Jake, feeling responsible for it, flared up.
"Now, don't you say you have n't got it, Ambrosch, because I know you
have, and if you ain't a-going to look for it, I will."
Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the
stable. I could see that it was one of his mean days. Presently he
returned, carrying a collar that had been badly used--trampled in the dirt
and gnawed by rats until the hair was sticking out of it.
"This what you want?" he asked surlily.
Jake jumped off his horse. I saw a wave of red come up under the rough
stubble on his face. "That ain't the piece of harness I loaned you,
Ambrosch; or if it is, you've used it shameful. I ain't a-going to carry
such a looking thing back to Mr. Burden."
Ambrosch dropped the collar on the ground. "All right," he said coolly,
took up his oil-can, and began to climb the mill. Jake caught him by the
belt of his trousers and yanked him back. Ambrosch's feet had scarcely
touched the ground when he lunged out with a vicious kick at Jake's
stomach. Fortunately Jake was in such a position that he could dodge it.
This was not the sort of thing country boys did when they played at
fisticuffs, and Jake was furious. He landed Ambrosch a blow on the head--it
sounded like the crack of an axe on a cow-pumpkin. Ambrosch dropped over,
stunned.
We heard squeals, and looking up saw Antonia and her mother coming on the
run. They did not take the path around the pond, but plunged through the
muddy water, without even lifting their skirts. They came on, screaming
and clawing the air. By this time Ambrosch had come to his senses and was
sputtering with nose-bleed. Jake sprang into his saddle. "Let's get out of
this, Jim," he called.
Mrs. Shimerda threw her hands over her head and clutched as if she were
going to pull down lightning. "Law, law!" she shrieked after us. "Law for
knock my Ambrosch down!"
"I never like you no more, Jake and Jim Burden," Antonia panted. "No
friends any more!"
Jake stopped and turned his horse for a second. "Well, you're a damned
ungrateful lot, the whole pack of you," he shouted back. "I guess the
Burdens can get along without you. You've been a sight of trouble to them,
anyhow!"
We rode away, feeling so outraged that the fine morning was spoiled for
us. I had n't a word to say, and poor Jake was white as paper and
trembling all over. It made him sick to get so angry. "They ain't the
same, Jimmy," he kept saying in a hurt tone. "These foreigners ain't the
same. You can't trust 'em to be fair. It's dirty to kick a feller. You
heard how the women turned on you--and after all we went through on account
of 'em last winter! They ain't to be trusted. I don't want to see you get
too thick with any of 'em."
"I'll never be friends with them again, Jake," I declared hotly. "I
believe they are all like Krajiek and Ambrosch underneath."
Grandfather heard our story with a twinkle in his eye. He advised Jake to
ride to town to-morrow, go to a justice of the peace, tell him he had
knocked young Shimerda down, and pay his fine. Then if Mrs. Shimerda was
inclined to make trouble--her son was still under age--she would be
forestalled. Jake said he might as well take the wagon and haul to market
the pig he had been fattening. On Monday, about an hour after Jake had
started, we saw Mrs. Shimerda and her Ambrosch proudly driving by, looking
neither to the right nor left. As they rattled out of sight down the Black
Hawk road, grandfather chuckled, saying he had rather expected she would
follow the matter up.
Jake paid his fine with a ten-dollar bill grandfather had given him for
that purpose. But when the Shimerdas found that Jake sold his pig in town
that day, Ambrosch worked it out in his shrewd head that Jake had to sell
his pig to pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas great
satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met
Antonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road with her
work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing
voice:--
"Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!"
Otto pretended not to be surprised at Antonia's behavior. He only lifted
his brows and said, "You can't tell me anything new about a Czech; I'm an
Austrian."
Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the
Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Antonia always greeted him respectfully, and he
asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought
the future looked hopeful for them. Ambrosch was a far-seeing fellow; he
soon realized that his oxen were too heavy for any work except breaking
sod, and he succeeded in selling them to a newly arrived German. With the
money he bought another team of horses, which grandfather selected for
him. Marek was strong, and Ambrosch worked him hard; but he could never
teach him to cultivate corn, I remember. The one idea that had ever got
through poor Marek's thick head was that all exertion was meritorious. He
always bore down on the handles of the cultivator and drove the blades so
deep into the earth that the horses were soon exhausted.
In June Ambrosch went to work at Mr. Bushy's for a week, and took Marek
with him at full wages. Mrs. Shimerda then drove the second cultivator;
she and Antonia worked in the fields all day and did the chores at night.
While the two women were running the place alone, one of the new horses
got colic and gave them a terrible fright.
Antonia had gone down to the barn one night to see that all was well
before she went to bed, and she noticed that one of the roans was swollen
about the middle and stood with its head hanging. She mounted another
horse, without waiting to saddle him, and hammered on our door just as we
were going to bed. Grandfather answered her knock. He did not send one of
his men, but rode back with her himself, taking a syringe and an old piece
of carpet he kept for hot applications when our horses were sick. He found
Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the horse with her lantern, groaning and wringing
her hands. It took but a few moments to release the gases pent up in the
poor beast, and the two women heard the rush of wind and saw the roan
visibly diminish in girth.
"If I lose that horse, Mr. Burden," Antonia exclaimed, "I never stay here
till Ambrosch come home! I go drown myself in the pond before morning."
When Ambrosch came back from Mr. Bushy's, we learned that he had given
Marek's wages to the priest at Black Hawk, for masses for their father's
soul. Grandmother thought Antonia needed shoes more than Mr. Shimerda
needed prayers, but grandfather said tolerantly, "If he can spare six
dollars, pinched as he is, it shows he believes what he professes."
It was grandfather who brought about a reconciliation with the Shimerdas.
One morning he told us that the small grain was coming on so well, he
thought he would begin to cut his wheat on the first of July. He would
need more men, and if it were agreeable to every one he would engage
Ambrosch for the reaping and thrashing, as the Shimerdas had no small
grain of their own.
"I think, Emmaline," he concluded, "I will ask Antonia to come over and
help you in the kitchen. She will be glad to earn something, and it will
be a good time to end misunderstandings. I may as well ride over this
morning and make arrangements. Do you want to go with me, Jim?" His tone
told me that he had already decided for me.
After breakfast we set off together. When Mrs. Shimerda saw us coming, she
ran from her door down into the draw behind the stable, as if she did not
want to meet us. Grandfather smiled to himself while he tied his horse,
and we followed her.
Behind the barn we came upon a funny sight. The cow had evidently been
grazing somewhere in the draw. Mrs. Shimerda had run to the animal, pulled
up the lariat pin, and, when we came upon her, she was trying to hide the
cow in an old cave in the bank. As the hole was narrow and dark, the cow
held back, and the old woman was slapping and pushing at her hind
quarters, trying to spank her into the draw-side.
Grandfather ignored her singular occupation and greeted her politely.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Shimerda. Can you tell me where I will find Ambrosch?
Which field?"
"He with the sod corn." She pointed toward the north, still standing in
front of the cow as if she hoped to conceal it.
"His sod corn will be good for fodder this winter," said grandfather
encouragingly. "And where is Antonia?"
"She go with." Mrs. Shimerda kept wiggling her bare feet about nervously
in the dust.
"Very well. I will ride up there. I want them to come over and help me cut
my oats and wheat next month. I will pay them wages. Good-morning. By the
way, Mrs. Shimerda," he said as he turned up the path, "I think we may as
well call it square about the cow."
She started and clutched the rope tighter. Seeing that she did not
understand, grandfather turned back. "You need not pay me anything more;
no more money. The cow is yours."
"Pay no more, keep cow?" she asked in a bewildered tone, her narrow eyes
snapping at us in the sunlight.
"Exactly. Pay no more, keep cow." He nodded.
Mrs. Shimerda dropped the rope, ran after us, and crouching down beside
grandfather, she took his hand and kissed it. I doubt if he had ever been
so much embarrassed before. I was a little startled, too. Somehow, that
seemed to bring the Old World very close.
We rode away laughing, and grandfather said: "I expect she thought we had
come to take the cow away for certain, Jim. I wonder if she would n't have
scratched a little if we'd laid hold of that lariat rope!"
Our neighbors seemed glad to make peace with us. The next Sunday Mrs.
Shimerda came over and brought Jake a pair of socks she had knitted. She
presented them with an air of great magnanimity, saying, "Now you not come
any more for knock my Ambrosch down?"
Jake laughed sheepishly. "I don't want to have no trouble with Ambrosch.
If he'll let me alone, I'll let him alone."
"If he slap you, we ain't got no pig for pay the fine," she said
insinuatingly.
Jake was not at all disconcerted. "Have the last word, mam," he said
cheerfully. "It's a lady's privilege."
|
My Antonia.book ii.chapte | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book ii, chapter ii based on the provided context. | book ii, chapter i|book ii, chapter ii|book ii, chapter iii | Jim begins this chapter by describing their Norwegian neighbors, the Harlings. Mr. Harling is very successful and frequently away on business, and his wife generally runs the household. She is short, sturdy, and jolly. There are three Harling children around Jim's age: Charley, Julia, and Sally the tomboy. The oldest daughter Frances helps her father with his business and is trusted around the countryside because of her understanding of financial matters. When the Harlings' cook leaves, Grandmother persuades Mrs. Harling to hire Antonia. Mrs. Harling goes to visit the Shimerdas to get an impression of Antonia and her family. Afterwards, Jim and the grandmother go hear what Mrs. Harling has to say. Mrs. Harling likes Antonia and tells about how grumpy and demanding Ambrosch was. Ambrosch wanted all of Antonia's wages to go directly to him, but Mrs. Harling mandates that a certain amount will be set aside for Antonia's own use. Mrs. Harling comments on how pretty Antonia is, and Jim and Grandmother are pleased at the praise. Grandmother then tells a brief history of the Shimerda family. |
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER I---------
I HAD been living with my grandfather for nearly three years when he
decided to move to Black Hawk. He and grandmother were getting old for the
heavy work of a farm, and as I was now thirteen they thought I ought to be
going to school. Accordingly our homestead was rented to "that good woman,
the Widow Steavens," and her bachelor brother, and we bought Preacher
White's house, at the north end of Black Hawk. This was the first town
house one passed driving in from the farm, a landmark which told country
people their long ride was over.
We were to move to Black Hawk in March, and as soon as grandfather had
fixed the date he let Jake and Otto know of his intention. Otto said he
would not be likely to find another place that suited him so well; that he
was tired of farming and thought he would go back to what he called the
"wild West." Jake Marpole, lured by Otto's stories of adventure, decided
to go with him. We did our best to dissuade Jake. He was so handicapped by
illiteracy and by his trusting disposition that he would be an easy prey
to sharpers. Grandmother begged him to stay among kindly, Christian
people, where he was known; but there was no reasoning with him. He wanted
to be a prospector. He thought a silver mine was waiting for him in
Colorado.
Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down the
carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for grandmother's
kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they went, without
warning. Those two fellows had been faithful to us through sun and storm,
had given us things that cannot be bought in any market in the world. With
me they had been like older brothers; had restrained their speech and
manners out of care for me, and given me so much good comradeship. Now
they got on the west-bound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes,
with their oilcloth valises--and I never saw them again. Months afterward
we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down with mountain
fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl mine, and were
doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to
me, "unclaimed." After that we never heard from them.
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards
about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing
along the wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town there were two rows
of new brick "store" buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the courthouse, and
four white churches. Our own house looked down over the town, and from our
upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two
miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost
freedom of the farming country.
We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like town
people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church, grandmother
was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I was quite
another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age,
I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was
over I could fight, play "keeps," tease the little girls, and use
forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from
utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbor,
kept an eye on me, and if my behavior went beyond certain bounds I was not
permitted to come into her yard or to play with her jolly children.
We saw more of our country neighbors now than when we lived on the farm.
Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big barn
where the farmers could put up their teams, and their women-folk more
often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for dinner, and
rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping. The more our
house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it. I was glad, when I
came home from school at noon, to see a farm wagon standing in the back
yard, and I was always ready to run downtown to get beefsteak or baker's
bread for unexpected company. All through that first spring and summer I
kept hoping that Ambrosch would bring Antonia and Yulka to see our new
house. I wanted to show them our red plush furniture, and the
trumpet-blowing cherubs the German paper-hanger had put on our parlor
ceiling.
When Ambrosch came to town, however, he came alone, and though he put his
horses in our barn, he would never stay for dinner, or tell us anything
about his mother and sisters. If we ran out and questioned him as he was
slipping through the yard, he would merely work his shoulders about in his
coat and say, "They all right, I guess."
Mrs. Steavens, who now lived on our farm, grew as fond of Antonia as we
had been, and always brought us news of her. All through the wheat season,
she told us, Ambrosch hired his sister out like a man, and she went from
farm to farm, binding sheaves or working with the thrashers. The farmers
liked her and were kind to her; said they would rather have her for a hand
than Ambrosch. When fall came she was to husk corn for the neighbors until
Christmas, as she had done the year before; but grandmother saved her from
this by getting her a place to work with our neighbors, the Harlings.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER II---------
GRANDMOTHER often said that if she had to live in town, she thanked God
she lived next the Harlings. They had been farming people, like ourselves,
and their place was like a little farm, with a big barn and a garden, and
an orchard and grazing lots,--even a windmill. The Harlings were
Norwegians, and Mrs. Harling had lived in Christiania until she was ten
years old. Her husband was born in Minnesota. He was a grain merchant and
cattle buyer, and was generally considered the most enterprising business
man in our county. He controlled a line of grain elevators in the little
towns along the railroad to the west of us, and was away from home a great
deal. In his absence his wife was the head of the household.
Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.
Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the
moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright,
twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick
to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember
her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her
eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps
shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever
she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her
enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all
the every-day occupations of life. Wash-day was interesting, never dreary,
at the Harlings'. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and
house-cleaning was like a revolution. When Mrs. Harling made garden that
spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge
that separated our place from hers.
Three of the Harling children were near me in age. Charley, the only
son,--they had lost an older boy,--was sixteen; Julia, who was known as the
musical one, was fourteen when I was; and Sally, the tomboy with short
hair, was a year younger. She was nearly as strong as I, and uncannily
clever at all boys' sports. Sally was a wild thing, with sunburned yellow
hair, bobbed about her ears, and a brown skin, for she never wore a hat.
She raced all over town on one roller skate, often cheated at "keeps," but
was such a quick shot one could n't catch her at it.
The grown-up daughter, Frances, was a very important person in our world.
She was her father's chief clerk, and virtually managed his Black Hawk
office during his frequent absences. Because of her unusual business
ability, he was stern and exacting with her. He paid her a good salary,
but she had few holidays and never got away from her responsibilities.
Even on Sundays she went to the office to open the mail and read the
markets. With Charley, who was not interested in business, but was already
preparing for Annapolis, Mr. Harling was very indulgent; bought him guns
and tools and electric batteries, and never asked what he did with them.
Frances was dark, like her father, and quite as tall. In winter she wore a
sealskin coat and cap, and she and Mr. Harling used to walk home together
in the evening, talking about grain-cars and cattle, like two men.
Sometimes she came over to see grandfather after supper, and her visits
flattered him. More than once they put their wits together to rescue some
unfortunate farmer from the clutches of Wick Cutter, the Black Hawk
money-lender. Grandfather said Frances Harling was as good a judge of
credits as any banker in the county. The two or three men who had tried to
take advantage of her in a deal acquired celebrity by their defeat. She
knew every farmer for miles about; how much land he had under cultivation,
how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were. Her interest in
these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in
her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play.
When Frances drove out into the country on business, she would go miles
out of her way to call on some of the old people, or to see the women who
seldom got to town. She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who
spoke no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would tell
her their story without realizing they were doing so. She went to country
funerals and weddings in all weathers. A farmer's daughter who was to be
married could count on a wedding present from Frances Harling.
In August the Harlings' Danish cook had to leave them. Grandmother
entreated them to try Antonia. She cornered Ambrosch the next time he came
to town, and pointed out to him that any connection with Christian Harling
would strengthen his credit and be of advantage to him. One Sunday Mrs.
Harling took the long ride out to the Shimerdas' with Frances. She said
she wanted to see "what the girl came from" and to have a clear
understanding with her mother. I was in our yard when they came driving
home, just before sunset. They laughed and waved to me as they passed, and
I could see they were in great good humor. After supper, when grandfather
set off to church, grandmother and I took my short cut through the willow
hedge and went over to hear about the visit to the Shimerdas.
We found Mrs. Harling with Charley and Sally on the front porch, resting
after her hard drive. Julia was in the hammock--she was fond of repose--and
Frances was at the piano, playing without a light and talking to her
mother through the open window.
Mrs. Harling laughed when she saw us coming. "I expect you left your
dishes on the table to-night, Mrs. Burden," she called. Frances shut the
piano and came out to join us.
They had liked Antonia from their first glimpse of her; felt they knew
exactly what kind of girl she was. As for Mrs. Shimerda, they found her
very amusing. Mrs. Harling chuckled whenever she spoke of her. "I expect I
am more at home with that sort of bird than you are, Mrs. Burden. They're
a pair, Ambrosch and that old woman!"
They had had a long argument with Ambrosch about Antonia's allowance for
clothes and pocket-money. It was his plan that every cent of his sister's
wages should be paid over to him each month, and he would provide her with
such clothing as he thought necessary. When Mrs. Harling told him firmly
that she would keep fifty dollars a year for Antonia's own use, he
declared they wanted to take his sister to town and dress her up and make
a fool of her. Mrs. Harling gave us a lively account of Ambrosch's
behavior throughout the interview; how he kept jumping up and putting on
his cap as if he were through with the whole business, and how his mother
tweaked his coat-tail and prompted him in Bohemian. Mrs. Harling finally
agreed to pay three dollars a week for Antonia's services--good wages in
those days--and to keep her in shoes. There had been hot dispute about the
shoes, Mrs. Shimerda finally saying persuasively that she would send Mrs.
Harling three fat geese every year to "make even." Ambrosch was to bring
his sister to town next Saturday.
"She'll be awkward and rough at first, like enough," grandmother said
anxiously, "but unless she's been spoiled by the hard life she's led, she
has it in her to be a real helpful girl."
Mrs. Harling laughed her quick, decided laugh. "Oh, I'm not worrying, Mrs.
Burden! I can bring something out of that girl. She's barely seventeen,
not too old to learn new ways. She's good-looking, too!" she added warmly.
Frances turned to grandmother. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Burden, you did n't tell us
that! She was working in the garden when we got there, barefoot and
ragged. But she has such fine brown legs and arms, and splendid color in
her cheeks--like those big dark red plums."
We were pleased at this praise. Grandmother spoke feelingly. "When she
first came to this country, Frances, and had that genteel old man to watch
over her, she was as pretty a girl as ever I saw. But, dear me, what a
life she's led, out in the fields with those rough thrashers! Things would
have been very different with poor Antonia if her father had lived."
The Harlings begged us to tell them about Mr. Shimerda's death and the big
snowstorm. By the time we saw grandfather coming home from church we had
told them pretty much all we knew of the Shimerdas.
"The girl will be happy here, and she'll forget those things," said Mrs.
Harling confidently, as we rose to take our leave.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER III---------
ON Saturday Ambrosch drove up to the back gate, and Antonia jumped down
from the wagon and ran into our kitchen just as she used to do. She was
wearing shoes and stockings, and was breathless and excited. She gave me a
playful shake by the shoulders. "You ain't forget about me, Jim?"
Grandmother kissed her. "God bless you, child! Now you've come, you must
try to do right and be a credit to us."
Antonia looked eagerly about the house and admired everything. "Maybe I be
the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town," she suggested
hopefully.
How good it was to have Antonia near us again; to see her every day and
almost every night! Her greatest fault, Mrs. Harling found, was that she
so often stopped her work and fell to playing with the children. She would
race about the orchard with us, or take sides in our hay-fights in the
barn, or be the old bear that came down from the mountain and carried off
Nina. Tony learned English so quickly that by the time school began she
could speak as well as any of us.
I was jealous of Tony's admiration for Charley Harling. Because he was
always first in his classes at school, and could mend the water-pipes or
the door-bell and take the clock to pieces, she seemed to think him a sort
of prince. Nothing that Charley wanted was too much trouble for her. She
loved to put up lunches for him when he went hunting, to mend his
ball-gloves and sew buttons on his shooting-coat, baked the kind of
nut-cake he liked, and fed his setter dog when he was away on trips with
his father. Antonia had made herself cloth working-slippers out of Mr.
Harling's old coats, and in these she went padding about after Charley,
fairly panting with eagerness to please him.
Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best. Nina was only six, and she
was rather more complex than the other children. She was fanciful, had all
sorts of unspoken preferences, and was easily offended. At the slightest
disappointment or displeasure her velvety brown eyes filled with tears,
and she would lift her chin and walk silently away. If we ran after her
and tried to appease her, it did no good. She walked on unmollified. I
used to think that no eyes in the world could grow so large or hold so
many tears as Nina's. Mrs. Harling and Antonia invariably took her part.
We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: "You have
made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic."
I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were
lovely; but I often wanted to shake her.
We had jolly evenings at the Harlings when the father was away. If he was
at home, the children had to go to bed early, or they came over to my
house to play. Mr. Harling not only demanded a quiet house, he demanded
all his wife's attention. He used to take her away to their room in the
west ell, and talk over his business with her all evening. Though we did
not realize it then, Mrs. Harling was our audience when we played, and we
always looked to her for suggestions. Nothing flattered one like her quick
laugh.
Mr. Harling had a desk in his bedroom, and his own easy-chair by the
window, in which no one else ever sat. On the nights when he was at home,
I could see his shadow on the blind, and it seemed to me an arrogant
shadow. Mrs. Harling paid no heed to any one else if he was there. Before
he went to bed she always got him a lunch of smoked salmon or anchovies
and beer. He kept an alcohol lamp in his room, and a French coffee-pot,
and his wife made coffee for him at any hour of the night he happened to
want it.
Most Black Hawk fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic
ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours,
moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on
Sunday. Mr. Harling, therefore, seemed to me autocratic and imperial in
his ways. He walked, talked, put on his gloves, shook hands, like a man
who felt that he had power. He was not tall, but he carried his head so
haughtily that he looked a commanding figure, and there was something
daring and challenging in his eyes. I used to imagine that the "nobles" of
whom Antonia was always talking probably looked very much like Christian
Harling, wore caped overcoats like his, and just such a glittering diamond
upon the little finger.
Except when the father was at home, the Harling house was never quiet.
Mrs. Harling and Nina and Antonia made as much noise as a houseful of
children, and there was usually somebody at the piano. Julia was the only
one who was held down to regular hours of practicing, but they all played.
When Frances came home at noon, she played until dinner was ready. When
Sally got back from school, she sat down in her hat and coat and drummed
the plantation melodies that negro minstrel troupes brought to town. Even
Nina played the Swedish Wedding March.
Mrs. Harling had studied the piano under a good teacher, and somehow she
managed to practice every day. I soon learned that if I were sent over on
an errand and found Mrs. Harling at the piano, I must sit down and wait
quietly until she turned to me. I can see her at this moment; her short,
square person planted firmly on the stool, her little fat hands moving
quickly and neatly over the keys, her eyes fixed on the music with
intelligent concentration.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book ii, chapter v with the given context. | book ii, chapter iv|book ii, chapter v|book ii, chapter vi | Jim frequently meets Lena downtown, and they used to walk home together and talk. Lena tells him about a hotel called the Boys' Home where she and Tiny Soderball would listen to the entertainment being put on for traveling salesmen. The traveling men would give Tiny gifts. One day Jim meets Lena and her young brother Chris going Christmas shopping. Chris shows all the presents he got for his family members and tries to decide which handkerchief to get his mother. After Chris goes back home, Lena tears up a little bit and confesses how homesick she gets. |
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER IV---------
"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."
WE were singing rhymes to tease Antonia 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.
"Hello, Tony. Don't you know me?" she asked in a smooth, low voice,
looking in at us archly.
Antonia gasped and stepped back. "Why, it's Lena! Of course I did n't know
you, so dressed up!"
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.
"Hello, Jim," she said carelessly as she walked into the kitchen and
looked about her. "I've come to town to work, too, Tony."
"Have you, now? Well, ain't that funny!" Antonia stood ill at ease, and
did n't seem to know just what to do with her visitor.
The door was open into the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat crocheting
and Frances was reading. Frances asked Lena to come in and join them.
"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."
Mrs. 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 Antonia hung back--said she had
to get her cake into the oven.
"So you have come to town," said Mrs. Harling, her eyes still fixed on
Lena. "Where are you working?"
"For Mrs. 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."
"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 Mrs. Harling rather severely. "How
is your mother?"
"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."
"See that you don't forget to," said Mrs. Harling skeptically, as she took
up her crocheting again and sent the hook in and out with nimble fingers.
"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.
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?"
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."
Frances laughed. "And how do you feel about it?"
"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."
"That's right," said Frances. "And Mrs. Thomas thinks you can learn
dressmaking?"
"Yes, 'm. I've always liked to sew, but I never had much to do with. Mrs.
Thomas makes lovely things for all the town ladies. Did you know Mrs.
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.
Mrs. 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."
"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.
"Too many, like enough," said Mrs. Harling. "I don't think a hotel is a
good place for a girl; though I guess Mrs. Gardener keeps an eye on her
waitresses."
Lena's candid eyes, that always looked a little sleepy under their long
lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration.
Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. "I guess I must be leaving," she
said irresolutely.
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.
She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Antonia to come and see her
often. "I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's, with a carpet."
Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers. "I'll come sometime, but
Mrs. Harling don't like to have me run much," she said evasively.
"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 Mrs. Harling sat.
When Lena was gone, Frances asked Antonia why she had n't been a little
more cordial to her.
"I did n't know if your mother would like her coming here," said Antonia,
looking troubled. "She was kind of talked about, out there."
"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?"
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow. We
were good friends, Frances and I.
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.
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.
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.
[Illustration: Lena Lingard knitting stockings]
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.
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.
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.
"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! {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}"
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.
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 Antonia'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. Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out
of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and was sorry when Antonia
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 Antonia and me to go with her,
and help get her cattle together; they were scattered and might be gorging
themselves in somebody's cornfield.
"Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes at
married men," Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.
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."
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER V---------
AFTER Lena came to Black Hawk I often met her downtown, where she would be
matching sewing silk or buying "findings" for Mrs. Thomas. If I happened
to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she was helping
to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with Tiny Soderball
at the hotel on Saturday nights.
The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and all
the commercial travelers in that territory tried to get into Black Hawk
for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlor after supper on Saturday
nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the piano and sang
all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped the cook wash the
dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the double doors between the
parlor and the dining-room, listening to the music and giggling at the
jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling man
when I grew up. They had a gay life of it; nothing to do but ride about on
trains all day and go to theaters when they were in big cities. Behind the
hotel there was an old store building, where the salesmen opened their big
trunks and spread out their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk
merchants went to look at these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas,
though she was "retail trade," was permitted to see them and to "get
ideas." They were all generous, these traveling men; they gave Tiny
Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and
so many bottles of perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed
some of them on Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drug-store, gazing
in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's arks arranged in the frosty show
window. The boy had come to town with a neighbor to do his Christmas
shopping, for he had money of his own this year. He was only twelve, but
that winter he had got the job of sweeping out the Norwegian church and
making the fire in it every Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been,
too!
We went into Duckford's dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his
presents and showed them to me--something for each of the six younger than
himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of Tiny
Soderball's bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he would get
some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he had n't much
money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for view at
Duckford's. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the corner, because
he had never seen any before. He studied them seriously, while Lena looked
over his shoulder, telling him she thought the red letters would hold
their color best. He seemed so perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n't
enough money, after all. Presently he said gravely,--
"Sister, you know mother's name is Berthe. I don't know if I ought to get
B for Berthe, or M for Mother."
Lena patted his bristly head. "I'd get the B, Chrissy. It will please her
for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now."
That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds and
three blues. When the neighbor came in to say that it was time to start,
Lena wound Chris's comforter about his neck and turned up his jacket
collar--he had no overcoat--and we watched him climb into the wagon and
start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the windy street,
Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove. "I get awful
homesick for them, all the same," she murmured, as if she were answering
some remembered reproach.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER VI---------
WINTER comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens
that hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw
closer together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green
tree-tops, now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than
when their angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I
could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to
me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify--it was like
the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and
the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs
and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter
song, as if it said: "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All
those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of
green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was
underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for
loving the loveliness of summer.
If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office
for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it
would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone; the
frozen streets stretched long and blue before me; the lights were shining
pale in kitchen windows, and I could smell the suppers cooking as I
passed. Few people were abroad, and each one of them was hurrying toward a
fire. The glowing stoves in the houses were like magnets. When one passed
an old man, one could see nothing of his face but a red nose sticking out
between a frosted beard and a long plush cap. The young men capered along
with their hands in their pockets, and sometimes tried a slide on the icy
sidewalk. The children, in their bright hoods and comforters, never
walked, but always ran from the moment they left their door, beating their
mittens against their sides. When I got as far as the Methodist Church, I
was about halfway home. I can remember how glad I was when there happened
to be a light in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us
as we came along the frozen street. In the winter bleakness a hunger for
color came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar.
Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church
when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting,
shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude
reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there.
On winter nights, the lights in the Harlings' windows drew me like the
painted glass. Inside that warm, roomy house there was color, too. After
supper I used to catch up my cap, stick my hands in my pockets, and dive
through the willow hedge as if witches were after me. Of course, if Mr.
Harling was at home, if his shadow stood out on the blind of the west
room, I did not go in, but turned and walked home by the long way, through
the street, wondering what book I should read as I sat down with the two
old people.
Such disappointments only gave greater zest to the nights when we acted
charades, or had a costume ball in the back parlor, with Sally always
dressed like a boy. Frances taught us to dance that winter, and she said,
from the first lesson, that Antonia would make the best dancer among us.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Harling used to play the old operas for
us,--"Martha," "Norma," "Rigoletto,"--telling us the story while she played.
Every Saturday night was like a party. The parlor, the back parlor, and
the dining-room were warm and brightly lighted, with comfortable chairs
and sofas, and gay pictures on the walls. One always felt at ease there.
Antonia brought her sewing and sat with us--she was already beginning to
make pretty clothes for herself. After the long winter evenings on the
prairie, with Ambrosch's sullen silences and her mother's complaints, the
Harlings' house seemed, as she said, "like Heaven" to her. She was never
too tired to make taffy or chocolate cookies for us. If Sally whispered in
her ear, or Charley gave her three winks, Tony would rush into the kitchen
and build a fire in the range on which she had already cooked three meals
that day.
While we sat in the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy
to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories--about the calf that
broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the
freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina
interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite of our
derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short
time before the Shimerdas left that country. We all liked Tony's stories.
Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky,
and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said
seemed to come right out of her heart.
One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy, Tony told
us a new story.
"Mrs. Harling, did you ever hear about what happened up in the Norwegian
settlement last summer, when I was thrashing there? We were at Iversons',
and I was driving one of the grain wagons."
Mrs. Harling came out and sat down among us. "Could you throw the wheat
into the bin yourself, Tony?" She knew what heavy work it was.
"Yes, mam, I did. I could shovel just as fast as that fat Andern boy that
drove the other wagon. One day it was just awful hot. When we got back to
the field from dinner, we took things kind of easy. The men put in the
horses and got the machine going, and Ole Iverson was up on the deck,
cutting bands. I was sitting against a straw stack, trying to get some
shade. My wagon was n't going out first, and somehow I felt the heat awful
that day. The sun was so hot like it was going to burn the world up. After
a while I see a man coming across the stubble, and when he got close I see
it was a tramp. His toes stuck out of his shoes, and he had n't shaved for
a long while, and his eyes was awful red and wild, like he had some
sickness. He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already.
He says: 'The ponds in this country is done got so low a man could n't
drownd himself in one of 'em.'
"I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n't have
rain soon we'd have to pump water for the cattle.
"'Oh, cattle,' he says, 'you'll all take care of your cattle! Ain't you
got no beer here?' I told him he'd have to go to the Bohemians for beer;
the Norwegians did n't have none when they thrashed. 'My God!' he says,
'so it's Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.'
"Then he goes up to the machine and yells out to Ole Iverson, 'Hello,
partner, let me up there. I can cut bands, and I'm tired of trampin'. I
won't go no farther.'
"I tried to make signs to Ole, 'cause I thought that man was crazy and
might get the machine stopped up. But Ole, he was glad to get down out of
the sun and chaff--it gets down your neck and sticks to you something awful
when it's hot like that. So Ole jumped down and crawled under one of the
wagons for shade, and the tramp got on the machine. He cut bands all right
for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me and
jumped head-first right into the thrashing machine after the wheat.
"I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses, but the belt had
sucked him down, and by the time they got her stopped he was all beat and
cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out,
and the machine ain't never worked right since."
"Was he clear dead, Tony?" we cried.
"Was he dead? Well, I guess so! There, now, Nina's all upset. We won't
talk about it. Don't you cry, Nina. No old tramp won't get you while
Tony's here."
Mrs. Harling spoke up sternly. "Stop crying, Nina, or I'll always send you
upstairs when Antonia tells us about the country. Did they never find out
where he came from, Antonia?"
"Never, mam. He had n't been seen nowhere except in a little town they
call Conway. He tried to get beer there, but there was n't any saloon.
Maybe he came in on a freight, but the brakeman had n't seen him. They
could n't find no letters nor nothing on him; nothing but an old penknife
in his pocket and the wishbone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of
paper, and some poetry."
"Some poetry?" we exclaimed.
"I remember," said Frances. "It was 'The Old Oaken Bucket,' cut out of a
newspaper and nearly worn out. Ole Iverson brought it into the office and
showed it to me."
"Now, was n't that strange, Miss Frances?" Tony asked thoughtfully. "What
would anybody want to kill themselves in summer for? In thrashing time,
too! It's nice everywhere then."
"So it is, Antonia," said Mrs. Harling heartily. "Maybe I'll go home and
help you thrash next summer. Is n't that taffy nearly ready to eat? I've
been smelling it a long while."
There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had
strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and
were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and
animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to
prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white
beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people
and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there
was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but
very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly
conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any
other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings'.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of book ii, chapter vii using the context provided. | book ii, chapter vii|book ii, chapter viii|book ii, chapter ix | Jim is bored of winter by March. During that month the only exciting thing that happens is when Blind d'Arnault, a negro pianist, comes to play at the Boys' Home on a Saturday night. The atmosphere is free and relaxed, particularly because the proprietor, the snobbish and proper Mrs. Gardener, is not present. Blind d'Arnault comes in to play for the men, and Jim describes him in racialized terms. Jim thinks he is the happiest-looking person he has seen since leaving Virginia. After swaying back and forth on the piano bench, the mulatto plays negro tunes. Jim recounts Blind d'Arnault's story: When he was three, he lost his vision. His mother named him Samson and hid him away because he was ugly and dim-witted. Samson used to go listen to his mistress Miss d'Arnault practice the piano, and one day he stole into the house and began to play the piano. When he was discovered, he had a violent fit, but afterwards his mistress let him play the piano. Samson became a negro prodigy who played barbarously but in a way that was somehow more real. Blind d'Arnault senses that there are girls dancing in the other room, and the men open the doors and invite Antonia, Lena, and Tiny, who are listening on the other side of the wall, to come in. The girls are pretty, and Blind d'Arnault plays until they have to close the hotel. |
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER VII---------
WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and
shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and
men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and
pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.
Through January and February I went to the river with the Harlings on
clear nights, and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the
frozen sand. But by March the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow on
the river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,
tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts and
the piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long. There was only
one break in the dreary monotony of that month; when Blind d'Arnault, the
negro pianist, came to town. He gave a concert at the Opera House on
Monday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at our
comfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She told
Antonia she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as there
would certainly be music at the Boys' Home.
Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slipped
quietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, and
the air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been two
rooms, and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cut
away. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stove
glowed at either end of the room, and the grand piano in the middle stood
open.
There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, for
Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been having drinks
with the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardener
who ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at the
desk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but no
manager.
Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove
the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh.
She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous
about them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with something
Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, and
she talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a
favor when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling men were
flattered when Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment. The
patrons of the hotel were divided into two classes; those who had seen
Mrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.
When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was
at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.
He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with
friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did
not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture
salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who traveled
for a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all about
good and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learned
that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were
to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success
in "A Winter's Tale," in London.
The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directing
Blind d'Arnault,--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulky
mulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him with
his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a show
of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids lay
motionless over his blind eyes.
"Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me
this evening?" It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in
it. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the
ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been
repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the
happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticed
the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he was
sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a
rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was
not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.
He found the pedals and tried them, ran his yellow hands up and down the
keys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.
"She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up before
I come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems like
we might have some good old plantation songs to-night."
The men gathered round him, as he began to play "My Old Kentucky Home."
They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks old
he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was old
enough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervous
motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young negro wench
who was laundress for the d'Arnaults, concluded that her blind baby was
"not right" in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She loved him
devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his "fidgets,"
that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she brought down from
the "Big House" were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed her
other children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get his
chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembered everything
he heard, and his mammy said he "was n't all wrong." She named him Samson,
because he was blind, but on the plantation he was known as "yellow
Martha's simple child." He was docile and obedient, but when he was six
years old he began to run away from home, always taking the same
direction. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up
to the south wing of the "Big House," where Miss Nellie d'Arnault
practiced the piano every morning. This angered his mother more than
anything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness that
she could n't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught him
slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him
what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found
him near the "Big House." But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran
away again. If Miss d'Arnault stopped practicing for a moment and went
toward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an
old piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhock
rows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and
wearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell
Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearing
was nearly all he had,--though it did not occur to her that he might have
more of it than other children.
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson
to her music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from the
piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the door
close after them. He crept up to the front windows and stuck his head in:
there was no one there. He could always detect the presence of any one in
a room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His mother
had told him over and over how his master would give him to the big
mastiff if he ever found him "meddling." Samson had got too near the
mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched
it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.
Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger tips along the slippery
sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape
and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its
mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be
done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this
highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of
him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out
passages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that were
already his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical little
skull, definite as animal desires. The door opened; Miss Nellie and her
music-master stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive to
presences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the pattern
that lay all ready-made on the big and little keys. When he paused for a
moment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie
spoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the
dark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding
to the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and
gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses,--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negro
enjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on
those black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling
them through his yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, "Somebody
dancing in there." He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room. "I
hear little feet,--girls, I 'spect."
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springing
down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tiny
and Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of the
floor. They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. "What's the matter with you girls?
Dancing out here by yourselves, when there's a roomful of lonesome men on
the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny."
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
"Mrs. Gardener would n't like it," she protested. "She'd be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us."
"Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl. Now, you're Lena, are you?--and you're
Tony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight?"
O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.
"Easy, boys, easy!" he entreated them. "You'll wake the cook, and there'll
be the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be down
the minute anything's moved in the dining-room."
"Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody'll tell tales."
Johnnie shook his head. "'S a fact, boys," he said confidentially. "If I
take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!"
His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, we'll make it all
right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie."
Molly was Mrs. Gardener's name, of course. "Molly Bawn" was painted in
large blue letters on the glossy white side of the hotel bus, and "Molly"
was engraved inside Johnnie's ring and on his watch-case--doubtless on his
heart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife a
wonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than a
clerk in some other man's hotel.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, d'Arnault spread himself out over the piano,
and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the perspiration shone
on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glistening
African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood. Whenever the
dancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom out
softly, "Who's that goin' back on me? One of these city gentlemen, I bet!
Now, you girls, you ain't goin' to let that floor get cold?"
Antonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at Lena
and Tiny over Willy O'Reilly's shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim and
slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles--she wore her dresses
very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner than
the other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightly
marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnut
hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and smooth, and her commanding
dark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked bold
and resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They were
handsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and in
their eyes that brilliancy which is called,--by no metaphor, alas!--"the
light of youth."
D'Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he left
us, he showed us his gold watch which struck the hours, and a topaz ring,
given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in negro melodies, and
had heard d'Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his way
upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I walked home with
Antonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered a
long while at the Harlings' gate, whispering in the cold until the
restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER VIII---------
THE Harling children and I were never happier, never felt more contented
and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long winter. We
were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling and Tony break
the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tie up
vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I could hear
Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry trees broke
into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new nests the birds
were building, throwing clods at each other, and playing hide-and-seek
with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer
every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not
even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether
they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia were preserving
cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion
had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted
poles up from the depot.
That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about Black Hawk,
looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman who wore a
long gold watch chain about her neck and carried a black lace parasol.
They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots. When I
overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable and
confiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and in
summer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and taught
dancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.
The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacant lot
surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much like a
merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from the poles.
Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sending their
children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o'clock one met little
girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collared shirts of the
time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to the tent. Mrs. Vanni
received them at the entrance, always dressed in lavender with a great
deal of black lace, her important watch chain lying on her bosom. She wore
her hair on the top of her head, built up in a black tower, with red coral
combs. When she smiled, she showed two rows of strong, crooked yellow
teeth. She taught the little children herself, and her husband, the
harpist, taught the older ones.
Often the mothers brought their fancy-work and sat on the shady side of
the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under
the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good
trade when the dancing was over. Mr. Jensen, the Danish laundryman, used
to bring a chair from his porch and sit out in the grass plot. Some ragged
little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under a white
umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came
to dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town.
Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and
the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in
the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from the laundryman's garden,
and the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the City Council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up "Home, Sweet Home," all Black Hawk knew it was ten o'clock.
You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the Round House
whistle.
At last there was something to do in those long, empty summer evenings,
when the married people sat like images on their front porches, and the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlor, the butcher shop. Now there was a place
where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh
aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed
to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple
trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by light-hearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in--one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why had
n't we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
any one could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the Round House mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farmhands
who lived near enough to ride into town after their day's work was over.
I never missed a Saturday night dance. The tent was open until midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor,--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with "the hired
girls."
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER IX---------
THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had "advantages," never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The
older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from
life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all,
like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender
age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country
girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived
there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of
them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had
given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming
to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and
made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court
in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly
and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in
summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never
moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not
to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom,
gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief
that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out,"
were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as
their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had
borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the
Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters
go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they
sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get
positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the
language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from
debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they
had been when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others,
like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth
they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and
sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping
to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of
debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,--usually of like
nationality,--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman,
and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it
matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who could n't speak English.
There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation,
much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father. Yet people saw no
difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all
"hired girls."
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into
their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant
can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to
the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian
girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and
living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat
upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young
fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his
father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the
window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in
her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their
beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious
mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons.
The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk
youth.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who
swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the
jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor
where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in
and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home
from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the
sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their
long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only
made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to
see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at
him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there
were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with
their white throats and their pink cheeks.
The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which
the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the
drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from
Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire
from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the
place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The
three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about
the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers
that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on
neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank,
always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances
Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with
her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on
"popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood
trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times
I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He
reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena
herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to
visit her mother, I heard from Antonia that young Lovett drove all the way
out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I
hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls
a better position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work;
had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was
daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he
ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a
half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena
again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he
happened to meet her on the sidewalk.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed,
high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from
a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book ii, chapter xi based on the provided context. | book ii, chapter x|book ii, chapter xi|book ii, chapter xii | Wick Cutter the money-lender is a sketchy philanderer who likes to gamble, and he had gotten two Swedish servant girls pregnant. He and his wife fight constantly and viciously. Mrs. Cutter is a sharp and scary-looking person who obsessively paints china. The Cutters fight about the question of inheritance, and each blames the other for remaining childless. They never separate, however, and seem to find each other interesting. Jim remarks that Wick Cutter is a unique rascal but that Mrs. Cutter is just a prototypical shrew. |
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER X---------
IT was at the Vannis' tent that Antonia was discovered. Hitherto she had
been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings than as one of the "hired
girls." She had lived in their house and yard and garden; her thoughts
never seemed to stray outside that little kingdom. But after the tent came
to town she began to go about with Tiny and Lena and their friends. The
Vannis often said that Antonia was the best dancer of them all. I
sometimes heard murmurs in the crowd outside the pavilion that Mrs.
Harling would soon have her hands full with that girl. The young men began
to joke with each other about "the Harlings' Tony" as they did about "the
Marshalls' Anna" or "the Gardeners' Tiny."
Antonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. She hummed the dance
tunes all day. When supper was late, she hurried with her dishes, dropped
and smashed them in her excitement. At the first call of the music, she
became irresponsible. If she had n't time to dress, she merely flung off
her apron and shot out of the kitchen door. Sometimes I went with her; the
moment the lighted tent came into view she would break into a run, like a
boy. There were always partners waiting for her; she began to dance before
she got her breath.
Antonia's success at the tent had its consequences. The iceman lingered
too long now, when he came into the covered porch to fill the
refrigerator. The delivery boys hung about the kitchen when they brought
the groceries. Young farmers who were in town for Saturday came tramping
through the yard to the back door to engage dances, or to invite Tony to
parties and picnics. Lena and Norwegian Anna dropped in to help her with
her work, so that she could get away early. The boys who brought her home
after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.
One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he
came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and
then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in
time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Antonia
was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry
his employer's daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Antonia to let him
walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he
was one of Miss Frances's friends, and she did n't mind. On the back porch
he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,--because he was going to be
married on Monday,--he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand
free and slapped him.
Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. "This is what I've
been expecting, Antonia. You've been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you've got the same
reputation. I won't have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard
all the time. This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can
quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over."
The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Antonia, they found her agitated but determined. "Stop going to the tent?"
she panted. "I would n't think of it for a minute! My own father could n't
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!" she blazed out indignantly.
"You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia," Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. "I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house."
"Then I'll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the
Cutters' to work at the hotel, and I can have her place."
Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. "Antonia, if you go to the Cutters to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you."
Tony snatched up the tea-kettle and began to pour boiling water over the
glasses, laughing excitedly. "Oh, I can take care of myself! I'm a lot
stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there's no
children. The work's nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot
in the afternoons."
"I thought you liked children. Tony, what's come over you?"
"I don't know, something has." Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw. "A
girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there
won't be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the
other girls."
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. "If you go to work for the
Cutters, you're likely to have a fling that you won't get up from in a
hurry."
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that
every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked
out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had
never let herself get fond of Antonia.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER XI---------
WICK CUTTER was the money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When
a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling
or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter's first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious
bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, "for
sentiment's sake," as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a
town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a
little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early
Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape
restraint. Cutter was one of the "fast set" of Black Hawk business men. He
was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light
burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was
going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than
sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that
other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys.
When he came to our house on business, he quoted "Poor Richard's Almanack"
to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a
cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he
would begin at once to talk about "the good old times" and simple living.
I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and
glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her
hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as
if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud
baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had
lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had
taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted
her. He still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet,
apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy,
scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a
fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about
horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On
Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around
the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a
black-and-white-check traveling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the
breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a
quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no
change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash
his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that
a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back
yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar
combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so
despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a
terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with
iron-gray hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.
When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me; it was the very color and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-gray brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her washbowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!"
They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town
at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether
he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her "people," whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her "to live by her brush."
Cutter was n't shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the
"privacy" which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed--easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER XII---------
AFTER Antonia went to live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about
nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not
going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the
subject of caustic comment. Under Lena's direction she copied Mrs.
Gardener's new party dress and Mrs. Smith's street costume so ingeniously
in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs.
Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she
went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls'
Norwegian Anna. We High-School boys used to linger on the playground at
the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill
along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every
day, but as they passed us, I used to think with pride that Antonia, like
Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still "fairest of them all."
Being a Senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the
girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlor, where they would
sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country. I
remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared she
had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. "I guess
you'll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won't he look
funny, girls?"
Lena laughed. "You'll have to hurry up, Jim. If you're going to be a
preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and
then baptize the babies."
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
"Baptists don't believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?"
I told her I did n't know what they believed, and did n't care, and that I
certainly was n't going to be a preacher.
"That's too bad," Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. "You'd make
such a good one. You're so studious. Maybe you'd like to be a professor.
You used to teach Tony, did n't you?"
Antonia broke in. "I've set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You'd be good
with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother's trained you up so nice. My papa
always said you were an awful smart boy."
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. "Won't you be surprised, Miss
Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?"
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the
High-School Principal had just come into the front part of the shop to buy
bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly
one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no
interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he
was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at
once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl
Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to
join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the
people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I
was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every
morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like
the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me,
because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after
supper? Usually I had learned next day's lessons by the time I left the
school building, and I could n't sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the
familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the
houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply
sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk
had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to
be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had
rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon
there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the
lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept
rye bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please
the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the
talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the
shoulder.
"Jim," he said, "I am good friends with you and I always like to see you.
But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has
always treated me fine, and I don't like to have you come into my place,
because I know he don't like it, and it puts me in bad with him."
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drug-store, and listen to the old men who sat
there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could
go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries
for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him,
the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often
went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with
the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to
Omaha or Denver, "where there was some life." He was sure to bring out his
pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and
nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces.
For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another
malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials
requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go
trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say "there was nothing in life for
him but trout streams, ever since he'd lost his twins."
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other
lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to
pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little,
sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back
porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light
wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.
Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness
some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to
me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save
washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This
guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's
speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed.
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice
in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over
the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders
in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming
process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced;
then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could
see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark
again.
After I refused to join "the Owls," as they were called, I made a bold
resolve to go to the Saturday night dances at Firemen's Hall. I knew it
would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather did
n't approve of dancing anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance
I could go to the Masonic Hall, among "the people we knew." It was just my
point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove
in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my
shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet
and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and
went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I
felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to
think about it.
The dance at the Firemen's Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all
the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis' tent.
Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who came down
on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always
there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their
house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung
out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls
well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that
his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her
mother, and that he had been "trying to make up for it ever since." On
summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his
laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the
big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of
white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered
his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression
seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and
evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed
clothes, and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and
sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they
did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine
pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the
brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and
curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much
English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind,
simple girls and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one
smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with
rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen's garden.
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but every one
wanted a turn with Tony and Lena. Lena moved without exertion, rather
indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner's
shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music
seemed to put her into a soft, waking dream, and her violet-colored eyes
looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When
she sighed she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance "Home,
Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every
dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz--the waltz of coming
home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got
restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer
day.
When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you did n't return to
anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to
schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always
putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around
the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of
the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a
living with his fiddle, how different Antonia's life might have been!
Antonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor
who was a kind of professional ladies' man, as we said. I remember how
admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her
velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardener's black velvet. She was lovely to
see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she
danced. That constant, dark color in her cheeks never changed.
One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Antonia came to the hall with
Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we
were in the Cutter's yard, sheltered by the evergreens, I told her she
must kiss me good-night.
"Why, sure, Jim." A moment later she drew her face away and whispered
indignantly, "Why, Jim! You know you ain't right to kiss me like that.
I'll tell your grandmother on you!"
"Lena Lingard lets me kiss her," I retorted, "and I'm not half as fond of
her as I am of you."
"Lena does?" Tony gasped. "If she's up to any of her nonsense with you,
I'll scratch her eyes out!" She took my arm again and we walked out of the
gate and up and down the sidewalk. "Now, don't you go and be a fool like
some of these town boys. You're not going to sit around here and whittle
store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school
and make something of yourself. I'm just awful proud of you. You won't go
and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?"
"I don't care anything about any of them but you," I said. "And you'll
always treat me like a kid, I suppose."
She laughed and threw her arms around me. "I expect I will, but you're a
kid I'm awful fond of, anyhow! You can like me all you want to, but if I
see you hanging round with Lena much, I'll go to your grandmother, as sure
as your name's Jim Burden! Lena's all right, only--well, you know yourself
she's soft that way. She can't help it. It's natural to her."
If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high
as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters' gate softly behind
me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she
was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark,
silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid
young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women
were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!
I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it
was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have
pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding
down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over
and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.
One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was
in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them.
Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a
curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a
kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to
me with a soft sigh and said, "Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you
as much as I like."
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I
never did.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for book ii, chapter xv with the given context. | null | At the end of the summer, the Cutters leave Black Hawk on a business trip, and Antonia comes to the Burdens to complain about feeling uneasy. Mr. Cutter had put all the silver and important documents under Antonia's bed and told her that she had to sleep there in order to keep them safe. Worried that Mr. Cutter is playing some sort of trick, she gets Jim to sleep at the Cutters in her bed, while she stays with Grandmother. On the third night, Jim awakes to find Mr. Cutter trying to grope him. They get into a fight, with Mr. Cutter beating Jim fiercely about the face. Jim runs back home and in the morning feels disgusted, ashamed, and angry at Antonia. He refuses to see her or a doctor and is worried about word getting around town. When Antonia and Grandmother go over to the Cutters' house to pack up Antonia's belongings, they find her room in a disarray. They also find Mrs. Cutter, who is indignant because her husband intentionally put her on the wrong train so that he could come back to Black Hawk for an intended rendezvous with Antonia. Jim notes that Mr. Cutter came up with a needlessly complex plan specifically to outrage Mrs. Cutter, and he comments that it was obviously Mr. Cutter's greatest joy to make his wife upset. |
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER XIII---------
I NOTICED one afternoon that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed
to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I
was studying and went to her, asking if she did n't feel well, and if I
could n't help her with her work.
"No, thank you, Jim. I'm troubled, but I guess I'm well enough. Getting a
little rusty in the bones, maybe," she added bitterly.
I stood hesitating. "What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has
grandfather lost any money?"
"No, it ain't money. I wish it was. But I've heard things. You must 'a'
known it would come back to me sometime." She dropped into a chair, and
covering her face with her apron, began to cry. "Jim," she said, "I was
never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But
it came about so; there was n't any other way for you, it seemed like."
I put my arms around her. I could n't bear to see her cry.
"What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen's dances?"
She nodded.
"I'm sorry I sneaked off like that. But there's nothing wrong about the
dances, and I have n't done anything wrong. I like all those country
girls, and I like to dance with them. That's all there is to it."
"But it ain't right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People
say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain't just to us."
"I don't care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles
it. I won't go to the Firemen's Hall again."
I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I
sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that
was not in our High-School course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of
college requirement work in the summer, and to enter the freshman class at
the University without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as
soon as possible.
Disapprobation hurt me, I found,--even that of people whom I did not
admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely, and fell back
on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for companionship.
I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a May-basket for Nina
Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman who
always had more window plants than any one else, and spent an afternoon
trimming a little work-basket. When dusk came on, and the new moon hung in
the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings' front door with my offering, rang
the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I
could hear Nina's cries of delight, and I felt comforted.
On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home
with Frances, and talked to her about my plans and about the reading I was
doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously
offended with me.
"Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess. But you know she
was hurt about Antonia, and she can't understand why you like to be with
Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set."
"Can you?" I asked bluntly.
Frances laughed. "Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country, and
you like to take sides. In some ways you're older than boys of your age.
It will be all right with mama after you pass your college examinations
and she sees you're in earnest."
"If you were a boy," I persisted, "you would n't belong to the Owl Club,
either. You'd be just like me."
She shook her head. "I would and I would n't. I expect I know the country
girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The
trouble with you, Jim, is that you're romantic. Mama's going to your
Commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to
be about. She wants you to do well."
I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervor a great many things
I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House to hear the
Commencement exercises, and I looked at her most of the time while I made
my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterward she
came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with our diplomas in our
hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: "You surprised me, Jim. I did
n't believe you could do as well as that. You did n't get that speech out
of books." Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from
Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.
I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I passed the Methodist
Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under
the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush
June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me--Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.
"Oh, Jim, it was splendid!" Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. "There ain't a lawyer in Black Hawk
could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to
him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, did
n't he, girls?"
Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: "What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget."
Anna spoke wistfully. "It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know."
"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,"--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels,--"there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I
dedicated it to him."
She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.
I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.
----------BOOK II, CHAPTER XV---------
LATE in August the Cutters went to Omaha for a few days, leaving Antonia
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, Antonia came over to see us. Grandmother
noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted. "You've got something on
your mind, Antonia," she said anxiously.
"Yes, Mrs. Burden. I could n'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 had n'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 would n'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."
Antonia 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 did n'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 some one 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 could n'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
nightshirt, 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 hatrack, lay down on the parlor 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 discolored. 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
nightshirt, 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 Antonia 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 Antonia. But I lay with my disfigured
face to the wall and felt no particular gratitude. My one concern was that
grandmother should keep every one 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 drug-store 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, Antonia 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 Antonia'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 Antonia was packing her trunk and putting her room in order, to
leave it, the front-door bell 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 afterwards.
Grandmother would not let her see Antonia at all, but made her sit down in
the parlor while she related to her just what had occurred the night
before. Antonia 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 horselike head and rolling her eyes.
Grandmother said she had n'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 could
n't do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!
|
My Antonia.book iii.chapt | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for book iii, chapter i based on the provided context. | At the University in Lincoln, Jim meets Gaston Cleric, who is his mentor in the Latin Department and who arrived at the same time he did. Jim stays in Lincoln during the summer studying Greek, and he spends a lot of time socializing with Gaston, who helps effect his mental awakening. During that time, the University is still very new, and it is full of earnest young men from the farms and enthusiastic, young instructors. Jim lives in a small cramped apartment where Gaston used to come visit him to talk about poetry and Italy. Gaston talks very vividly and poetically, and Jim imagines that he might have been a poet if he didn't waste so much creativity talking to other people. Jim particularly remembers one conversation they had about Dante's admiration for his teacher Virgil. Although he admires Gaston, Jim knows that he cannot be a scholar because he loves the people and places of his past so much. He has very vivid memories of them sometimes. |
----------BOOK III, CHAPTER I---------
AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.
I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.
In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the University from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through
the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few
enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an
atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the
young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years
before.
Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near
the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.
When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of old
Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.
I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"
Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
----------BOOK III, CHAPTER II---------
ONE March evening in my Sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down,
the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star
hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon
the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the
dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics
where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.
"Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit." I turned back to the beginning of the third
book, which we had read in class that morning. "Primus ego in patriam
mecum {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the
Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here
meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood
on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately
come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the
palatia Romana, but to his own little "country"; to his father's fields,
"sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops."
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to
leave the AEneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him
unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of
the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to
the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a
good man, "I was the first to bring the Muse into my country."
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the
wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately
enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at
my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the
page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New
England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried
to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
"I expect you hardly know me, Jim."
The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped
into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard! She was so quietly
conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and
a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her
yellow hair.
I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.
She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with
the naive curiosity I remembered so well. "You are quite comfortable here,
are n't you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for myself.
I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've made
a real good start."
"But, Lena, when did you come?"
"Oh, I've been here all winter. Did n't your grandmother ever write you?
I've thought about looking you up lots of times. But we've all heard what
a studious young man you've got to be, and I felt bashful. I did n't know
whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that
was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.
"You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course. Do
you think I've changed?"
"Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps it's
your clothes that make a difference."
"You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business." She
took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft,
flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into
it, as she did into everything. She told me her business was going well,
and she had saved a little money.
"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so
long. I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it
before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I'll take her down new
furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all
winter."
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared-for, and
thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the
snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the
cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well
in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.
"You must feel proud of yourself, Lena," I said heartily. "Look at me;
I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."
"Tony says you're going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She's
always bragging about you, you know."
"Tell me, how _is_ Tony?"
"She's fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She's
housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see
after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in Tony.
Tony's made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond of her
that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things."
"Is she still going with Larry Donovan?"
"Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess they're engaged. Tony talks about
him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about it,
because she was never a girl to be soft. She won't hear a word against
him. She's so sort of innocent."
I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.
Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't
do any good. She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's failing, you know;
if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."
"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.
"I think you had." Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. "It's a good
thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry's afraid of them.
They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people.
What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my
book toward her. I caught a faint odor of violet sachet. "So that's Latin,
is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater sometimes, though, for I've
seen you there. Don't you just love a good play, Jim? I can't stay at home
in the evening if there's one in town. I'd be willing to work like a
slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where there are theaters."
"Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to see
you, are n't you?"
"Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased. I'm never busy after six
o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to save
time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one
for you. Well,"--she began to put on her white gloves,--"it's been awful
good to see you, Jim."
"You need n't hurry, need you? You've hardly told me anything yet."
"We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don't often have lady
visitors. The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very
much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!" Lena
laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat she shook her head. "No, I don't want you to go
with me. I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store. You would n't care for
them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I
must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always so
afraid some one will run off with you!" Lena slipped her silk sleeves into
the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it
slowly. I walked with her to the door. "Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you want. Have you?"
She turned her soft cheek to me. "Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my
ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I
loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed
my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and
the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.
----------BOOK III, CHAPTER III---------
IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in "Rip Van Winkle," and to a war play called "Shenandoah." She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business
now, and she would n't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked
to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything
was true. It was like going to revival meetings with some one who was
always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a
kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant
much more to her than to me. She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and
hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which
two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille."
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked
down to the theater. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a
holiday humor. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people
come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the "incidental
music" would be from the opera "Traviata," which was made from the same
story as the play. We had neither of us read the play, and we did not know
what it was about--though I seemed to remember having heard it was a piece
in which great actresses shone. "The Count of Monte Cristo," which I had
seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I
knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family
resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not
have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody
Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there
was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theater lines
that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which
passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her
friends entered. This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne
bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen them opened
anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it
then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me, was
delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged
hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling
whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing
young men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or
less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I
saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world
in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every
pleasantry enlarged one's horizon. One could experience excess and satiety
without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a
drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of
the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my
ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.
The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though
historic. She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and
afterward a "star" under his direction. She was a woman who could not be
taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried
with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not
squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique
curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty--I think she was lame--I
seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was
disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the
extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to
fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent,
reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I
wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the
frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in
the world. Her sudden illness, when the gayety was at its height, her
pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she
smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano
lightly--it all wrung my heart. But not so much as her cynicism in the long
dialogue with her lover which followed. How far was I from questioning her
unbelief! While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded with
her--accompanied by the orchestra in the old "Traviata" duet, "misterioso,
misterioso!"--she maintained her bitter skepticism, and the curtain fell on
her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away
with his flower.
Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away
at the "Traviata" music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so
clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left Lena in
tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to
smoke. As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not
brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior
dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth. Lena was at least
a woman, and I was a man.
Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept
unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of
idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable
happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.
I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and
temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who
first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was as heavy
and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the
consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.
Lightness of stress or behavior was far from her. Her voice was heavy and
deep: "Ar-r-r-mond!" she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the
bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them.
They created the character in spite of her.
The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never
been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in
Olympe's salon for the fourth act. There were chandeliers hung from the
ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men
played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made
their entrance. After all the others had gathered round the card tables,
and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the
staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her
face! One knew at a glance how it was with her. When Armand, with the
terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the
gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside
me and covered her face with her hands.
The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By this time there was n't a nerve
in me that had n't been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me cry. I
loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow! The
New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now. I
wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for
elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund
woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.
When we reached the door of the theater, the streets were shining with
rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement
present, and I took Lena home under its shelter. After leaving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The
lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the
rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with
a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the
showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only
yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and
which had reached me only that night, across long years and several
languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The idea is one
that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is
put on, it is April.
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My Antonia.book iv.chapte | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of book iv, chapter iii, utilizing the provided context. | book iv, chapter i|book iv, chapter ii|book iv, chapter iii | On the way to see Widow Steavens, Jim looks at the country and seems to remember every single aspect of it. Mrs. Steavens asks him to stay the night, and after dinner she begins to tell Antonia's story: The summer before she was supposed to be married, Antonia used to come to the Widow Steaven's house and sew her fine wedding linen, singing happily in Bohemian. Larry Donovan would write letters to her while working on the railroad, and he told her that they would have to move to Denver. When it came time for her to meet him, Ambrosch did the right thing and gave her a very nice dowry. In Denver, she sent a couple of postcards saying that they would get married soon, after Larry got his promotion. One day, though, Antonia came back on a wagon, and the next day Mrs. Steavens went to visit to see what had happened. Antonia tells her that Larry had gotten fired and only lived with her in Denver until her money ran out, and then he left to go to Mexico to cheat railway passengers. Antonia did not try to get a civil marriage because she didn't want to support him. Mrs. Steavens cries when she hears the story because she thinks Antonia is a good girl. After her marriage fiasco, Antonia starts working in the fields all the time and doesn't visit anyone. Mrs. Steavens worries about her and visits her as much as she can. One day Antonia reminisces about her childhood with Jim and her father, and she says that she feels like she won't live very long so she's just trying to enjoy the fall. During the winter Antonia wears men's outerwear. When she goes into labor, Mrs. Shimerda comes running to the house saying that Ambrosch is behaving like a devil, and Mrs. Steavens goes over and warns Ambrosch not to touch the child. Now the baby is a year and eight months, and Antonia, a good mother, loves it dearly. |
----------BOOK IV, CHAPTER I---------
TWO years after I left Lincoln I completed my academic course at Harvard.
Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On
the night of my arrival Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her
husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in
grandmother's parlor, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at
her gate, she said simply, "You know, of course, about poor Antonia."
Poor Antonia! Every one would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Antonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted
her, and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
"He never married her," Frances said. "I have n't seen her since she came
back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She
brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's settled down
to be Ambrosch's drudge for good."
I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart
away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had
got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to
think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used
to stop at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the water-front
in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his
empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors' lodging-house. This,
every one said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running
a decent place, she could n't keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses
were alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well
as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the
dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big tray full of dishes,
glancing rather pertly at the spruce traveling men, and contemptuously at
the scrubby ones--who were so afraid of her that they did n't dare to ask
for two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we would have been, as we sat
talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we could have known
what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous
life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for
Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went
in dog sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came
into the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike
farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and
her friends, and nearly every one else in Circle City, started for the
Klondike fields on the last steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze
for the winter. That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed
a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their
placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for
it in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one
night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The
poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be
amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a
working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from
the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on
Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson
building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off
into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged
miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable
fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake City in 1908.
She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in
manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener, for whom she
had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about some of the
desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but the thrill of
them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing interested her much now
but making money. The only two human beings of whom she spoke with any
feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given her his claim, and Lena
Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco and go into
business there.
"Lincoln was never any place for her," Tiny remarked. "In a town of that
size Lena would always be gossiped about. Frisco's the right field for
her. She has a fine class of trade. Oh, she's just the same as she always
was! She's careless, but she's level-headed. She's the only person I know
who never gets any older. It's fine for me to have her there; somebody who
enjoys things like that. She keeps an eye on me and won't let me be
shabby. When she thinks I need a new dress, she makes it and sends it
home--with a bill that's long enough, I can tell you!"
Tiny limped slightly when she walked. The claim on Hunker Creek took toll
from its possessors. Tiny had been caught in a sudden turn of weather,
like poor Johnson. She lost three toes from one of those pretty little
feet that used to trip about Black Hawk in pointed slippers and striped
stockings. Tiny mentioned this mutilation quite casually--did n't seem
sensitive about it. She was satisfied with her success, but not elated.
She was like some one in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn
out.
----------BOOK IV, CHAPTER II---------
SOON after I got home that summer I persuaded my grandparents to have
their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer's
shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of
his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on
his walls: girls in Commencement dresses, country brides and grooms
holding hands, family groups of three generations. I noticed, in a heavy
frame, one of those depressing "crayon enlargements" often seen in
farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses.
The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.
"That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You remember her; she used to be the
Harling's Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; would n't
hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for
it Saturday."
I went away feeling that I must see Antonia again. Another girl would have
kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its picture on
exhibition at the town photographer's, in a great gilt frame. How like
her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she had n't thrown herself
away on such a cheap sort of fellow.
Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew
aristocrats who are always afraid that some one may ask them to put up a
car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service,
silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of
official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to
compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently
from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and
his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the
station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of the utmost importance
to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was
usually cold and distant with men, but with all women he had a silent,
grave familiarity, a special handshake, accompanied by a significant,
deliberate look. He took women, married or single, into his confidence;
walked them up and down in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he
had made by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much
better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver
than the roughshod man who then bore that title. His unappreciated worth
was the tender secret Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always
able to make some foolish heart ache over it.
As I drew near home that morning, I saw Mrs. Harling out in her yard,
digging round her mountain-ash tree. It was a dry summer, and she had now
no boy to help her. Charley was off in his battleship, cruising somewhere
on the Caribbean sea. I turned in at the gate--it was with a feeling of
pleasure that I opened and shut that gate in those days; I liked the feel
of it under my hand. I took the spade away from Mrs. Harling, and while I
loosened the earth around the tree, she sat down on the steps and talked
about the oriole family that had a nest in its branches.
"Mrs. Harling," I said presently, "I wish I could find out exactly how
Antonia's marriage fell through."
"Why don't you go out and see your grandfather's tenant, the Widow
Steavens? She knows more about it than anybody else. She helped Antonia
get ready to be married, and she was there when Antonia came back. She
took care of her when the baby was born. She could tell you everything.
Besides, the Widow Steavens is a good talker, and she has a remarkable
memory."
----------BOOK IV, CHAPTER III---------
ON the first or second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out
for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was
over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of
smoke from the steam thrashing-machines. The old pasture land was now
being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was
disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing. There were
wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards,
and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men
who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the
blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat
tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in
long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and
harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a
great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found
that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the
modeling of human faces.
When I drew up to our old windmill, the Widow Steavens came out to meet
me. She was brown as an Indian woman, tall, and very strong. When I was
little, her massive head had always seemed to me like a Roman senator's. I
told her at once why I had come.
"You'll stay the night with us, Jimmy? I'll talk to you after supper. I
can take more interest when my work is off my mind. You've no prejudice
against hot biscuit for supper? Some have, these days."
While I was putting my horse away I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at
my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him
at six.
After supper Mrs. Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room,
while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm
papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining
outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess
put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the
heat. She sat down in her favorite rocking-chair and settled a little
stool comfortably under her tired feet. "I'm troubled with callouses, Jim;
getting old," she sighed cheerfully. She crossed her hands in her lap and
sat as if she were at a meeting of some kind.
"Now, it's about that dear Antonia you want to know? Well, you've come to
the right person. I've watched her like she'd been my own daughter.
"When she came home to do her sewing that summer before she was to be
married, she was over here about every day. They've never had a sewing
machine at the Shimerdas', and she made all her things here. I taught her
hemstitching, and I helped her to cut and fit. She used to sit there at
that machine by the window, pedaling the life out of it--she was so
strong--and always singing them queer Bohemian songs, like she was the
happiest thing in the world.
"'Antonia,' I used to say, 'don't run that machine so fast. You won't
hasten the day none that way.'
"Then she'd laugh and slow down for a little, but she'd soon forget and
begin to pedal and sing again. I never saw a girl work harder to go to
housekeeping right and well-prepared. Lovely table linen the Harlings had
given her, and Lena Lingard had sent her nice things from Lincoln. We
hemstitched all the tablecloths and pillow-cases, and some of the sheets.
Old Mrs. Shimerda knit yards and yards of lace for her underclothes. Tony
told me just how she meant to have everything in her house. She'd even
bought silver spoons and forks, and kept them in her trunk. She was always
coaxing brother to go to the post-office. Her young man did write her real
often, from the different towns along his run.
"The first thing that troubled her was when he wrote that his run had been
changed, and they would likely have to live in Denver. 'I'm a country
girl,' she said, 'and I doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in
a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow.' She soon
cheered up, though.
"At last she got the letter telling her when to come. She was shaken by
it; she broke the seal and read it in this room. I suspected then that
she'd begun to get faint-hearted, waiting; though she'd never let me see
it.
"Then there was a great time of packing. It was in March, if I remember
rightly, and a terrible muddy, raw spell, with the roads bad for hauling
her things to town. And here let me say, Ambrosch did the right thing. He
went to Black Hawk and bought her a set of plated silver in a purple
velvet box, good enough for her station. He gave her three hundred dollars
in money; I saw the check. He'd collected her wages all those first years
she worked out, and it was but right. I shook him by the hand in this
room. 'You're behaving like a man, Ambrosch,' I said, 'and I'm glad to see
it, son.'
"'T was a cold, raw day he drove her and her three trunks into Black Hawk
to take the night train for Denver--the boxes had been shipped before. He
stopped the wagon here, and she ran in to tell me good-bye. She threw her
arms around me and kissed me, and thanked me for all I'd done for her. She
was so happy she was crying and laughing at the same time, and her red
cheeks was all wet with rain.
"'You're surely handsome enough for any man,' I said, looking her over.
"She laughed kind of flighty like, and whispered, 'Good-bye, dear house!'
and then ran out to the wagon. I expect she meant that for you and your
grandmother, as much as for me, so I'm particular to tell you. This house
had always been a refuge to her.
"Well, in a few days we had a letter saying she got to Denver safe, and he
was there to meet her. They were to be married in a few days. He was
trying to get his promotion before he married, she said. I did n't like
that, but I said nothing. The next week Yulka got a postal card, saying
she was 'well and happy.' After that we heard nothing. A month went by,
and old Mrs. Shimerda began to get fretful. Ambrosch was as sulky with me
as if I'd picked out the man and arranged the match.
"One night brother William came in and said that on his way back from the
fields he had passed a livery team from town, driving fast out the west
road. There was a trunk on the front seat with the driver, and another
behind. In the back seat there was a woman all bundled up; but for all her
veils, he thought 't was Antonia Shimerda, or Antonia Donovan, as her name
ought now to be.
"The next morning I got brother to drive me over. I can walk still, but my
feet ain't what they used to be, and I try to save myself. The lines
outside the Shimerdas' house was full of washing, though it was the middle
of the week. As we got nearer I saw a sight that made my heart sink--all
those underclothes we'd put so much work on, out there swinging in the
wind. Yulka came bringing a dishpanful of wrung clothes, but she darted
back into the house like she was loath to see us. When I went in, Antonia
was standing over the tubs, just finishing up a big washing. Mrs. Shimerda
was going about her work, talking and scolding to herself. She did n't so
much as raise her eyes. Tony wiped her hand on her apron and held it out
to me, looking at me steady but mournful. When I took her in my arms she
drew away. 'Don't, Mrs. Steavens,' she says, 'you'll make me cry, and I
don't want to.'
"I whispered and asked her to come out of doors with me. I knew she could
n't talk free before her mother. She went out with me, bareheaded, and we
walked up toward the garden.
"'I'm not married, Mrs. Steavens,' she says to me very quiet and
natural-like, 'and I ought to be.'
"'Oh, my child,' says I, 'what's happened to you? Don't be afraid to tell
me!'
"She sat down on the draw-side, out of sight of the house. 'He's run away
from me,' she said. 'I don't know if he ever meant to marry me.'
"'You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?' says I.
"'He did n't have any job. He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking down
fares. I did n't know. I thought he had n't been treated right. He was
sick when I got there. He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived with
me till my money gave out, and afterwards I found he had n't really been
hunting work at all. Then he just did n't come back. One nice fellow at
the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up. He
said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and would n't come back any more. I
guess he's gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there,
collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was
always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way.'
"I asked her, of course, why she did n't insist on a civil marriage at
once--that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, 'I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me.'
"Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried
like a young thing. I could n't help it. I was just about heart-broke. It
was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the
colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that
Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out
so well, and was coming home here every summer in her silks and her
satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give credit where credit is
due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great difference in
the principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that had
come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marveled at her calm. As we
went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they
was drying well, and seemed to take pride in their whiteness--she said
she'd been living in a brick block, where she did n't have proper
conveniences to wash them.
"The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it
seemed to be an understood thing. Ambrosch did n't get any other hand to
help him. Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution
a good while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She did
n't take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and steady. Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd put on airs. She was
so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her. She never
went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At first I
was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in
from the fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about
the grain and the weather as if she'd never had another interest, and if I
went over at night she always looked dead weary. She was afflicted with
toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated, and she went about with her
face swollen half the time. She would n't go to Black Hawk to a dentist
for fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell
long ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let
Antonia work so hard and pull herself down. He said, 'If you put that in
her head, you better stay home.' And after that I did.
"Antonia worked on through harvest and thrashing, though she was too
modest to go out thrashing for the neighbors, like when she was young and
free. I did n't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to
herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and
I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty
cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she
would n't have brought them so far.
"It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she had
n't gone too far.
"'It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,' she
said one day, 'but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on.
It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all
over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father
used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long, so
I'm just enjoying every day of this fall.'
"After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots, and a
man's felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and
I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the
snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Antonia driving her cattle
homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to
face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual. 'Deary me,' I says
to myself, 'the girl's stayed out too late. It'll be dark before she gets
them cattle put into the corral.' I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too
miserable to get up and drive them.
"That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and
shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay
down on the bed and bore her child.
"I was lifting supper when old Mrs. Shimerda came running down the
basement stairs, out of breath and screeching:--
"'Baby come, baby come!' she says. 'Ambrosch much like devil!'
"Brother William is surely a patient man. He was just ready to sit down to
a hot supper after a long day in the fields. Without a word he rose and
went down to the barn and hooked up his team. He got us over there as
quick as it was humanly possible. I went right in, and began to do for
Antonia; but she laid there with her eyes shut and took no account of me.
The old woman got a tubful of warm water to wash the baby. I overlooked
what she was doing and I said out loud:--
"'Mrs. Shimerda, don't you put that strong yellow soap near that baby.
You'll blister its little skin.' I was indignant.
[Illustration: Antonia driving her cattle home]
"'Mrs. Steavens,' Antonia said from the bed, 'if you'll look in the top
tray of my trunk, you'll see some fine soap.' That was the first word she
spoke.
"After I'd dressed the baby, I took it out to show it to Ambrosch. He was
muttering behind the stove and would n't look at it.
"'You'd better put it out in the rain barrel,' he says.
"'Now, see here, Ambrosch,' says I, 'there's a law in this land, don't
forget that. I stand here a witness that this baby has come into the world
sound and strong, and I intend to keep an eye on what befalls it.' I pride
myself I cowed him.
"Well, I expect you're not much interested in babies, but Antonia's got on
fine. She loved it from the first as dearly as if she'd had a ring on her
finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight months old now,
and no baby was ever better cared-for. Antonia is a natural-born mother. I
wish she could marry and raise a family, but I don't know as there's much
chance now."
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the
ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn
and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow
against the blue sky.
|
Narrative of the Life of | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter ii, utilizing the provided context. | chapter i|chapter ii | Douglass describes his master's family and their relationship with Colonel Lloyd, who was sort of a "grand master" of the area. Douglass explains that if slaves broke plantation rules, tried to run away, or became generally "unmanageable," they were whipped and shipped to Baltimore to be sold to slave traders as a "warning to the slaves." He discusses the meager food and clothing allowance given to slaves: "Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might be seen all seasons of the year." Slaves had no beds and only some were given blankets. They had to work long hours in the fields and were deprived of sleep. The master's latest overseer, with the fitting name of Mr. Severe, was "armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin" and took "fiendish pleasure in manifesting barbarity." Severe's early death was considered a sign of a "merciful providence" by the slaves, but he was soon replaced by Hopkins, a less profane man, but no less cruel than Severe. The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd was called the Great House Farm, and it was a privilege for a slave in the outlying areas of the plantation to be asked to run errands there. Many of the songs that slaves sang at that plantation mention the Great House Farm; Douglass didn't understand the implications of the lyrics of the songs while he was enslaved, but as a free man in the North, he has heard whites commenting that the singing of slaves is "evidence of their contentment and happiness." He refutes this myth, stating that slaves sing in order to relieve their sorrow much like tears relieve an aching heart. |
----------CHAPTER I---------
I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from
Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my
age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the
larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of
theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep
their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave
who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than
planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A
want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me
even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could
not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not
allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed
all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and
evidence of a restless spirit. The nearest estimate I can give makes me
now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this,
from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen
years old.
My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and
Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a darker
complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.
My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever
heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my
master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know
nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were
separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother. It is
a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part
children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the
child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and
hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is
placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For
what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the
development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and
destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the
inevitable result.
I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times
in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at
night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from
my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the
whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was
a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at
sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to
the contrary--a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives
to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master. I do not
recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me
in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long
before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place
between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived,
and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about
seven years old, on one of my master's farms, near Lee's Mill. I was not
allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She
was gone long before I knew any thing about it. Never having enjoyed, to
any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful
care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I
should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.
Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation
of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may or
may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to
my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that
slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children
of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers;
and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and
make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as
pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases
not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and
father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves
invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with,
than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom
do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she
sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of
showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black
slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his
slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel
as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children
to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to
do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself,
but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few
shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his
naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to
his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for
himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.
Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was
doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great
statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the
inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled
or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of
people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery,
from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their
increase do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument,
that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the
lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is
certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for
thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe
their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently
their own masters.
I have had two masters. My first master's name was Anthony. I do not
remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony--a title
which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay.
He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two or three farms,
and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were under the care of an
overseer. The overseer's name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable
drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed
with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash
the women's heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at
his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself.
Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary
barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man,
hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take
great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the
dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine,
whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she
was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from
his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran
fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream,
and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would
he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I
ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well
remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was
the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be
a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the
blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which
I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could
commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.
This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my old
master, and under the following circumstances. Aunt Hester went out one
night,--where or for what I do not know,--and happened to be absent
when my master desired her presence. He had ordered her not to go
out evenings, and warned her that she must never let him catch her in
company with a young man, who was paying attention to her belonging to
Colonel Lloyd. The young man's name was Ned Roberts, generally called
Lloyd's Ned. Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to
conjecture. She was a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions,
having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance,
among the colored or white women of our neighborhood.
Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been
found in company with Lloyd's Ned; which circumstance, I found, from
what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence. Had he been a
man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in
protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not
suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping Aunt
Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to
waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then
told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d----d b---h.
After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her
to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He
made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now
stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their
full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said
to her, "Now, you d----d b---h, I'll learn you how to disobey my orders!"
and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy
cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from
her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so
terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a
closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction
was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me.
I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my
grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to
raise the children of the younger women. I had therefore been, until
now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the
plantation.
----------CHAPTER II---------
My master's family consisted of two sons, Andrew and Richard; one
daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Captain Thomas Auld. They lived in
one house, upon the home plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. My master
was Colonel Lloyd's clerk and superintendent. He was what might be
called the overseer of the overseers. I spent two years of childhood on
this plantation in my old master's family. It was here that I witnessed
the bloody transaction recorded in the first chapter; and as I received
my first impressions of slavery on this plantation, I will give some
description of it, and of slavery as it there existed. The plantation is
about twelve miles north of Easton, in Talbot county, and is situated
on the border of Miles River. The principal products raised upon it were
tobacco, corn, and wheat. These were raised in great abundance; so that,
with the products of this and the other farms belonging to him, he was
able to keep in almost constant employment a large sloop, in carrying
them to market at Baltimore. This sloop was named Sally Lloyd, in honor
of one of the colonel's daughters. My master's son-in-law, Captain Auld,
was master of the vessel; she was otherwise manned by the colonel's
own slaves. Their names were Peter, Isaac, Rich, and Jake. These
were esteemed very highly by the other slaves, and looked upon as the
privileged ones of the plantation; for it was no small affair, in the
eyes of the slaves, to be allowed to see Baltimore.
Colonel Lloyd kept from three to four hundred slaves on his home
plantation, and owned a large number more on the neighboring farms
belonging to him. The names of the farms nearest to the home plantation
were Wye Town and New Design. "Wye Town" was under the overseership of
a man named Noah Willis. New Design was under the overseership of a
Mr. Townsend. The overseers of these, and all the rest of the farms,
numbering over twenty, received advice and direction from the managers
of the home plantation. This was the great business place. It was the
seat of government for the whole twenty farms. All disputes among
the overseers were settled here. If a slave was convicted of any high
misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run
away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board
the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some
other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.
Here, too, the slaves of all the other farms received their monthly
allowance of food, and their yearly clothing. The men and women slaves
received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork,
or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal. Their yearly
clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen
trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter,
made of coarse negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of
shoes; the whole of which could not have cost more than seven dollars.
The allowance of the slave children was given to their mothers, or the
old women having the care of them. The children unable to work in the
field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to
them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year.
When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance-day.
Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might
be seen at all seasons of the year.
There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be
considered such, and none but the men and women had these. This,
however, is not considered a very great privation. They find less
difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep;
for when their day's work in the field is done, the most of them having
their washing, mending, and cooking to do, and having few or none of
the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many of their
sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day;
and when this is done, old and young, male and female, married and
single, drop down side by side, on one common bed,--the cold, damp
floor,--each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets;
and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver's
horn. At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field.
There must be no halting; every one must be at his or her post; and woe
betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if
they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are by the sense of
feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used
to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick
and heavy cowskin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not
to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to
start for the field at the sound of the horn.
Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip a
woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this,
too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's
release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish
barbarity. Added to his cruelty, he was a profane swearer. It was enough
to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of an ordinary man to hear him
talk. Scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or concluded
by some horrid oath. The field was the place to witness his cruelty
and profanity. His presence made it both the field of blood and of
blasphemy. From the rising till the going down of the sun, he was
cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in
the most frightful manner. His career was short. He died very soon after
I went to Colonel Lloyd's; and he died as he lived, uttering, with his
dying groans, bitter curses and horrid oaths. His death was regarded by
the slaves as the result of a merciful providence.
Mr. Severe's place was filled by a Mr. Hopkins. He was a very different
man. He was less cruel, less profane, and made less noise, than Mr.
Severe. His course was characterized by no extraordinary demonstrations
of cruelty. He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. He was
called by the slaves a good overseer.
The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country
village. All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed
here. The shoemaking and mending, the blacksmithing, cartwrighting,
coopering, weaving, and grain-grinding, were all performed by the slaves
on the home plantation. The whole place wore a business-like aspect very
unlike the neighboring farms. The number of houses, too, conspired
to give it advantage over the neighboring farms. It was called by the
slaves the _Great House Farm._ Few privileges were esteemed higher, by
the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being selected to do
errands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in their minds with
greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to
a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of the out-farms
would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm. They
regarded it as evidence of great confidence reposed in them by their
overseers; and it was on this account, as well as a constant desire to
be out of the field from under the driver's lash, that they esteemed
it a high privilege, one worth careful living for. He was called the
smartest and most trusty fellow, who had this honor conferred upon
him the most frequently. The competitors for this office sought as
diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the
political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits
of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd's slaves, as are seen in the
slaves of the political parties.
The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly
allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly
enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods,
for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once
the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as
they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came
up, came out--if not in the word, in the sound;--and as frequently in
the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic
sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment
in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to
weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this,
when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following
words:--
"I am going away to the Great House Farm!
O, yea! O, yea! O!"
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem
unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to
themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those
songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of
slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject
could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and
apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I
neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a
tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension;
they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone
was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance
from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit,
and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in
tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even
now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of
feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace
my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.
I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to
deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren
in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing
effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on
allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him,
in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers
of his soul,--and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because
"there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find
persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of
their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a
greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by
them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such
is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to
express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike
uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast
away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as
evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the
songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter v using the context provided. | chapter iii|chapter iv|chapter v | Douglass further describes the conditions of slave children on Colonel Lloyd's plantation, telling us that his own experience was typical of slave children. Although he was seldom whipped, he was constantly hungry and cold. Even in the dead of winter, he was given nothing but a long shirt to wear, and, at night, he would steal a bag, crawl into it headfirst, and sleep. His exposed feet developed deep cracks from the frost. Children were fed cornmeal mush from a trough on the ground, and they ate from it, like the pigs did. When he was about seven or eight years old, he was given to Captain Anthony's son-in-law's brother, Hugh Auld, who lived in Baltimore. Douglass was instructed to clean himself before going to Baltimore, and he took great pride and joy in washing himself. He looks upon this event as a turning point in his life and claims that it was the hand of Providence which offered him this opportunity. In Baltimore, Mr. and Mrs. Auld and their child, Thomas, received him kindly. His duty was to take care of young Thomas. |
----------CHAPTER III---------
Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which afforded
almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief gardener,
(Mr. M'Durmond.) This garden was probably the greatest attraction of
the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near--from
Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis--to see it. It abounded in fruits of
almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the
delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of
trouble on the plantation. Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to
the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the
colonel, few of whom had the virtue or the vice to resist it. Scarcely a
day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash
for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems
to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one
was that of tarring his fence all around; after which, if a slave was
caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that
he had either been into the garden, or had tried to get in. In either
case, he was severely whipped by the chief gardener. This plan worked
well; the slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash. They seemed to
realize the impossibility of touching _tar_ without being defiled.
The colonel also kept a splendid riding equipage. His stable and
carriage-house presented the appearance of some of our large city livery
establishments. His horses were of the finest form and noblest blood.
His carriage-house contained three splendid coaches, three or four gigs,
besides dearborns and barouches of the most fashionable style.
This establishment was under the care of two slaves--old Barney and young
Barney--father and son. To attend to this establishment was their sole
work. But it was by no means an easy employment; for in nothing was
Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses. The
slightest inattention to these was unpardonable, and was visited upon
those, under whose care they were placed, with the severest punishment;
no excuse could shield them, if the colonel only suspected any want of
attention to his horses--a supposition which he frequently indulged, and
one which, of course, made the office of old and young Barney a very
trying one. They never knew when they were safe from punishment. They
were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when
most deserving it. Every thing depended upon the looks of the horses,
and the state of Colonel Lloyd's own mind when his horses were brought
to him for use. If a horse did not move fast enough, or hold his head
high enough, it was owing to some fault of his keepers. It was painful
to stand near the stable-door, and hear the various complaints against
the keepers when a horse was taken out for use. "This horse has not had
proper attention. He has not been sufficiently rubbed and curried, or
he has not been properly fed; his food was too wet or too dry; he got it
too soon or too late; he was too hot or too cold; he had too much hay,
and not enough of grain; or he had too much grain, and not enough
of hay; instead of old Barney's attending to the horse, he had very
improperly left it to his son." To all these complaints, no matter how
unjust, the slave must answer never a word. Colonel Lloyd could not
brook any contradiction from a slave. When he spoke, a slave must
stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case. I have seen
Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of
age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and
receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty
lashes at the time. Colonel Lloyd had three sons--Edward, Murray, and
Daniel,--and three sons-in-law, Mr. Winder, Mr. Nicholson, and Mr.
Lowndes. All of these lived at the Great House Farm, and enjoyed the
luxury of whipping the servants when they pleased, from old Barney down
to William Wilkes, the coach-driver. I have seen Winder make one of the
house-servants stand off from him a suitable distance to be touched with
the end of his whip, and at every stroke raise great ridges upon his
back.
To describe the wealth of Colonel Lloyd would be almost equal
to describing the riches of Job. He kept from ten to fifteen
house-servants. He was said to own a thousand slaves, and I think this
estimate quite within the truth. Colonel Lloyd owned so many that he did
not know them when he saw them; nor did all the slaves of the out-farms
know him. It is reported of him, that, while riding along the road one
day, he met a colored man, and addressed him in the usual manner of
speaking to colored people on the public highways of the south: "Well,
boy, whom do you belong to?" "To Colonel Lloyd," replied the slave.
"Well, does the colonel treat you well?" "No, sir," was the ready reply.
"What, does he work you too hard?" "Yes, sir." "Well, don't he give you
enough to eat?" "Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is."
The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on;
the man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been
conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of
the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then
informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master,
he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained
and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment's warning, he was snatched
away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more
unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of
telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.
It is partly in consequence of such facts, that slaves, when inquired
of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost
universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind.
The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves,
to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The
frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the
maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth
rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove
themselves a part of the human family. If they have any thing to say of
their masters, it is generally in their masters' favor, especially when
speaking to an untried man. I have been frequently asked, when a
slave, if I had a kind master, and do not remember ever to have given a
negative answer; nor did I, in pursuing this course, consider myself as
uttering what was absolutely false; for I always measured the kindness
of my master by the standard of kindness set up among slaveholders
around us. Moreover, slaves are like other people, and imbibe prejudices
quite common to others. They think their own better than that of others.
Many, under the influence of this prejudice, think their own masters are
better than the masters of other slaves; and this, too, in some cases,
when the very reverse is true. Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves
even to fall out and quarrel among themselves about the relative
goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of
his own over that of the others. At the very same time, they mutually
execrate their masters when viewed separately. It was so on our
plantation. When Colonel Lloyd's slaves met the slaves of Jacob Jepson,
they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters; Colonel
Lloyd's slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr. Jepson's
slaves that he was the smartest, and most of a man. Colonel Lloyd's
slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson. Mr.
Jepson's slaves would boast his ability to whip Colonel Lloyd. These
quarrels would almost always end in a fight between the parties, and
those that whipped were supposed to have gained the point at issue. They
seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to
themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a slave; but to
be a poor man's slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!
----------CHAPTER IV---------
Mr. Hopkins remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why his
career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the necessary
severity to suit Colonel Lloyd. Mr. Hopkins was succeeded by Mr. Austin
Gore, a man possessing, in an eminent degree, all those traits of
character indispensable to what is called a first-rate overseer. Mr.
Gore had served Colonel Lloyd, in the capacity of overseer, upon one
of the out-farms, and had shown himself worthy of the high station of
overseer upon the home or Great House Farm.
Mr. Gore was proud, ambitious, and persevering. He was artful, cruel,
and obdurate. He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the
place for such a man. It afforded scope for the full exercise of all his
powers, and he seemed to be perfectly at home in it. He was one of those
who could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of
the slave, into impudence, and would treat it accordingly. There must
be no answering back to him; no explanation was allowed a slave, showing
himself to have been wrongfully accused. Mr. Gore acted fully up to
the maxim laid down by slaveholders,--"It is better that a dozen
slaves should suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be
convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault."
No matter how innocent a slave might be--it availed him nothing,
when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to
be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always
following the other with immutable certainty. To escape punishment was
to escape accusation; and few slaves had the fortune to do either, under
the overseership of Mr. Gore. He was just proud enough to demand the
most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to crouch,
himself, at the feet of the master. He was ambitious enough to be
contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and
persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition. He was cruel
enough to inflict the severest punishment, artful enough to descend to
the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice
of a reproving conscience. He was, of all the overseers, the most
dreaded by the slaves. His presence was painful; his eye flashed
confusion; and seldom was his sharp, shrill voice heard, without
producing horror and trembling in their ranks.
Mr. Gore was a grave man, and, though a young man, he indulged in no
jokes, said no funny words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect
keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his
words. Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the
slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but
to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with
his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as well.
When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no
consequences. He did nothing reluctantly, no matter how disagreeable;
always at his post, never inconsistent. He never promised but to fulfil.
He was, in a word, a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like
coolness.
His savage barbarity was equalled only by the consummate coolness with
which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves
under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel Lloyd's
slaves, by the name of Demby. He had given Demby but few stripes, when,
to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek,
and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out. Mr.
Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did
not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was
given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and
third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without
consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an
additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his
standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled
body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he
had stood.
A thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the plantation,
excepting Mr. Gore. He alone seemed cool and collected. He was asked by
Colonel Lloyd and my old master, why he resorted to this extraordinary
expedient. His reply was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby had
become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to the other
slaves,--one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration
on his part, would finally lead to the total subversion of all rule and
order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be
corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy
the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves,
and the enslavement of the whites. Mr. Gore's defence was satisfactory.
He was continued in his station as overseer upon the home plantation.
His fame as an overseer went abroad. His horrid crime was not even
submitted to judicial investigation. It was committed in the presence of
slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor testify
against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest
and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the
community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael's, Talbot
county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very
probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as
highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not
been stained with his brother's blood.
I speak advisedly when I say this,--that killing a slave, or any colored
person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by
the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman, of St. Michael's, killed
two slaves, one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking his brains
out. He used to boast of the commission of the awful and bloody deed. I
have heard him do so laughingly, saying, among other things, that he was
the only benefactor of his country in the company, and that when others
would do as much as he had done, we should be relieved of "the d----d
niggers."
The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, living but a short distance from where I
used to live, murdered my wife's cousin, a young girl between fifteen
and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible
manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor
girl expired in a few hours afterward. She was immediately buried, but
had not been in her untimely grave but a few hours before she was taken
up and examined by the coroner, who decided that she had come to her
death by severe beating. The offence for which this girl was thus
murdered was this:--She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks's
baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She,
having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the
crying. They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, finding
the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized an oak stick of wood
by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl's nose and breastbone,
and thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder
produced no sensation in the community. It did produce sensation, but
not enough to bring the murderess to punishment. There was a warrant
issued for her arrest, but it was never served. Thus she escaped not
only punishment, but even the pain of being arraigned before a court for
her horrid crime.
Whilst I am detailing bloody deeds which took place during my stay
on Colonel Lloyd's plantation, I will briefly narrate another, which
occurred about the same time as the murder of Demby by Mr. Gore.
Colonel Lloyd's slaves were in the habit of spending a part of their
nights and Sundays in fishing for oysters, and in this way made up the
deficiency of their scanty allowance. An old man belonging to Colonel
Lloyd, while thus engaged, happened to get beyond the limits of Colonel
Lloyd's, and on the premises of Mr. Beal Bondly. At this trespass, Mr.
Bondly took offence, and with his musket came down to the shore, and
blew its deadly contents into the poor old man.
Mr. Bondly came over to see Colonel Lloyd the next day, whether to pay
him for his property, or to justify himself in what he had done, I know
not. At any rate, this whole fiendish transaction was soon hushed up.
There was very little said about it at all, and nothing done. It was
a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a
half-cent to kill a "nigger," and a half-cent to bury one.
----------CHAPTER V---------
As to my own treatment while I lived on Colonel Lloyd's plantation,
it was very similar to that of the other slave children. I was not old
enough to work in the field, and there being little else than field work
to do, I had a great deal of leisure time. The most I had to do was to
drive up the cows at evening, keep the fowls out of the garden, keep the
front yard clean, and run of errands for my old master's daughter, Mrs.
Lucretia Auld. The most of my leisure time I spent in helping Master
Daniel Lloyd in finding his birds, after he had shot them. My connection
with Master Daniel was of some advantage to me. He became quite attached
to me, and was a sort of protector of me. He would not allow the older
boys to impose upon me, and would divide his cakes with me.
I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any
thing else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much
more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost
naked--no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a
coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must
have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal
a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into
this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in
and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen
with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.
We were not regularly allowanced. Our food was coarse corn meal boiled.
This was called _mush_. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough,
and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so
many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush;
some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked
hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was
strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.
I was probably between seven and eight years old when I left Colonel
Lloyd's plantation. I left it with joy. I shall never forget the ecstasy
with which I received the intelligence that my old master (Anthony)
had determined to let me go to Baltimore, to live with Mr. Hugh Auld,
brother to my old master's son-in-law, Captain Thomas Auld. I received
this information about three days before my departure. They were three
of the happiest days I ever enjoyed. I spent the most part of all these
three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf, and preparing
myself for my departure.
The pride of appearance which this would indicate was not my own. I
spent the time in washing, not so much because I wished to, but because
Mrs. Lucretia had told me I must get all the dead skin off my feet and
knees before I could go to Baltimore; for the people in Baltimore were
very cleanly, and would laugh at me if I looked dirty. Besides, she was
going to give me a pair of trousers, which I should not put on unless
I got all the dirt off me. The thought of owning a pair of trousers was
great indeed! It was almost a sufficient motive, not only to make me
take off what would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin
itself. I went at it in good earnest, working for the first time with
the hope of reward.
The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended
in my case. I found no severe trial in my departure. My home was
charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel
that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying. My
mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her.
I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the same house with me;
but the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the
fact of our relationship from our memories. I looked for home elsewhere,
and was confident of finding none which I should relish less than the
one which I was leaving. If, however, I found in my new home hardship,
hunger, whipping, and nakedness, I had the consolation that I should not
have escaped any one of them by staying. Having already had more than
a taste of them in the house of my old master, and having endured them
there, I very naturally inferred my ability to endure them elsewhere,
and especially at Baltimore; for I had something of the feeling about
Baltimore that is expressed in the proverb, that "being hanged in
England is preferable to dying a natural death in Ireland." I had the
strongest desire to see Baltimore. Cousin Tom, though not fluent in
speech, had inspired me with that desire by his eloquent description
of the place. I could never point out any thing at the Great House,
no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that he had seen something at
Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and strength, the object which I
pointed out to him. Even the Great House itself, with all its pictures,
was far inferior to many buildings in Baltimore. So strong was my
desire, that I thought a gratification of it would fully compensate
for whatever loss of comforts I should sustain by the exchange. I left
without a regret, and with the highest hopes of future happiness.
We sailed out of Miles River for Baltimore on a Saturday morning. I
remember only the day of the week, for at that time I had no knowledge
of the days of the month, nor the months of the year. On setting sail, I
walked aft, and gave to Colonel Lloyd's plantation what I hoped would be
the last look. I then placed myself in the bows of the sloop, and there
spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead, interesting myself in
what was in the distance rather than in things near by or behind.
In the afternoon of that day, we reached Annapolis, the capital of the
State. We stopped but a few moments, so that I had no time to go on
shore. It was the first large town that I had ever seen, and though it
would look small compared with some of our New England factory villages,
I thought it a wonderful place for its size--more imposing even than the
Great House Farm!
We arrived at Baltimore early on Sunday morning, landing at Smith's
Wharf, not far from Bowley's Wharf. We had on board the sloop a large
flock of sheep; and after aiding in driving them to the slaughterhouse
of Mr. Curtis on Louden Slater's Hill, I was conducted by Rich, one of
the hands belonging on board of the sloop, to my new home in Alliciana
Street, near Mr. Gardner's ship-yard, on Fells Point.
Mr. and Mrs. Auld were both at home, and met me at the door with their
little son Thomas, to take care of whom I had been given. And here I saw
what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most
kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish
I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld
it. It was a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my pathway
with the light of happiness. Little Thomas was told, there was his
Freddy,--and I was told to take care of little Thomas; and thus I entered
upon the duties of my new home with the most cheering prospect ahead.
I look upon my departure from Colonel Lloyd's plantation as one of
the most interesting events of my life. It is possible, and even quite
probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that
plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here
seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness
of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of
slavery. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the
gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. I have ever regarded it as the
first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since
attended me, and marked my life with so many favors. I regarded the
selection of myself as being somewhat remarkable. There were a number
of slave children that might have been sent from the plantation to
Baltimore. There were those younger, those older, and those of the same
age. I was chosen from among them all, and was the first, last, and only
choice.
I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this
event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But
I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed
the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of
incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my
own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment
of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold
me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in
slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from
me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.
This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and
praise.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter vi based on the provided context. | chapter vi|chapter vii | Mrs. Sophia Auld was unlike any white person Douglass had met before because she had "the kindest heart and finest feelings." She had never owned a slave, and, prior to her marriage, she was an industrious weaver. But her personality soon changed. At first, Mrs. Auld taught Douglass how to read, but Mr. Auld admonished her and explained, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world . . . if you teach that nigger . . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave." Slaves in the cities were generally treated better than those on plantations. Douglass was better fed and clothed in Baltimore than he had ever been. There were also community standards regarding how slaves should be treated: "Few are willing to incur the odium attaching the reputation of being a cruel master. . . . Every city slave-holder is anxious to have it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well." Douglass, however, ends this chapter with one exception -- Mary, a slave in the neighborhood, is treated brutally by her master. |
----------CHAPTER VI---------
My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at
the door,--a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had
never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to
her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living.
She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business,
she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and
dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly astonished at her
goodness. I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely
unlike any other white woman I had ever seen. I could not approach her
as I was accustomed to approach other white ladies. My early instruction
was all out of place. The crouching servility, usually so acceptable a
quality in a slave, did not answer when manifested toward her. Her favor
was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it. She did not
deem it impudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face.
The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence, and none
left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face was made of
heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music.
But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The
fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon
commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence
of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet
accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic
face gave place to that of a demon.
Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly
commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she
assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at
this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at
once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other
things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to
read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an
inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his
master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would _spoil_ the best nigger
in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of
myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever
unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no
value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great
deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These
words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay
slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.
It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious
things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but
struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most
perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the
black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that
moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just
what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it.
Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind
mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the
merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the
difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and
a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The
very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife
with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince
me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me
the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the
results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he
most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most
hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was
to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he
so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire
me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe
almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly
aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.
I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked
difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed
in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a
slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys
privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is
a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and
check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the
plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity
of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave.
Few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being
a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known as not
giving a slave enough to eat. Every city slaveholder is anxious to have
it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well; and it is due to them
to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to eat. There are,
however, some painful exceptions to this rule. Directly opposite to us,
on Philpot Street, lived Mr. Thomas Hamilton. He owned two slaves. Their
names were Henrietta and Mary. Henrietta was about twenty-two years
of age, Mary was about fourteen; and of all the mangled and emaciated
creatures I ever looked upon, these two were the most so. His heart
must be harder than stone, that could look upon these unmoved. The
head, neck, and shoulders of Mary were literally cut to pieces. I have
frequently felt her head, and found it nearly covered with festering
sores, caused by the lash of her cruel mistress. I do not know that her
master ever whipped her, but I have been an eye-witness to the cruelty
of Mrs. Hamilton. I used to be in Mr. Hamilton's house nearly every day.
Mrs. Hamilton used to sit in a large chair in the middle of the room,
with a heavy cowskin always by her side, and scarce an hour passed
during the day but was marked by the blood of one of these slaves. The
girls seldom passed her without her saying, "Move faster, you _black
gip!_" at the same time giving them a blow with the cowskin over the
head or shoulders, often drawing the blood. She would then say, "Take
that, you _black gip!_" continuing, "If you don't move faster, I'll move
you!" Added to the cruel lashings to which these slaves were subjected,
they were kept nearly half-starved. They seldom knew what it was to eat
a full meal. I have seen Mary contending with the pigs for the offal
thrown into the street. So much was Mary kicked and cut to pieces, that
she was oftener called "_pecked_" than by her name.
----------CHAPTER VII---------
I lived in Master Hugh's family about seven years. During this time, I
succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was
compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My
mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance
with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to
instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one
else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did
not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the
depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was
at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of
irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as
though I were a brute.
My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in
the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with
her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.
In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to
perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and
that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but
dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When
I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was
no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for
the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that
came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of
these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became
stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like
fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to
instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She
finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband
himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had
commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her
more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that
here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up
of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed
her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon
demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were
incompatible with each other.
From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room
any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having
a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this,
however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in
teaching me the alphabet, had given me the _inch,_ and no precaution
could prevent me from taking the _ell._
The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful,
was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in
the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With
their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places,
I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I
always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly,
I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry
bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I
was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many
of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to
bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me
that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give
the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the
gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;--not that
it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an
unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country.
It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on
Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard. I used to talk
this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I
wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. "You
will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, _but I am a slave for life!_
Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?" These words used
to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and
console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be
free.
I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being _a slave for
life_ began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got
hold of a book entitled "The Columbian Orator." Every opportunity I
got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter,
I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was
represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue
represented the conversation which took place between them, when the
slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument
in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was
disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as
well as impressive things in reply to his master--things which had the
desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the
voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.
In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and
in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me.
I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue
to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed
through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I
gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of
even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation
of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading
of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the
arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved
me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than
the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led
to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light
than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to
Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced
us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most
wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very
discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning
to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable
anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to
read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view
of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the
horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of
agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often
wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile
to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was
this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was
no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within
sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom
had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to
disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in
every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my
wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing
without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from
every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved
in every storm.
I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself
dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I
should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have
been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one
speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I could
hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found
what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make
it an interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in
getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or
did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of
as the fruit of _abolition._ Hearing the word in this connection very
often, I set about learning what it meant. The dictionary afforded me
little or no help. I found it was "the act of abolishing;" but then I
did not know what was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. I did not
dare to ask any one about its meaning, for I was satisfied that it was
something they wanted me to know very little about. After a patient
waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the
number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of slavery
in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the States.
From this time I understood the words _abolition_ and _abolitionist,_
and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear
something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. The light broke in
upon me by degrees. I went one day down on the wharf of Mr. Waters;
and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and
helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked
me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, "Are ye a slave for
life?" I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply
affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so
fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He said it
was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to the north;
that I should find friends there, and that I should be free. I pretended
not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not
understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have
been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward,
catch them and return them to their masters. I was afraid that these
seemingly good men might use me so; but I nevertheless remembered their
advice, and from that time I resolved to run away. I looked forward to
a time at which it would be safe for me to escape. I was too young to
think of doing so immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write,
as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with
the hope that I should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would
learn to write.
The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by
being in Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship
carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use,
write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was
intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it
would be marked thus--"L." When a piece was for the starboard side, it
would be marked thus--"S." A piece for the larboard side forward, would
be marked thus--"L. F." When a piece was for starboard side forward,
it would be marked thus--"S. F." For larboard aft, it would be marked
thus--"L. A." For starboard aft, it would be marked thus--"S. A." I soon
learned the names of these letters, and for what they were intended when
placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I immediately commenced
copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters
named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I
would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, "I
don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I would then make the letters
which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that.
In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite
possible I should never have gotten in any other way. During this time,
my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and
ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I
then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster's Spelling
Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. By this
time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to
write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been
brought home, and shown to some of our near neighbors, and then laid
aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting at the Wilk Street
meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to take care of the
house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the
spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written. I
continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of
Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally
succeeded in learning how to write.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter viii, utilizing the provided context. | null | In a digression, Douglass tells us that about five years after he had been living in Baltimore, his old master, Captain Anthony, died, and Douglass was sent back to the plantation for a valuation so that all of the captain's property could be appraised and divided up among his relatives. "Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine" for the purpose of this evaluation. He was indeed nervous about his future, for it was possible that he would be sold to a crueler master or to a Georgia trader. Anthony had two children, Andrew and Lucretia , and Douglass was awarded to Lucretia, which meant that he would be returned to her relatives , the Aulds in Baltimore. This turn of events was fortunate for Douglass because during his short visit, Andrew demonstrated his cruelty by crushing the head of Douglass' brother. Soon after Douglass' return to Baltimore, both Lucretia and Andrew died, and all of the slaves were once again slated to be sold or given away. Douglass was particularly angry about how his grandmother, after years of service to Anthony, was left to die in an isolated hut in the woods. Lucretia's surviving husband, Master Thomas, now owned Douglass. A misunderstanding arose between Thomas and his brother Hugh Auld, and, as a spiteful gesture, Thomas took Douglass away from Hugh. Douglass was not entirely unhappy to leave Baltimore, for alcohol had changed Hugh's character, just as slavery had corrupted Sophia's. |
----------CHAPTER VIII---------
In a very short time after I went to live at Baltimore, my old master's
youngest son Richard died; and in about three years and six months after
his death, my old master, Captain Anthony, died, leaving only his son,
Andrew, and daughter, Lucretia, to share his estate. He died while on a
visit to see his daughter at Hillsborough. Cut off thus unexpectedly,
he left no will as to the disposal of his property. It was therefore
necessary to have a valuation of the property, that it might be equally
divided between Mrs. Lucretia and Master Andrew. I was immediately sent
for, to be valued with the other property. Here again my feelings rose
up in detestation of slavery. I had now a new conception of my degraded
condition. Prior to this, I had become, if not insensible to my lot,
at least partly so. I left Baltimore with a young heart overborne with
sadness, and a soul full of apprehension. I took passage with Captain
Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a sail of about twenty-four
hours, I found myself near the place of my birth. I had now been absent
from it almost, if not quite, five years. I, however, remembered the
place very well. I was only about five years old when I left it, to go
and live with my old master on Colonel Lloyd's plantation; so that I was
now between ten and eleven years old.
We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and
young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine.
There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all
holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to
the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth,
maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At
this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of
slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.
After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to
express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us
poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided.
we had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we
were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough--against all our
wishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever the dearest friends,
dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings. In addition
to the pain of separation, there was the horrid dread of falling into
the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as being a most cruel
wretch,--a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and
profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's
property. We all felt that we might as well be sold at once to the
Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we knew that that would
be our inevitable condition,--a condition held by us all in the utmost
horror and dread.
I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellow-slaves. I had known what
it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They
had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and
women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made
familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine was
yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few slaves
could boast of a kinder master and mistress than myself; and the thought
of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew--a man who, but
a few days before, to give me a sample of his bloody disposition, took
my little brother by the throat, threw him on the ground, and with the
heel of his boot stamped upon his head till the blood gushed from his
nose and ears--was well calculated to make me anxious as to my fate.
After he had committed this savage outrage upon my brother, he turned
to me, and said that was the way he meant to serve me one of these
days,--meaning, I suppose, when I came into his possession.
Thanks to a kind Providence, I fell to the portion of Mrs. Lucretia, and
was sent immediately back to Baltimore, to live again in the family
of Master Hugh. Their joy at my return equalled their sorrow at my
departure. It was a glad day to me. I had escaped a worse than lion's
jaws. I was absent from Baltimore, for the purpose of valuation and
division, just about one month, and it seemed to have been six.
Very soon after my return to Baltimore, my mistress, Lucretia, died,
leaving her husband and one child, Amanda; and in a very short time
after her death, Master Andrew died. Now all the property of my old
master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers,--strangers who
had had nothing to do with accumulating it. Not a slave was left free.
All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing
in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction
of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable
loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old
grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old
age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his
plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his
service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood,
served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the
cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left
a slave--a slave for life--a slave in the hands of strangers; and in
their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her
great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being
gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or
her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude
and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having
outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning
and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but
little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and
complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs,
they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little
mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting
herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to
die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to suffer in utter
loneliness; she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children,
the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They
are, in the language of the slave's poet, Whittier,--
"Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
Where the noisome insect stings,
Where the fever-demon strews
Poison with the falling dews,
Where the sickly sunbeams glare
Through the hot and misty air:—
Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
From Virginia hills and waters—
Woe is me, my stolen daughters!"
The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once
sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the
darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her
children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the
screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And
now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head
inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence
meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together--at
this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that
tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a
declining parent--my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve
children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim
embers. She stands--she sits--she staggers--she falls--she groans--she
dies--and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to
wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath
the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for these
things?
In about two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas
married his second wife. Her name was Rowena Hamilton. She was the
eldest daughter of Mr. William Hamilton. Master now lived in St.
Michael's. Not long after his marriage, a misunderstanding took place
between himself and Master Hugh; and as a means of punishing his
brother, he took me from him to live with himself at St. Michael's. Here
I underwent another most painful separation. It, however, was not so
severe as the one I dreaded at the division of property; for, during
this interval, a great change had taken place in Master Hugh and his
once kind and affectionate wife. The influence of brandy upon him, and
of slavery upon her, had effected a disastrous change in the characters
of both; so that, as far as they were concerned, I thought I had little
to lose by the change. But it was not to them that I was attached. It
was to those little Baltimore boys that I felt the strongest attachment.
I had received many good lessons from them, and was still receiving
them, and the thought of leaving them was painful indeed. I was leaving,
too, without the hope of ever being allowed to return. Master Thomas had
said he would never let me return again. The barrier betwixt himself and
brother he considered impassable.
I then had to regret that I did not at least make the attempt to carry
out my resolution to run away; for the chances of success are tenfold
greater from the city than from the country.
I sailed from Baltimore for St. Michael's in the sloop Amanda, Captain
Edward Dodson. On my passage, I paid particular attention to the
direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia. I found,
instead of going down, on reaching North Point they went up the bay,
in a north-easterly direction. I deemed this knowledge of the utmost
importance. My determination to run away was again revived. I resolved
to wait only so long as the offering of a favorable opportunity. When
that came, I was determined to be off.
----------CHAPTER IX---------
I have now reached a period of my life when I can give dates. I left
Baltimore, and went to live with Master Thomas Auld, at St. Michael's,
in March, 1832. It was now more than seven years since I lived with him
in the family of my old master, on Colonel Lloyd's plantation. We of
course were now almost entire strangers to each other. He was to me a
new master, and I to him a new slave. I was ignorant of his temper and
disposition; he was equally so of mine. A very short time, however,
brought us into full acquaintance with each other. I was made acquainted
with his wife not less than with himself. They were well matched, being
equally mean and cruel. I was now, for the first time during a space
of more than seven years, made to feel the painful gnawings of hunger--a
something which I had not experienced before since I left Colonel
Lloyd's plantation. It went hard enough with me then, when I could look
back to no period at which I had enjoyed a sufficiency. It was tenfold
harder after living in Master Hugh's family, where I had always had
enough to eat, and of that which was good. I have said Master Thomas was
a mean man. He was so. Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as
the most aggravated development of meanness even among slaveholders. The
rule is, no matter how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it.
This is the theory; and in the part of Maryland from which I came, it
is the general practice,--though there are many exceptions. Master Thomas
gave us enough of neither coarse nor fine food. There were four slaves
of us in the kitchen--my sister Eliza, my aunt Priscilla, Henny, and
myself; and we were allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal
per week, and very little else, either in the shape of meat or
vegetables. It was not enough for us to subsist upon. We were therefore
reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our
neighbors. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in
the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other.
A great many times have we poor creatures been nearly perishing
with hunger, when food in abundance lay mouldering in the safe and
smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that
mistress and her husband would kneel every morning, and pray that God
would bless them in basket and store!
Bad as all slaveholders are, we seldom meet one destitute of every
element of character commanding respect. My master was one of this rare
sort. I do not know of one single noble act ever performed by him. The
leading trait in his character was meanness; and if there were any other
element in his nature, it was made subject to this. He was mean; and,
like most other mean men, he lacked the ability to conceal his meanness.
Captain Auld was not born a slaveholder. He had been a poor man, master
only of a Bay craft. He came into possession of all his slaves by
marriage; and of all men, adopted slaveholders are the worst. He was
cruel, but cowardly. He commanded without firmness. In the enforcement
of his rules, he was at times rigid, and at times lax. At times, he
spoke to his slaves with the firmness of Napoleon and the fury of a
demon; at other times, he might well be mistaken for an inquirer who
had lost his way. He did nothing of himself. He might have passed for a
lion, but for his ears. In all things noble which he attempted, his own
meanness shone most conspicuous. His airs, words, and actions, were the
airs, words, and actions of born slaveholders, and, being assumed, were
awkward enough. He was not even a good imitator. He possessed all the
disposition to deceive, but wanted the power. Having no resources within
himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he
was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an
object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves. The luxury
of having slaves of his own to wait upon him was something new and
unprepared for. He was a slaveholder without the ability to hold slaves.
He found himself incapable of managing his slaves either by force,
fear, or fraud. We seldom called him "master;" we generally called him
"Captain Auld," and were hardly disposed to title him at all. I doubt
not that our conduct had much to do with making him appear awkward,
and of consequence fretful. Our want of reverence for him must have
perplexed him greatly. He wished to have us call him master, but lacked
the firmness necessary to command us to do so. His wife used to insist
upon our calling him so, but to no purpose. In August, 1832, my master
attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county,
and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his
conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did
not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was
disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane
to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his
character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I
believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than
before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity
to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his
conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding
cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety. His house was
the house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very
soon distinguished himself among his brethren, and was soon made a
class-leader and exhorter. His activity in revivals was great, and he
proved himself an instrument in the hands of the church in converting
many souls. His house was the preachers' home. They used to take great
pleasure in coming there to put up; for while he starved us, he stuffed
them. We have had three or four preachers there at a time. The names
of those who used to come most frequently while I lived there, were Mr.
Storks, Mr. Ewery, Mr. Humphry, and Mr. Hickey. I have also seen Mr.
George Cookman at our house. We slaves loved Mr. Cookman. We believed
him to be a good man. We thought him instrumental in getting Mr. Samuel
Harrison, a very rich slaveholder, to emancipate his slaves; and by some
means got the impression that he was laboring to effect the emancipation
of all the slaves. When he was at our house, we were sure to be called
in to prayers. When the others were there, we were sometimes called in
and sometimes not. Mr. Cookman took more notice of us than either of
the other ministers. He could not come among us without betraying his
sympathy for us, and, stupid as we were, we had the sagacity to see it.
While I lived with my master in St. Michael's, there was a white
young man, a Mr. Wilson, who proposed to keep a Sabbath school for the
instruction of such slaves as might be disposed to learn to read the New
Testament. We met but three times, when Mr. West and Mr. Fairbanks,
both class-leaders, with many others, came upon us with sticks and other
missiles, drove us off, and forbade us to meet again. Thus ended our
little Sabbath school in the pious town of St. Michael's.
I have said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty. As an
example, I will state one of many facts going to prove the charge.
I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy
cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip;
and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of
Scripture--"He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be
beaten with many stripes."
Master would keep this lacerated young woman tied up in this horrid
situation four or five hours at a time. I have known him to tie her up
early in the morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her, go to
his store, return at dinner, and whip her again, cutting her in the
places already made raw with his cruel lash. The secret of master's
cruelty toward "Henny" is found in the fact of her being almost
helpless. When quite a child, she fell into the fire, and burned herself
horribly. Her hands were so burnt that she never got the use of them.
She could do very little but bear heavy burdens. She was to master a
bill of expense; and as he was a mean man, she was a constant offence
to him. He seemed desirous of getting the poor girl out of existence.
He gave her away once to his sister; but, being a poor gift, she was
not disposed to keep her. Finally, my benevolent master, to use his
own words, "set her adrift to take care of herself." Here was a
recently-converted man, holding on upon the mother, and at the same time
turning out her helpless child, to starve and die! Master Thomas was one
of the many pious slaveholders who hold slaves for the very charitable
purpose of taking care of them.
My master and myself had quite a number of differences. He found
me unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very
pernicious effect upon me. It had almost ruined me for every good
purpose, and fitted me for every thing which was bad. One of my greatest
faults was that of letting his horse run away, and go down to his
father-inlaw's farm, which was about five miles from St. Michael's. I
would then have to go after it. My reason for this kind of carelessness,
or carefulness, was, that I could always get something to eat when I
went there. Master William Hamilton, my master's father-in-law, always
gave his slaves enough to eat. I never left there hungry, no matter
how great the need of my speedy return. Master Thomas at length said he
would stand it no longer. I had lived with him nine months, during
which time he had given me a number of severe whippings, all to no good
purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken; and, for
this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named Edward Covey. Mr.
Covey was a poor man, a farm-renter. He rented the place upon which he
lived, as also the hands with which he tilled it. Mr. Covey had acquired
a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation
was of immense value to him. It enabled him to get his farm tilled with
much less expense to himself than he could have had it done without such
a reputation. Some slaveholders thought it not much loss to allow Mr.
Covey to have their slaves one year, for the sake of the training to
which they were subjected, without any other compensation. He could hire
young help with great ease, in consequence of this reputation. Added
to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of
religion--a pious soul--a member and a class-leader in the
Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a
"nigger-breaker." I was aware of all the facts, having been made
acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I nevertheless
made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough to eat, which
is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man.
|
Northanger Abbey.chapter | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter ii with the given context. | chapter i|chapter ii|chapter iii | Chapter II opens as Catherine is preparing to depart to for Bath with the Allens. Although Catherine is young and inexperienced, her mother Mrs. Morland exhibits little anxiety about the trip, and her only admonition to her daughter is to stay warm. The journey to Bath is uneventful, but Catherine is full of "eager delight" at the prospects of spending six weeks in the "fine and striking environs" of the resort town. Catherine's host Mrs. Allen is described by Austen as an unremarkable and trifling woman whose sole passion consists of dressing up for formal balls. A few nights after arriving in Bath, Catherine and the Allens attend one of the public balls in the Upper Rooms, a popular social venue. Catherine and Mrs. Allen squeeze through the crowd and finally find themselves looking down at the dancers. Catherine wishes she could dance, but she doesn't know any of the gentlemen present at the ball, and Mrs. Allen's sympathetic recognition of her desire for a partner begin to annoy her. The rest of the night is similarly disappointing until Catherine leaves the ball and hears two young men remarking that she is a "pretty girl. After overhearing the comment, Catherine thinks that she is "perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention |
----------CHAPTER I---------
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have
supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character
of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were
all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being
neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name
was Richard--and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable
independence besides two good livings--and he was not in the least
addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful
plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a
good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and
instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might
expect, she still lived on--lived to have six children more--to see them
growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family
of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are
heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had
little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and
Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin
awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong
features--so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism
seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred
cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of
infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a
rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered
flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief--at least
so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was
forbidden to take. Such were her propensities--her abilities were quite
as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything
before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often
inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in
teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her
next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine
was always stupid--by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and
Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her
to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was
very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight
years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs.
Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in
spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which
dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life.
Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain
the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd
piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses
and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing
and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her
proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in
both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character!--for
with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither
a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever
quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions
of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and
cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the
green slope at the back of the house.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending;
she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved,
her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more
animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to
an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had
now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark
on her personal improvement. "Catherine grows quite a good-looking
girl--she is almost pretty today," were words which caught her ears now
and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an
acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the
first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever
receive.
Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children
everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in
lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were
inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful
that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should
prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about
the country at the age of fourteen, to books--or at least books of
information--for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be
gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she
had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen
she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines
must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so
serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.
From Pope, she learnt to censure those who
"bear about the mockery of woe."
From Gray, that
"Many a flower is born to blush unseen,
"And waste its fragrance on the desert air."
From Thompson, that--
"It is a delightful task
"To teach the young idea how to shoot."
And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information--amongst
the rest, that--
"Trifles light as air,
"Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,
"As proofs of Holy Writ."
That
"The poor beetle, which we tread upon,
"In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
"As when a giant dies."
And that a young woman in love always looks--
"like Patience on a monument
"Smiling at Grief."
So far her improvement was sufficient--and in many other points she came
on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought
herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing
a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own
composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very
little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil--she had no
notion of drawing--not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's
profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell
miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know
her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the
age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call
forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and
without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate
and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be
generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was
not one lord in the neighbourhood; no--not even a baronet. There was not
one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy
accidentally found at their door--not one young man whose origin
was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no
children.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty
surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen
to throw a hero in her way.
Mr. Allen, who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton, the
village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived, was ordered to Bath
for the benefit of a gouty constitution--and his lady, a good-humoured
woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will
not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad,
invited her to go with them. Mr. and Mrs. Morland were all compliance,
and Catherine all happiness.
----------CHAPTER II---------
In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland's
personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the
difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath, it may be
stated, for the reader's more certain information, lest the following
pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is
meant to be, that her heart was affectionate; her disposition cheerful
and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind--her manners just
removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing,
and, when in good looks, pretty--and her mind about as ignorant and
uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.
When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of Mrs.
Morland will be naturally supposed to be most severe. A thousand
alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved Catherine from this
terrific separation must oppress her heart with sadness, and drown her
in tears for the last day or two of their being together; and advice of
the most important and applicable nature must of course flow from her
wise lips in their parting conference in her closet. Cautions against
the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young
ladies away to some remote farm-house, must, at such a moment, relieve
the fulness of her heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs. Morland knew
so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their
general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her
daughter from their machinations. Her cautions were confined to the
following points. "I beg, Catherine, you will always wrap yourself up
very warm about the throat, when you come from the rooms at night; and
I wish you would try to keep some account of the money you spend; I will
give you this little book on purpose."
Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will
reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?),
must from situation be at this time the intimate friend and confidante
of her sister. It is remarkable, however, that she neither insisted
on Catherine's writing by every post, nor exacted her promise of
transmitting the character of every new acquaintance, nor a detail
of every interesting conversation that Bath might produce. Everything
indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the
Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed
rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the
refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation
of a heroine from her family ought always to excite. Her father, instead
of giving her an unlimited order on his banker, or even putting an
hundred pounds bank-bill into her hands, gave her only ten guineas, and
promised her more when she wanted it.
Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the
journey began. It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful
safety. Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky
overturn to introduce them to the hero. Nothing more alarming occurred
than a fear, on Mrs. Allen's side, of having once left her clogs behind
her at an inn, and that fortunately proved to be groundless.
They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight--her eyes were
here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking
environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted
them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.
They were soon settled in comfortable lodgings in Pulteney Street.
It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the
reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter
tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will,
probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate
wretchedness of which a last volume is capable--whether by her
imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy--whether by intercepting her letters,
ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.
Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can
raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world
who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty,
genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great
deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind
were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible,
intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted
to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere
and seeing everything herself as any young lady could be. Dress was
her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our
heroine's entree into life could not take place till after three or four
days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperone
was provided with a dress of the newest fashion. Catherine too made
some purchases herself, and when all these matters were arranged, the
important evening came which was to usher her into the Upper Rooms. Her
hair was cut and dressed by the best hand, her clothes put on with care,
and both Mrs. Allen and her maid declared she looked quite as she should
do. With such encouragement, Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured
through the crowd. As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it
came, but she did not depend on it.
Mrs. Allen was so long in dressing that they did not enter the ballroom
till late. The season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies
squeezed in as well as they could. As for Mr. Allen, he repaired
directly to the card-room, and left them to enjoy a mob by themselves.
With more care for the safety of her new gown than for the comfort of
her protegee, Mrs. Allen made her way through the throng of men by
the door, as swiftly as the necessary caution would allow; Catherine,
however, kept close at her side, and linked her arm too firmly within
her friend's to be torn asunder by any common effort of a struggling
assembly. But to her utter amazement she found that to proceed along the
room was by no means the way to disengage themselves from the crowd; it
seemed rather to increase as they went on, whereas she had imagined that
when once fairly within the door, they should easily find seats and be
able to watch the dances with perfect convenience. But this was far from
being the case, and though by unwearied diligence they gained even the
top of the room, their situation was just the same; they saw nothing
of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies. Still they
moved on--something better was yet in view; and by a continued exertion
of strength and ingenuity they found themselves at last in the passage
behind the highest bench. Here there was something less of crowd than
below; and hence Miss Morland had a comprehensive view of all the
company beneath her, and of all the dangers of her late passage through
them. It was a splendid sight, and she began, for the first time that
evening, to feel herself at a ball: she longed to dance, but she had
not an acquaintance in the room. Mrs. Allen did all that she could do
in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, "I wish you
could dance, my dear--I wish you could get a partner." For some time
her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were
repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine
grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.
They were not long able, however, to enjoy the repose of the eminence
they had so laboriously gained. Everybody was shortly in motion for
tea, and they must squeeze out like the rest. Catherine began to feel
something of disappointment--she was tired of being continually pressed
against by people, the generality of whose faces possessed nothing to
interest, and with all of whom she was so wholly unacquainted that she
could not relieve the irksomeness of imprisonment by the exchange of a
syllable with any of her fellow captives; and when at last arrived in
the tea-room, she felt yet more the awkwardness of having no party to
join, no acquaintance to claim, no gentleman to assist them. They saw
nothing of Mr. Allen; and after looking about them in vain for a more
eligible situation, were obliged to sit down at the end of a table, at
which a large party were already placed, without having anything to do
there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.
Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having
preserved her gown from injury. "It would have been very shocking to
have it torn," said she, "would not it? It is such a delicate muslin.
For my part I have not seen anything I like so well in the whole room, I
assure you."
"How uncomfortable it is," whispered Catherine, "not to have a single
acquaintance here!"
"Yes, my dear," replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, "it is very
uncomfortable indeed."
"What shall we do? The gentlemen and ladies at this table look as if
they wondered why we came here--we seem forcing ourselves into their
party."
"Aye, so we do. That is very disagreeable. I wish we had a large
acquaintance here."
"I wish we had any--it would be somebody to go to."
"Very true, my dear; and if we knew anybody we would join them directly.
The Skinners were here last year--I wish they were here now."
"Had not we better go away as it is? Here are no tea-things for us, you
see."
"No more there are, indeed. How very provoking! But I think we had
better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd! How is my
head, my dear? Somebody gave me a push that has hurt it, I am afraid."
"No, indeed, it looks very nice. But, dear Mrs. Allen, are you sure
there is nobody you know in all this multitude of people? I think you
must know somebody."
"I don't, upon my word--I wish I did. I wish I had a large acquaintance
here with all my heart, and then I should get you a partner. I should be
so glad to have you dance. There goes a strange-looking woman! What an
odd gown she has got on! How old-fashioned it is! Look at the back."
After some time they received an offer of tea from one of their
neighbours; it was thankfully accepted, and this introduced a light
conversation with the gentleman who offered it, which was the only time
that anybody spoke to them during the evening, till they were discovered
and joined by Mr. Allen when the dance was over.
"Well, Miss Morland," said he, directly, "I hope you have had an
agreeable ball."
"Very agreeable indeed," she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a
great yawn.
"I wish she had been able to dance," said his wife; "I wish we could
have got a partner for her. I have been saying how glad I should be if
the Skinners were here this winter instead of last; or if the Parrys had
come, as they talked of once, she might have danced with George Parry. I
am so sorry she has not had a partner!"
"We shall do better another evening I hope," was Mr. Allen's
consolation.
The company began to disperse when the dancing was over--enough to leave
space for the remainder to walk about in some comfort; and now was the
time for a heroine, who had not yet played a very distinguished part
in the events of the evening, to be noticed and admired. Every five
minutes, by removing some of the crowd, gave greater openings for her
charms. She was now seen by many young men who had not been near her
before. Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding
her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once
called a divinity by anybody. Yet Catherine was in very good looks, and
had the company only seen her three years before, they would now have
thought her exceedingly handsome.
She was looked at, however, and with some admiration; for, in her own
hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a pretty girl. Such words
had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter
than she had found it before--her humble vanity was contented--she
felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a
true-quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration
of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and
perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.
----------CHAPTER III---------
Every morning now brought its regular duties--shops were to be visited;
some new part of the town to be looked at; and the pump-room to be
attended, where they paraded up and down for an hour, looking at
everybody and speaking to no one. The wish of a numerous acquaintance
in Bath was still uppermost with Mrs. Allen, and she repeated it after
every fresh proof, which every morning brought, of her knowing nobody at
all.
They made their appearance in the Lower Rooms; and here fortune was more
favourable to our heroine. The master of the ceremonies introduced to
her a very gentlemanlike young man as a partner; his name was Tilney.
He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had a
pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and, if not
quite handsome, was very near it. His address was good, and Catherine
felt herself in high luck. There was little leisure for speaking
while they danced; but when they were seated at tea, she found him as
agreeable as she had already given him credit for being. He talked with
fluency and spirit--and there was an archness and pleasantry in his
manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her. After
chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects
around them, he suddenly addressed her with--"I have hitherto been very
remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not
yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here
before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and
the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been
very negligent--but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these
particulars? If you are I will begin directly."
"You need not give yourself that trouble, sir."
"No trouble, I assure you, madam." Then forming his features into a set
smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering
air, "Have you been long in Bath, madam?"
"About a week, sir," replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
"Really!" with affected astonishment.
"Why should you be surprised, sir?"
"Why, indeed!" said he, in his natural tone. "But some emotion must
appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed,
and not less reasonable than any other. Now let us go on. Were you never
here before, madam?"
"Never, sir."
"Indeed! Have you yet honoured the Upper Rooms?"
"Yes, sir, I was there last Monday."
"Have you been to the theatre?"
"Yes, sir, I was at the play on Tuesday."
"To the concert?"
"Yes, sir, on Wednesday."
"And are you altogether pleased with Bath?"
"Yes--I like it very well."
"Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again."
Catherine turned away her head, not knowing whether she might venture to
laugh. "I see what you think of me," said he gravely--"I shall make but
a poor figure in your journal tomorrow."
"My journal!"
"Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower
Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings--plain black
shoes--appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a
queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed
me by his nonsense."
"Indeed I shall say no such thing."
"Shall I tell you what you ought to say?"
"If you please."
"I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had
a great deal of conversation with him--seems a most extraordinary
genius--hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to
say."
"But, perhaps, I keep no journal."
"Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by
you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a
journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your
life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of
every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every
evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered,
and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be
described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to
a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as
you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journaling which
largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies
are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing
agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something,
but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping
a journal."
"I have sometimes thought," said Catherine, doubtingly, "whether ladies
do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is--I should not
think the superiority was always on our side."
"As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the
usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three
particulars."
"And what are they?"
"A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a
very frequent ignorance of grammar."
"Upon my word! I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the
compliment. You do not think too highly of us in that way."
"I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better
letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better
landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence
is pretty fairly divided between the sexes."
They were interrupted by Mrs. Allen: "My dear Catherine," said she, "do
take this pin out of my sleeve; I am afraid it has torn a hole already;
I shall be quite sorry if it has, for this is a favourite gown, though
it cost but nine shillings a yard."
"That is exactly what I should have guessed it, madam," said Mr. Tilney,
looking at the muslin.
"Do you understand muslins, sir?"
"Particularly well; I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an
excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a
gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a
prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a
yard for it, and a true Indian muslin."
Mrs. Allen was quite struck by his genius. "Men commonly take so little
notice of those things," said she; "I can never get Mr. Allen to know
one of my gowns from another. You must be a great comfort to your
sister, sir."
"I hope I am, madam."
"And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland's gown?"
"It is very pretty, madam," said he, gravely examining it; "but I do not
think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray."
"How can you," said Catherine, laughing, "be so--" She had almost said
"strange."
"I am quite of your opinion, sir," replied Mrs. Allen; "and so I told
Miss Morland when she bought it."
"But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other;
Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or
a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted. I have heard my sister
say so forty times, when she has been extravagant in buying more than
she wanted, or careless in cutting it to pieces."
"Bath is a charming place, sir; there are so many good shops here. We
are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in
Salisbury, but it is so far to go--eight miles is a long way; Mr. Allen
says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than
eight; and it is such a fag--I come back tired to death. Now, here one
can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes."
Mr. Tilney was polite enough to seem interested in what she said; and
she kept him on the subject of muslins till the dancing recommenced.
Catherine feared, as she listened to their discourse, that he indulged
himself a little too much with the foibles of others. "What are you
thinking of so earnestly?" said he, as they walked back to the ballroom;
"not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head, your
meditations are not satisfactory."
Catherine coloured, and said, "I was not thinking of anything."
"That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I had rather be told at once
that you will not tell me."
"Well then, I will not."
"Thank you; for now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to
tease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world
advances intimacy so much."
They danced again; and, when the assembly closed, parted, on the
lady's side at least, with a strong inclination for continuing the
acquaintance. Whether she thought of him so much, while she drank her
warm wine and water, and prepared herself for bed, as to dream of him
when there, cannot be ascertained; but I hope it was no more than in
a slight slumber, or a morning doze at most; for if it be true, as a
celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified
in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared,* it must be
very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the
gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her. How proper Mr. Tilney
might be as a dreamer or a lover had not yet perhaps entered Mr. Allen's
head, but that he was not objectionable as a common acquaintance for
his young charge he was on inquiry satisfied; for he had early in the
evening taken pains to know who her partner was, and had been assured
of Mr. Tilney's being a clergyman, and of a very respectable family in
Gloucestershire.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter iv using the context provided. | chapter iv|chapter v|chapter vii | The day after they meet at the ball, Catherine seeks out Henry in the Pump Room, the gathering place for Bath's socialites during the day. At first, she is crestfallen when she realizes that he is not there, but soon she is distracted by a new introduction. Mrs. Allen, who is sitting next to Catherine, is greeted by an old school friend named Mrs. Thorpe. The two older women have not seen each other for the past fifteen years, and they are both overeager to share details of their own lives. Mrs. Thorpe has three sons and three daughters, and Catherine is delighted to meet the eldest of the Thorpe girls, a dashing young woman named Isabella. Isabella reveals that her brother John has already Catherine's brother James, and she uses this connection to establish a quick intimacy with Catherine. Catherine admires Isabella for her sophisticated knowledge of the rules of fashion and flirtation. The two young ladies walk back to the Allens and promise to see each other again the next day |
----------CHAPTER IV---------
With more than usual eagerness did Catherine hasten to the pump-room the
next day, secure within herself of seeing Mr. Tilney there before the
morning were over, and ready to meet him with a smile; but no smile
was demanded--Mr. Tilney did not appear. Every creature in Bath,
except himself, was to be seen in the room at different periods of the
fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and
out, up the steps and down; people whom nobody cared about, and nobody
wanted to see; and he only was absent. "What a delightful place Bath
is," said Mrs. Allen as they sat down near the great clock, after
parading the room till they were tired; "and how pleasant it would be if
we had any acquaintance here."
This sentiment had been uttered so often in vain that Mrs. Allen had no
particular reason to hope it would be followed with more advantage now;
but we are told to "despair of nothing we would attain," as "unwearied
diligence our point would gain"; and the unwearied diligence with which
she had every day wished for the same thing was at length to have its
just reward, for hardly had she been seated ten minutes before a lady of
about her own age, who was sitting by her, and had been looking at her
attentively for several minutes, addressed her with great complaisance
in these words: "I think, madam, I cannot be mistaken; it is a long time
since I had the pleasure of seeing you, but is not your name Allen?"
This question answered, as it readily was, the stranger pronounced hers
to be Thorpe; and Mrs. Allen immediately recognized the features of
a former schoolfellow and intimate, whom she had seen only once since
their respective marriages, and that many years ago. Their joy on this
meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented
to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years. Compliments
on good looks now passed; and, after observing how time had slipped away
since they were last together, how little they had thought of meeting in
Bath, and what a pleasure it was to see an old friend, they proceeded to
make inquiries and give intelligence as to their families, sisters, and
cousins, talking both together, far more ready to give than to receive
information, and each hearing very little of what the other said. Mrs.
Thorpe, however, had one great advantage as a talker, over Mrs. Allen,
in a family of children; and when she expatiated on the talents of her
sons, and the beauty of her daughters, when she related their different
situations and views--that John was at Oxford, Edward at Merchant
Taylors', and William at sea--and all of them more beloved and respected
in their different station than any other three beings ever were, Mrs.
Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press
on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to
sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling
herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that
the lace on Mrs. Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that on
her own.
"Here come my dear girls," cried Mrs. Thorpe, pointing at three
smart-looking females who, arm in arm, were then moving towards her. "My
dear Mrs. Allen, I long to introduce them; they will be so delighted
to see you: the tallest is Isabella, my eldest; is not she a fine young
woman? The others are very much admired too, but I believe Isabella is
the handsomest."
The Miss Thorpes were introduced; and Miss Morland, who had been for a
short time forgotten, was introduced likewise. The name seemed to strike
them all; and, after speaking to her with great civility, the eldest
young lady observed aloud to the rest, "How excessively like her brother
Miss Morland is!"
"The very picture of him indeed!" cried the mother--and "I should have
known her anywhere for his sister!" was repeated by them all, two or
three times over. For a moment Catherine was surprised; but Mrs. Thorpe
and her daughters had scarcely begun the history of their acquaintance
with Mr. James Morland, before she remembered that her eldest brother
had lately formed an intimacy with a young man of his own college, of
the name of Thorpe; and that he had spent the last week of the Christmas
vacation with his family, near London.
The whole being explained, many obliging things were said by the Miss
Thorpes of their wish of being better acquainted with her; of being
considered as already friends, through the friendship of their brothers,
etc., which Catherine heard with pleasure, and answered with all the
pretty expressions she could command; and, as the first proof of amity,
she was soon invited to accept an arm of the eldest Miss Thorpe, and
take a turn with her about the room. Catherine was delighted with this
extension of her Bath acquaintance, and almost forgot Mr. Tilney while
she talked to Miss Thorpe. Friendship is certainly the finest balm for
the pangs of disappointed love.
Their conversation turned upon those subjects, of which the free
discussion has generally much to do in perfecting a sudden intimacy
between two young ladies: such as dress, balls, flirtations, and
quizzes. Miss Thorpe, however, being four years older than Miss Morland,
and at least four years better informed, had a very decided advantage in
discussing such points; she could compare the balls of Bath with those
of Tunbridge, its fashions with the fashions of London; could rectify
the opinions of her new friend in many articles of tasteful attire;
could discover a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only
smiled on each other; and point out a quiz through the thickness of a
crowd. These powers received due admiration from Catherine, to whom they
were entirely new; and the respect which they naturally inspired might
have been too great for familiarity, had not the easy gaiety of Miss
Thorpe's manners, and her frequent expressions of delight on this
acquaintance with her, softened down every feeling of awe, and left
nothing but tender affection. Their increasing attachment was not to be
satisfied with half a dozen turns in the pump-room, but required, when
they all quitted it together, that Miss Thorpe should accompany Miss
Morland to the very door of Mr. Allen's house; and that they should
there part with a most affectionate and lengthened shake of hands, after
learning, to their mutual relief, that they should see each other across
the theatre at night, and say their prayers in the same chapel the next
morning. Catherine then ran directly upstairs, and watched Miss Thorpe's
progress down the street from the drawing-room window; admired the
graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and
dress; and felt grateful, as well she might, for the chance which had
procured her such a friend.
Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a
good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother. Her
eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by
pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and
dressing in the same style, did very well.
This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity
of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past
adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy
the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of
lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which had
passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.
----------CHAPTER V---------
Catherine was not so much engaged at the theatre that evening, in
returning the nods and smiles of Miss Thorpe, though they certainly
claimed much of her leisure, as to forget to look with an inquiring eye
for Mr. Tilney in every box which her eye could reach; but she looked in
vain. Mr. Tilney was no fonder of the play than the pump-room. She hoped
to be more fortunate the next day; and when her wishes for fine weather
were answered by seeing a beautiful morning, she hardly felt a doubt of
it; for a fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants,
and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell
their acquaintance what a charming day it is.
As soon as divine service was over, the Thorpes and Allens eagerly
joined each other; and after staying long enough in the pump-room to
discover that the crowd was insupportable, and that there was not
a genteel face to be seen, which everybody discovers every Sunday
throughout the season, they hastened away to the Crescent, to breathe
the fresh air of better company. Here Catherine and Isabella, arm
in arm, again tasted the sweets of friendship in an unreserved
conversation; they talked much, and with much enjoyment; but again
was Catherine disappointed in her hope of reseeing her partner. He was
nowhere to be met with; every search for him was equally unsuccessful,
in morning lounges or evening assemblies; neither at the Upper nor Lower
Rooms, at dressed or undressed balls, was he perceivable; nor among the
walkers, the horsemen, or the curricle-drivers of the morning. His name
was not in the pump-room book, and curiosity could do no more. He must
be gone from Bath. Yet he had not mentioned that his stay would be so
short! This sort of mysteriousness, which is always so becoming in a
hero, threw a fresh grace in Catherine's imagination around his person
and manners, and increased her anxiety to know more of him. From the
Thorpes she could learn nothing, for they had been only two days in Bath
before they met with Mrs. Allen. It was a subject, however, in which
she often indulged with her fair friend, from whom she received every
possible encouragement to continue to think of him; and his impression
on her fancy was not suffered therefore to weaken. Isabella was very
sure that he must be a charming young man, and was equally sure that he
must have been delighted with her dear Catherine, and would therefore
shortly return. She liked him the better for being a clergyman, "for she
must confess herself very partial to the profession"; and something like
a sigh escaped her as she said it. Perhaps Catherine was wrong in not
demanding the cause of that gentle emotion--but she was not experienced
enough in the finesse of love, or the duties of friendship, to know when
delicate raillery was properly called for, or when a confidence should
be forced.
Mrs. Allen was now quite happy--quite satisfied with Bath. She had found
some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family
of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had
found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself. Her
daily expressions were no longer, "I wish we had some acquaintance in
Bath!" They were changed into, "How glad I am we have met with Mrs.
Thorpe!" and she was as eager in promoting the intercourse of the two
families, as her young charge and Isabella themselves could be; never
satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of
Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was
scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of
subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children, and Mrs. Allen
of her gowns.
The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick
as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every
gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof
of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other
by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned
up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the
set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they
were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut
themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not
adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers,
of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the
number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest
enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely
ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she
accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages
with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I
cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such
effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in
threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us
not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions
have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any
other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has
been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes
are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who
collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and
Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne,
are eulogized by a thousand pens--there seems almost a general wish of
decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and
of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to
recommend them. "I am no novel-reader--I seldom look into novels--Do not
imagine that I often read novels--It is really very well for a novel."
Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! It is
only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book
with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or
Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest
powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge
of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a
volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she
have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be
against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication,
of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of
taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement
of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of
conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language,
too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age
that could endure it.
----------CHAPTER VII---------
The following conversation, which took place between the two friends in
the pump-room one morning, after an acquaintance of eight or nine
days, is given as a specimen of their very warm attachment, and of the
delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which
marked the reasonableness of that attachment.
They met by appointment; and as Isabella had arrived nearly five
minutes before her friend, her first address naturally was, "My dearest
creature, what can have made you so late? I have been waiting for you at
least this age!"
"Have you, indeed! I am very sorry for it; but really I thought I was in
very good time. It is but just one. I hope you have not been here long?"
"Oh! These ten ages at least. I am sure I have been here this half hour.
But now, let us go and sit down at the other end of the room, and enjoy
ourselves. I have an hundred things to say to you. In the first place,
I was so afraid it would rain this morning, just as I wanted to set off;
it looked very showery, and that would have thrown me into agonies! Do
you know, I saw the prettiest hat you can imagine, in a shop window in
Milsom Street just now--very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons
instead of green; I quite longed for it. But, my dearest Catherine, what
have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on
with Udolpho?"
"Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the
black veil."
"Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is
behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?"
"Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me--I would not be
told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like
to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been
to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world."
"Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished
Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list
of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
"Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?"
"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook.
Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the
Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.
Those will last us some time."
"Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all
horrid?"
"Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a
sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every
one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with
her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can conceive. I think
her as beautiful as an angel, and I am so vexed with the men for not
admiring her! I scold them all amazingly about it."
"Scold them! Do you scold them for not admiring her?"
"Yes, that I do. There is nothing I would not do for those who are
really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is
not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong. I told
Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was to
tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow
Miss Andrews to be as beautiful as an angel. The men think us incapable
of real friendship, you know, and I am determined to show them the
difference. Now, if I were to hear anybody speak slightingly of you, I
should fire up in a moment: but that is not at all likely, for you are
just the kind of girl to be a great favourite with the men."
"Oh, dear!" cried Catherine, colouring. "How can you say so?"
"I know you very well; you have so much animation, which is exactly
what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess there is something amazingly
insipid about her. Oh! I must tell you, that just after we parted
yesterday, I saw a young man looking at you so earnestly--I am sure he
is in love with you." Catherine coloured, and disclaimed again. Isabella
laughed. "It is very true, upon my honour, but I see how it is; you are
indifferent to everybody's admiration, except that of one gentleman,
who shall be nameless. Nay, I cannot blame you"--speaking more
seriously--"your feelings are easily understood. Where the heart is
really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the
attention of anybody else. Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting,
that does not relate to the beloved object! I can perfectly comprehend
your feelings."
"But you should not persuade me that I think so very much about Mr.
Tilney, for perhaps I may never see him again."
"Not see him again! My dearest creature, do not talk of it. I am sure
you would be miserable if you thought so!"
"No, indeed, I should not. I do not pretend to say that I was not very
much pleased with him; but while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if
nobody could make me miserable. Oh! The dreadful black veil! My dear
Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it."
"It is so odd to me, that you should never have read Udolpho before; but
I suppose Mrs. Morland objects to novels."
"No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself;
but new books do not fall in our way."
"Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not? I
remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume."
"It is not like Udolpho at all; but yet I think it is very
entertaining."
"Do you indeed! You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.
But, my dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on your head
tonight? I am determined at all events to be dressed exactly like you.
The men take notice of that sometimes, you know."
"But it does not signify if they do," said Catherine, very innocently.
"Signify! Oh, heavens! I make it a rule never to mind what they say.
They are very often amazingly impertinent if you do not treat them with
spirit, and make them keep their distance."
"Are they? Well, I never observed that. They always behave very well to
me."
"Oh! They give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited
creatures in the world, and think themselves of so much importance!
By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always
forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you
like them best dark or fair?"
"I hardly know. I never much thought about it. Something between both, I
think. Brown--not fair, and--and not very dark."
"Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I have not forgot your
description of Mr. Tilney--'a brown skin, with dark eyes, and rather
dark hair.' Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as to
complexion--do you know--I like a sallow better than any other. You must
not betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance
answering that description."
"Betray you! What do you mean?"
"Nay, do not distress me. I believe I have said too much. Let us drop
the subject."
Catherine, in some amazement, complied, and after remaining a few
moments silent, was on the point of reverting to what interested her
at that time rather more than anything else in the world, Laurentina's
skeleton, when her friend prevented her, by saying, "For heaven's sake!
Let us move away from this end of the room. Do you know, there are two
odious young men who have been staring at me this half hour. They really
put me quite out of countenance. Let us go and look at the arrivals.
They will hardly follow us there."
Away they walked to the book; and while Isabella examined the names, it
was Catherine's employment to watch the proceedings of these alarming
young men.
"They are not coming this way, are they? I hope they are not so
impertinent as to follow us. Pray let me know if they are coming. I am
determined I will not look up."
In a few moments Catherine, with unaffected pleasure, assured her
that she need not be longer uneasy, as the gentlemen had just left the
pump-room.
"And which way are they gone?" said Isabella, turning hastily round.
"One was a very good-looking young man."
"They went towards the church-yard."
"Well, I am amazingly glad I have got rid of them! And now, what say you
to going to Edgar's Buildings with me, and looking at my new hat? You
said you should like to see it."
Catherine readily agreed. "Only," she added, "perhaps we may overtake
the two young men."
"Oh! Never mind that. If we make haste, we shall pass by them presently,
and I am dying to show you my hat."
"But if we only wait a few minutes, there will be no danger of our
seeing them at all."
"I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you. I have no
notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil
them."
Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning; and therefore,
to show the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling
the sex, they set off immediately as fast as they could walk, in pursuit
of the two young men.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter xii based on the provided context. | chapter viii|chapter xii | Catherine goes to the Tilneys' house the next day to seek out Miss Tilney and explain why they saw her on the carriage with John, but their servant tells her that Miss Tilney is not at home. As she starts back to the Allens, Catherine spots Miss Tilney exiting her house with her father. Catherine is "dejected and humbled" but manages to enjoy herself at the theater that night until she sees Henry in the opposite box. Henry bows to her stiffly, and Catherine almost rushes over to make amends with him. After the play, Henry visits Catherine's box, and Catherine explains she was lead to believe that he and his sister had already gone out. Henry accepts her explanation. Catherine is puzzled to see John talking with General Tilney and looking in her direction. John tells Catherine that he was discussing her with General Tilney, and both of the men agreed that Catherine is the "finest girl in Bath. Catherine is flattered to be singled out by General Tilney, but she does not enjoy John's compliment. Nonetheless, she reflects that the evening had done "more, much more, for her than could have been expected |
----------CHAPTER VIII---------
Half a minute conducted them through the pump-yard to the archway,
opposite Union Passage; but here they were stopped. Everybody acquainted
with Bath may remember the difficulties of crossing Cheap Street at
this point; it is indeed a street of so impertinent a nature, so
unfortunately connected with the great London and Oxford roads, and the
principal inn of the city, that a day never passes in which parties of
ladies, however important their business, whether in quest of pastry,
millinery, or even (as in the present case) of young men, are not
detained on one side or other by carriages, horsemen, or carts. This
evil had been felt and lamented, at least three times a day, by Isabella
since her residence in Bath; and she was now fated to feel and lament it
once more, for at the very moment of coming opposite to Union Passage,
and within view of the two gentlemen who were proceeding through the
crowds, and threading the gutters of that interesting alley, they
were prevented crossing by the approach of a gig, driven along on bad
pavement by a most knowing-looking coachman with all the vehemence that
could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his
horse.
"Oh, these odious gigs!" said Isabella, looking up. "How I detest them."
But this detestation, though so just, was of short duration, for she
looked again and exclaimed, "Delightful! Mr. Morland and my brother!"
"Good heaven! 'Tis James!" was uttered at the same moment by Catherine;
and, on catching the young men's eyes, the horse was immediately checked
with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches, and the servant
having now scampered up, the gentlemen jumped out, and the equipage was
delivered to his care.
Catherine, by whom this meeting was wholly unexpected, received her
brother with the liveliest pleasure; and he, being of a very amiable
disposition, and sincerely attached to her, gave every proof on his
side of equal satisfaction, which he could have leisure to do, while the
bright eyes of Miss Thorpe were incessantly challenging his notice;
and to her his devoirs were speedily paid, with a mixture of joy and
embarrassment which might have informed Catherine, had she been more
expert in the development of other people's feelings, and less simply
engrossed by her own, that her brother thought her friend quite as
pretty as she could do herself.
John Thorpe, who in the meantime had been giving orders about the
horses, soon joined them, and from him she directly received the amends
which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the
hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short
bow. He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face
and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore
the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy
where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be
easy. He took out his watch: "How long do you think we have been running
it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?"
"I do not know the distance." Her brother told her that it was
twenty-three miles.
"Three and twenty!" cried Thorpe. "Five and twenty if it is an inch."
Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, innkeepers,
and milestones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer test
of distance. "I know it must be five and twenty," said he, "by the time
we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the
inn-yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man
in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness;
that makes it exactly twenty-five."
"You have lost an hour," said Morland; "it was only ten o'clock when we
came from Tetbury."
"Ten o'clock! It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke. This
brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do
but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in
your life?" (The servant had just mounted the carriage and was driving
off.) "Such true blood! Three hours and and a half indeed coming only
three and twenty miles! Look at that creature, and suppose it possible
if you can."
"He does look very hot, to be sure."
"Hot! He had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church; but look
at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse
cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on.
What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? A neat one, is not it?
Well hung; town-built; I have not had it a month. It was built for a
Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow; he ran
it a few weeks, till, I believe, it was convenient to have done with it.
I happened just then to be looking out for some light thing of the kind,
though I had pretty well determined on a curricle too; but I chanced to
meet him on Magdalen Bridge, as he was driving into Oxford, last term:
'Ah! Thorpe,' said he, 'do you happen to want such a little thing as
this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.'
'Oh! D--,' said I; 'I am your man; what do you ask?' And how much do you
think he did, Miss Morland?"
"I am sure I cannot guess at all."
"Curricle-hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board,
lamps, silver moulding, all you see complete; the iron-work as good
as new, or better. He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly,
threw down the money, and the carriage was mine."
"And I am sure," said Catherine, "I know so little of such things that I
cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear."
"Neither one nor t'other; I might have got it for less, I dare say; but
I hate haggling, and poor Freeman wanted cash."
"That was very good-natured of you," said Catherine, quite pleased.
"Oh! D---- it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend,
I hate to be pitiful."
An inquiry now took place into the intended movements of the young
ladies; and, on finding whither they were going, it was decided that
the gentlemen should accompany them to Edgar's Buildings, and pay their
respects to Mrs. Thorpe. James and Isabella led the way; and so
well satisfied was the latter with her lot, so contentedly was she
endeavouring to ensure a pleasant walk to him who brought the double
recommendation of being her brother's friend, and her friend's brother,
so pure and uncoquettish were her feelings, that, though they overtook
and passed the two offending young men in Milsom Street, she was so far
from seeking to attract their notice, that she looked back at them only
three times.
John Thorpe kept of course with Catherine, and, after a few minutes'
silence, renewed the conversation about his gig. "You will find,
however, Miss Morland, it would be reckoned a cheap thing by some
people, for I might have sold it for ten guineas more the next day;
Jackson, of Oriel, bid me sixty at once; Morland was with me at the
time."
"Yes," said Morland, who overheard this; "but you forget that your horse
was included."
"My horse! Oh, d---- it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are
you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?"
"Yes, very; I have hardly ever an opportunity of being in one; but I am
particularly fond of it."
"I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day."
"Thank you," said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the
propriety of accepting such an offer.
"I will drive you up Lansdown Hill tomorrow."
"Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?"
"Rest! He has only come three and twenty miles today; all nonsense;
nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon.
No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours every day
while I am here."
"Shall you indeed!" said Catherine very seriously. "That will be forty
miles a day."
"Forty! Aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up Lansdown
tomorrow; mind, I am engaged."
"How delightful that will be!" cried Isabella, turning round. "My
dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will
not have room for a third."
"A third indeed! No, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters
about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care of you."
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but
Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her companion's
discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch to nothing more than
a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every
woman they met; and Catherine, after listening and agreeing as long as
she could, with all the civility and deference of the youthful female
mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that
of a self-assured man, especially where the beauty of her own sex is
concerned, ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which
had been long uppermost in her thoughts; it was, "Have you ever read
Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"
"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to
do."
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question,
but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense
and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since
Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the
others, they are the stupidest things in creation."
"I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very
interesting."
"Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's; her
novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature
in them."
"Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some
hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
"No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that
other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about,
she who married the French emigrant."
"I suppose you mean Camilla?"
"Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at
see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon
found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be
before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was
sure I should never be able to get through it."
"I have never read it."
"You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can
imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at
see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not."
This critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor
Catherine, brought them to the door of Mrs. Thorpe's lodgings, and the
feelings of the discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla gave way
to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son, as they met Mrs.
Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage. "Ah, Mother!
How do you do?" said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand. "Where
did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch.
Here is Morland and I come to stay a few days with you, so you must look
out for a couple of good beds somewhere near." And this address seemed
to satisfy all the fondest wishes of the mother's heart, for she
received him with the most delighted and exulting affection. On his
two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal
tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that
they both looked very ugly.
These manners did not please Catherine; but he was James's friend
and Isabella's brother; and her judgment was further bought off by
Isabella's assuring her, when they withdrew to see the new hat, that
John thought her the most charming girl in the world, and by John's
engaging her before they parted to dance with him that evening. Had she
been older or vainer, such attacks might have done little; but, where
youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of
reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl
in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner; and the
consequence was that, when the two Morlands, after sitting an hour with
the Thorpes, set off to walk together to Mr. Allen's, and James, as
the door was closed on them, said, "Well, Catherine, how do you like my
friend Thorpe?" instead of answering, as she probably would have done,
had there been no friendship and no flattery in the case, "I do not like
him at all," she directly replied, "I like him very much; he seems very
agreeable."
"He is as good-natured a fellow as ever lived; a little of a rattle; but
that will recommend him to your sex, I believe: and how do you like the
rest of the family?"
"Very, very much indeed: Isabella particularly."
"I am very glad to hear you say so; she is just the kind of young woman
I could wish to see you attached to; she has so much good sense, and is
so thoroughly unaffected and amiable; I always wanted you to know her;
and she seems very fond of you. She said the highest things in your
praise that could possibly be; and the praise of such a girl as Miss
Thorpe even you, Catherine," taking her hand with affection, "may be
proud of."
"Indeed I am," she replied; "I love her exceedingly, and am delighted
to find that you like her too. You hardly mentioned anything of her when
you wrote to me after your visit there."
"Because I thought I should soon see you myself. I hope you will be a
great deal together while you are in Bath. She is a most amiable girl;
such a superior understanding! How fond all the family are of her; she
is evidently the general favourite; and how much she must be admired in
such a place as this--is not she?"
"Yes, very much indeed, I fancy; Mr. Allen thinks her the prettiest girl
in Bath."
"I dare say he does; and I do not know any man who is a better judge of
beauty than Mr. Allen. I need not ask you whether you are happy here, my
dear Catherine; with such a companion and friend as Isabella Thorpe, it
would be impossible for you to be otherwise; and the Allens, I am sure,
are very kind to you?"
"Yes, very kind; I never was so happy before; and now you are come it
will be more delightful than ever; how good it is of you to come so far
on purpose to see me."
James accepted this tribute of gratitude, and qualified his conscience
for accepting it too, by saying with perfect sincerity, "Indeed,
Catherine, I love you dearly."
Inquiries and communications concerning brothers and sisters, the
situation of some, the growth of the rest, and other family matters now
passed between them, and continued, with only one small digression
on James's part, in praise of Miss Thorpe, till they reached Pulteney
Street, where he was welcomed with great kindness by Mr. and Mrs. Allen,
invited by the former to dine with them, and summoned by the latter
to guess the price and weigh the merits of a new muff and tippet.
A pre-engagement in Edgar's Buildings prevented his accepting the
invitation of one friend, and obliged him to hurry away as soon as he
had satisfied the demands of the other. The time of the two parties
uniting in the Octagon Room being correctly adjusted, Catherine was then
left to the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination
over the pages of Udolpho, lost from all worldly concerns of dressing
and dinner, incapable of soothing Mrs. Allen's fears on the delay of an
expected dressmaker, and having only one minute in sixty to bestow even
on the reflection of her own felicity, in being already engaged for the
evening.
----------CHAPTER XII---------
"Mrs. Allen," said Catherine the next morning, "will there be any harm
in my calling on Miss Tilney today? I shall not be easy till I have
explained everything."
"Go, by all means, my dear; only put on a white gown; Miss Tilney always
wears white."
Catherine cheerfully complied, and being properly equipped, was more
impatient than ever to be at the pump-room, that she might inform
herself of General Tilney's lodgings, for though she believed they were
in Milsom Street, she was not certain of the house, and Mrs. Allen's
wavering convictions only made it more doubtful. To Milsom Street she
was directed, and having made herself perfect in the number, hastened
away with eager steps and a beating heart to pay her visit, explain her
conduct, and be forgiven; tripping lightly through the church-yard, and
resolutely turning away her eyes, that she might not be obliged to
see her beloved Isabella and her dear family, who, she had reason to
believe, were in a shop hard by. She reached the house without any
impediment, looked at the number, knocked at the door, and inquired for
Miss Tilney. The man believed Miss Tilney to be at home, but was not
quite certain. Would she be pleased to send up her name? She gave her
card. In a few minutes the servant returned, and with a look which did
not quite confirm his words, said he had been mistaken, for that Miss
Tilney was walked out. Catherine, with a blush of mortification, left
the house. She felt almost persuaded that Miss Tilney was at home, and
too much offended to admit her; and as she retired down the street,
could not withhold one glance at the drawing-room windows, in
expectation of seeing her there, but no one appeared at them. At the
bottom of the street, however, she looked back again, and then, not at a
window, but issuing from the door, she saw Miss Tilney herself. She was
followed by a gentleman, whom Catherine believed to be her father,
and they turned up towards Edgar's Buildings. Catherine, in deep
mortification, proceeded on her way. She could almost be angry herself
at such angry incivility; but she checked the resentful sensation; she
remembered her own ignorance. She knew not how such an offence as hers
might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree
of unforgivingness it might with propriety lead, nor to what rigours of
rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.
Dejected and humbled, she had even some thoughts of not going with the
others to the theatre that night; but it must be confessed that they
were not of long continuance, for she soon recollected, in the first
place, that she was without any excuse for staying at home; and, in the
second, that it was a play she wanted very much to see. To the theatre
accordingly they all went; no Tilneys appeared to plague or please her;
she feared that, amongst the many perfections of the family, a fondness
for plays was not to be ranked; but perhaps it was because they were
habituated to the finer performances of the London stage, which she
knew, on Isabella's authority, rendered everything else of the kind
"quite horrid." She was not deceived in her own expectation of pleasure;
the comedy so well suspended her care that no one, observing her during
the first four acts, would have supposed she had any wretchedness about
her. On the beginning of the fifth, however, the sudden view of Mr.
Henry Tilney and his father, joining a party in the opposite box,
recalled her to anxiety and distress. The stage could no longer excite
genuine merriment--no longer keep her whole attention. Every other look
upon an average was directed towards the opposite box; and, for the
space of two entire scenes, did she thus watch Henry Tilney, without
being once able to catch his eye. No longer could he be suspected of
indifference for a play; his notice was never withdrawn from the stage
during two whole scenes. At length, however, he did look towards her,
and he bowed--but such a bow! No smile, no continued observance attended
it; his eyes were immediately returned to their former direction.
Catherine was restlessly miserable; she could almost have run round to
the box in which he sat and forced him to hear her explanation. Feelings
rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her
own dignity injured by this ready condemnation--instead of proudly
resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him
who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble
of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by
avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else--she took to herself
all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only
eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause.
The play concluded--the curtain fell--Henry Tilney was no longer to be
seen where he had hitherto sat, but his father remained, and perhaps he
might be now coming round to their box. She was right; in a few minutes
he appeared, and, making his way through the then thinning rows, spoke
with like calm politeness to Mrs. Allen and her friend. Not with such
calmness was he answered by the latter: "Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been
quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You must have thought
me so rude; but indeed it was not my own fault, was it, Mrs. Allen?
Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a
phaeton together? And then what could I do? But I had ten thousand times
rather have been with you; now had not I, Mrs. Allen?"
"My dear, you tumble my gown," was Mrs. Allen's reply.
Her assurance, however, standing sole as it did, was not thrown away; it
brought a more cordial, more natural smile into his countenance, and
he replied in a tone which retained only a little affected reserve:
"We were much obliged to you at any rate for wishing us a pleasant walk
after our passing you in Argyle Street: you were so kind as to look back
on purpose."
"But indeed I did not wish you a pleasant walk; I never thought of such
a thing; but I begged Mr. Thorpe so earnestly to stop; I called out to
him as soon as ever I saw you; now, Mrs. Allen, did not--Oh! You were
not there; but indeed I did; and, if Mr. Thorpe would only have stopped,
I would have jumped out and run after you."
Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a
declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not. With a yet sweeter smile, he
said everything that need be said of his sister's concern, regret, and
dependence on Catherine's honour. "Oh! Do not say Miss Tilney was not
angry," cried Catherine, "because I know she was; for she would not see
me this morning when I called; I saw her walk out of the house the next
minute after my leaving it; I was hurt, but I was not affronted. Perhaps
you did not know I had been there."
"I was not within at the time; but I heard of it from Eleanor, and she
has been wishing ever since to see you, to explain the reason of such
incivility; but perhaps I can do it as well. It was nothing more than
that my father--they were just preparing to walk out, and he being
hurried for time, and not caring to have it put off--made a point of her
being denied. That was all, I do assure you. She was very much vexed,
and meant to make her apology as soon as possible."
Catherine's mind was greatly eased by this information, yet a something
of solicitude remained, from which sprang the following question,
thoroughly artless in itself, though rather distressing to the
gentleman: "But, Mr. Tilney, why were you less generous than your
sister? If she felt such confidence in my good intentions, and could
suppose it to be only a mistake, why should you be so ready to take
offence?"
"Me! I take offence!"
"Nay, I am sure by your look, when you came into the box, you were
angry."
"I angry! I could have no right."
"Well, nobody would have thought you had no right who saw your face." He
replied by asking her to make room for him, and talking of the play.
He remained with them some time, and was only too agreeable for
Catherine to be contented when he went away. Before they parted,
however, it was agreed that the projected walk should be taken as soon
as possible; and, setting aside the misery of his quitting their box,
she was, upon the whole, left one of the happiest creatures in the
world.
While talking to each other, she had observed with some surprise that
John Thorpe, who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes
together, was engaged in conversation with General Tilney; and she felt
something more than surprise when she thought she could perceive herself
the object of their attention and discourse. What could they have to say
of her? She feared General Tilney did not like her appearance: she found
it was implied in his preventing her admittance to his daughter, rather
than postpone his own walk a few minutes. "How came Mr. Thorpe to know
your father?" was her anxious inquiry, as she pointed them out to her
companion. He knew nothing about it; but his father, like every military
man, had a very large acquaintance.
When the entertainment was over, Thorpe came to assist them in getting
out. Catherine was the immediate object of his gallantry; and, while
they waited in the lobby for a chair, he prevented the inquiry which had
travelled from her heart almost to the tip of her tongue, by asking, in
a consequential manner, whether she had seen him talking with General
Tilney: "He is a fine old fellow, upon my soul! Stout, active--looks
as young as his son. I have a great regard for him, I assure you: a
gentleman-like, good sort of fellow as ever lived."
"But how came you to know him?"
"Know him! There are few people much about town that I do not know. I
have met him forever at the Bedford; and I knew his face again today the
moment he came into the billiard-room. One of the best players we have,
by the by; and we had a little touch together, though I was almost
afraid of him at first: the odds were five to four against me; and, if
I had not made one of the cleanest strokes that perhaps ever was made in
this world--I took his ball exactly--but I could not make you understand
it without a table; however, I did beat him. A very fine fellow; as rich
as a Jew. I should like to dine with him; I dare say he gives famous
dinners. But what do you think we have been talking of? You. Yes, by
heavens! And the general thinks you the finest girl in Bath."
"Oh! Nonsense! How can you say so?"
"And what do you think I said?"--lowering his voice--"well done,
general, said I; I am quite of your mind."
Here Catherine, who was much less gratified by his admiration than by
General Tilney's, was not sorry to be called away by Mr. Allen. Thorpe,
however, would see her to her chair, and, till she entered it, continued
the same kind of delicate flattery, in spite of her entreating him to
have done.
That General Tilney, instead of disliking, should admire her, was very
delightful; and she joyfully thought that there was not one of the
family whom she need now fear to meet. The evening had done more, much
more, for her than could have been expected.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 1 based on the provided context. | chapter viii|chapter 1 | Catherine Morland is born, which is good since she is the star of this book. The narrator introduces us to her family. Dad's a clergyman and Mom takes care of Catherine and her nine siblings. The narrator helpfully informs us that Catherine is a pretty bad heroine: no suffering or tragedies or anything like that. Catherine is awkward and tomboyish and generally unremarkable as a kid. Then Catherine hits her teen years and gets better looking. Good for her. She also becomes interested in fashion, boys, and reading popular Gothic fiction instead of "boring" educational junk - which is like saying she got obsessed with Twilight and thought the classics like, well, Jane Austen, were really lame. Catherine finds school pretty dull and can't really boast of a talent like drawing or music. Sadly, Catherine lives in a small community and has yet to meet any handsome young men. Her improving looks are going to waste. But her neighbors, the Allens, don't have any children and decide to invite Catherine, now seventeen, to visit Bath with them. Catherine is super-excited. Fun fact: Bath is famous for its hot springs and was a popular spa town/fashionable tourist destination in early nineteenth century Britain. |
----------CHAPTER VIII---------
In spite of Udolpho and the dressmaker, however, the party from Pulteney
Street reached the Upper Rooms in very good time. The Thorpes and James
Morland were there only two minutes before them; and Isabella having
gone through the usual ceremonial of meeting her friend with the most
smiling and affectionate haste, of admiring the set of her gown, and
envying the curl of her hair, they followed their chaperones, arm in
arm, into the ballroom, whispering to each other whenever a thought
occurred, and supplying the place of many ideas by a squeeze of the hand
or a smile of affection.
The dancing began within a few minutes after they were seated; and
James, who had been engaged quite as long as his sister, was very
importunate with Isabella to stand up; but John was gone into the
card-room to speak to a friend, and nothing, she declared, should induce
her to join the set before her dear Catherine could join it too. "I
assure you," said she, "I would not stand up without your dear sister
for all the world; for if I did we should certainly be separated the
whole evening." Catherine accepted this kindness with gratitude, and
they continued as they were for three minutes longer, when Isabella, who
had been talking to James on the other side of her, turned again to his
sister and whispered, "My dear creature, I am afraid I must leave you,
your brother is so amazingly impatient to begin; I know you will not
mind my going away, and I dare say John will be back in a moment,
and then you may easily find me out." Catherine, though a little
disappointed, had too much good nature to make any opposition, and the
others rising up, Isabella had only time to press her friend's hand and
say, "Good-bye, my dear love," before they hurried off. The younger
Miss Thorpes being also dancing, Catherine was left to the mercy of Mrs.
Thorpe and Mrs. Allen, between whom she now remained. She could not help
being vexed at the non-appearance of Mr. Thorpe, for she not only longed
to be dancing, but was likewise aware that, as the real dignity of her
situation could not be known, she was sharing with the scores of other
young ladies still sitting down all the discredit of wanting a partner.
To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of
infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the
misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those
circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine's life, and her
fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character. Catherine
had fortitude too; she suffered, but no murmur passed her lips.
From this state of humiliation, she was roused, at the end of ten
minutes, to a pleasanter feeling, by seeing, not Mr. Thorpe, but Mr.
Tilney, within three yards of the place where they sat; he seemed to be
moving that way, but he did not see her, and therefore the smile and the
blush, which his sudden reappearance raised in Catherine, passed away
without sullying her heroic importance. He looked as handsome and as
lively as ever, and was talking with interest to a fashionable and
pleasing-looking young woman, who leant on his arm, and whom Catherine
immediately guessed to be his sister; thus unthinkingly throwing away
a fair opportunity of considering him lost to her forever, by being
married already. But guided only by what was simple and probable, it
had never entered her head that Mr. Tilney could be married; he had not
behaved, he had not talked, like the married men to whom she had been
used; he had never mentioned a wife, and he had acknowledged a sister.
From these circumstances sprang the instant conclusion of his sister's
now being by his side; and therefore, instead of turning of a deathlike
paleness and falling in a fit on Mrs. Allen's bosom, Catherine sat
erect, in the perfect use of her senses, and with cheeks only a little
redder than usual.
Mr. Tilney and his companion, who continued, though slowly, to approach,
were immediately preceded by a lady, an acquaintance of Mrs. Thorpe; and
this lady stopping to speak to her, they, as belonging to her, stopped
likewise, and Catherine, catching Mr. Tilney's eye, instantly received
from him the smiling tribute of recognition. She returned it with
pleasure, and then advancing still nearer, he spoke both to her and Mrs.
Allen, by whom he was very civilly acknowledged. "I am very happy to see
you again, sir, indeed; I was afraid you had left Bath." He thanked her
for her fears, and said that he had quitted it for a week, on the very
morning after his having had the pleasure of seeing her.
"Well, sir, and I dare say you are not sorry to be back again, for it
is just the place for young people--and indeed for everybody else too.
I tell Mr. Allen, when he talks of being sick of it, that I am sure he
should not complain, for it is so very agreeable a place, that it is
much better to be here than at home at this dull time of year. I tell
him he is quite in luck to be sent here for his health."
"And I hope, madam, that Mr. Allen will be obliged to like the place,
from finding it of service to him."
"Thank you, sir. I have no doubt that he will. A neighbour of ours,
Dr. Skinner, was here for his health last winter, and came away quite
stout."
"That circumstance must give great encouragement."
"Yes, sir--and Dr. Skinner and his family were here three months; so I
tell Mr. Allen he must not be in a hurry to get away."
Here they were interrupted by a request from Mrs. Thorpe to Mrs. Allen,
that she would move a little to accommodate Mrs. Hughes and Miss Tilney
with seats, as they had agreed to join their party. This was accordingly
done, Mr. Tilney still continuing standing before them; and after a
few minutes' consideration, he asked Catherine to dance with him. This
compliment, delightful as it was, produced severe mortification to the
lady; and in giving her denial, she expressed her sorrow on the occasion
so very much as if she really felt it that had Thorpe, who joined her
just afterwards, been half a minute earlier, he might have thought her
sufferings rather too acute. The very easy manner in which he then told
her that he had kept her waiting did not by any means reconcile her more
to her lot; nor did the particulars which he entered into while they
were standing up, of the horses and dogs of the friend whom he had just
left, and of a proposed exchange of terriers between them, interest her
so much as to prevent her looking very often towards that part of the
room where she had left Mr. Tilney. Of her dear Isabella, to whom she
particularly longed to point out that gentleman, she could see nothing.
They were in different sets. She was separated from all her party, and
away from all her acquaintance; one mortification succeeded another,
and from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously
engaged to a ball does not necessarily increase either the dignity or
enjoyment of a young lady. From such a moralizing strain as this, she
was suddenly roused by a touch on the shoulder, and turning round,
perceived Mrs. Hughes directly behind her, attended by Miss Tilney and
a gentleman. "I beg your pardon, Miss Morland," said she, "for this
liberty--but I cannot anyhow get to Miss Thorpe, and Mrs. Thorpe said
she was sure you would not have the least objection to letting in this
young lady by you." Mrs. Hughes could not have applied to any creature
in the room more happy to oblige her than Catherine. The young ladies
were introduced to each other, Miss Tilney expressing a proper sense of
such goodness, Miss Morland with the real delicacy of a generous mind
making light of the obligation; and Mrs. Hughes, satisfied with having
so respectably settled her young charge, returned to her party.
Miss Tilney had a good figure, a pretty face, and a very agreeable
countenance; and her air, though it had not all the decided pretension,
the resolute stylishness of Miss Thorpe's, had more real elegance. Her
manners showed good sense and good breeding; they were neither shy nor
affectedly open; and she seemed capable of being young, attractive, and
at a ball without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her,
and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable
vexation on every little trifling occurrence. Catherine, interested at
once by her appearance and her relationship to Mr. Tilney, was desirous
of being acquainted with her, and readily talked therefore whenever she
could think of anything to say, and had courage and leisure for saying
it. But the hindrance thrown in the way of a very speedy intimacy, by
the frequent want of one or more of these requisites, prevented their
doing more than going through the first rudiments of an acquaintance, by
informing themselves how well the other liked Bath, how much she admired
its buildings and surrounding country, whether she drew, or played, or
sang, and whether she was fond of riding on horseback.
The two dances were scarcely concluded before Catherine found her arm
gently seized by her faithful Isabella, who in great spirits exclaimed,
"At last I have got you. My dearest creature, I have been looking for
you this hour. What could induce you to come into this set, when you
knew I was in the other? I have been quite wretched without you."
"My dear Isabella, how was it possible for me to get at you? I could not
even see where you were."
"So I told your brother all the time--but he would not believe me. Do go
and see for her, Mr. Morland, said I--but all in vain--he would not stir
an inch. Was not it so, Mr. Morland? But you men are all so immoderately
lazy! I have been scolding him to such a degree, my dear Catherine, you
would be quite amazed. You know I never stand upon ceremony with such
people."
"Look at that young lady with the white beads round her head," whispered
Catherine, detaching her friend from James. "It is Mr. Tilney's sister."
"Oh! Heavens! You don't say so! Let me look at her this moment. What a
delightful girl! I never saw anything half so beautiful! But where is
her all-conquering brother? Is he in the room? Point him out to me this
instant, if he is. I die to see him. Mr. Morland, you are not to listen.
We are not talking about you."
"But what is all this whispering about? What is going on?"
"There now, I knew how it would be. You men have such restless
curiosity! Talk of the curiosity of women, indeed! 'Tis nothing. But be
satisfied, for you are not to know anything at all of the matter."
"And is that likely to satisfy me, do you think?"
"Well, I declare I never knew anything like you. What can it signify to
you, what we are talking of. Perhaps we are talking about you; therefore
I would advise you not to listen, or you may happen to hear something
not very agreeable."
In this commonplace chatter, which lasted some time, the original
subject seemed entirely forgotten; and though Catherine was very well
pleased to have it dropped for a while, she could not avoid a little
suspicion at the total suspension of all Isabella's impatient desire to
see Mr. Tilney. When the orchestra struck up a fresh dance, James would
have led his fair partner away, but she resisted. "I tell you, Mr.
Morland," she cried, "I would not do such a thing for all the world.
How can you be so teasing; only conceive, my dear Catherine, what your
brother wants me to do. He wants me to dance with him again, though
I tell him that it is a most improper thing, and entirely against the
rules. It would make us the talk of the place, if we were not to change
partners."
"Upon my honour," said James, "in these public assemblies, it is as
often done as not."
"Nonsense, how can you say so? But when you men have a point to carry,
you never stick at anything. My sweet Catherine, do support me; persuade
your brother how impossible it is. Tell him that it would quite shock
you to see me do such a thing; now would not it?"
"No, not at all; but if you think it wrong, you had much better change."
"There," cried Isabella, "you hear what your sister says, and yet you
will not mind her. Well, remember that it is not my fault, if we set all
the old ladies in Bath in a bustle. Come along, my dearest Catherine,
for heaven's sake, and stand by me." And off they went, to regain
their former place. John Thorpe, in the meanwhile, had walked away; and
Catherine, ever willing to give Mr. Tilney an opportunity of repeating
the agreeable request which had already flattered her once, made her
way to Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe as fast as she could, in the hope
of finding him still with them--a hope which, when it proved to be
fruitless, she felt to have been highly unreasonable. "Well, my dear,"
said Mrs. Thorpe, impatient for praise of her son, "I hope you have had
an agreeable partner."
"Very agreeable, madam."
"I am glad of it. John has charming spirits, has not he?"
"Did you meet Mr. Tilney, my dear?" said Mrs. Allen.
"No, where is he?"
"He was with us just now, and said he was so tired of lounging about,
that he was resolved to go and dance; so I thought perhaps he would ask
you, if he met with you."
"Where can he be?" said Catherine, looking round; but she had not looked
round long before she saw him leading a young lady to the dance.
"Ah! He has got a partner; I wish he had asked you," said Mrs. Allen;
and after a short silence, she added, "he is a very agreeable young
man."
"Indeed he is, Mrs. Allen," said Mrs. Thorpe, smiling complacently; "I
must say it, though I am his mother, that there is not a more agreeable
young man in the world."
This inapplicable answer might have been too much for the comprehension
of many; but it did not puzzle Mrs. Allen, for after only a moment's
consideration, she said, in a whisper to Catherine, "I dare say she
thought I was speaking of her son."
Catherine was disappointed and vexed. She seemed to have missed by so
little the very object she had had in view; and this persuasion did not
incline her to a very gracious reply, when John Thorpe came up to her
soon afterwards and said, "Well, Miss Morland, I suppose you and I are
to stand up and jig it together again."
"Oh, no; I am much obliged to you, our two dances are over; and,
besides, I am tired, and do not mean to dance any more."
"Do not you? Then let us walk about and quiz people. Come along with
me, and I will show you the four greatest quizzers in the room; my two
younger sisters and their partners. I have been laughing at them this
half hour."
Again Catherine excused herself; and at last he walked off to quiz his
sisters by himself. The rest of the evening she found very dull; Mr.
Tilney was drawn away from their party at tea, to attend that of his
partner; Miss Tilney, though belonging to it, did not sit near her, and
James and Isabella were so much engaged in conversing together that the
latter had no leisure to bestow more on her friend than one smile, one
squeeze, and one "dearest Catherine."
----------CHAPTER 1---------
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have
supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character
of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were
all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being
neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name
was Richard--and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable
independence besides two good livings--and he was not in the least
addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful
plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a
good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and
instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might
expect, she still lived on--lived to have six children more--to see them
growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family
of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are
heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had
little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and
Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin
awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong
features--so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism
seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred
cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of
infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a
rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered
flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief--at least
so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was
forbidden to take. Such were her propensities--her abilities were quite
as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything
before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often
inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in
teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her
next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine
was always stupid--by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and
Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her
to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was
very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight
years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs.
Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in
spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which
dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life.
Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain
the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd
piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses
and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing
and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her
proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in
both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character!--for
with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither
a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever
quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions
of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and
cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the
green slope at the back of the house.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending;
she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved,
her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more
animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to
an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had
now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark
on her personal improvement. "Catherine grows quite a good-looking
girl--she is almost pretty today," were words which caught her ears now
and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an
acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the
first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever
receive.
Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children
everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in
lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were
inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful
that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should
prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about
the country at the age of fourteen, to books--or at least books of
information--for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be
gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she
had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen
she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines
must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so
serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.
From Pope, she learnt to censure those who
"bear about the mockery of woe."
From Gray, that
"Many a flower is born to blush unseen,
"And waste its fragrance on the desert air."
From Thompson, that--
"It is a delightful task
"To teach the young idea how to shoot."
And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information--amongst
the rest, that--
"Trifles light as air,
"Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,
"As proofs of Holy Writ."
That
"The poor beetle, which we tread upon,
"In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
"As when a giant dies."
And that a young woman in love always looks--
"like Patience on a monument
"Smiling at Grief."
So far her improvement was sufficient--and in many other points she came
on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought
herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing
a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own
composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very
little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil--she had no
notion of drawing--not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's
profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell
miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know
her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the
age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call
forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and
without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate
and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be
generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was
not one lord in the neighbourhood; no--not even a baronet. There was not
one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy
accidentally found at their door--not one young man whose origin
was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no
children.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty
surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen
to throw a hero in her way.
Mr. Allen, who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton, the
village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived, was ordered to Bath
for the benefit of a gouty constitution--and his lady, a good-humoured
woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will
not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad,
invited her to go with them. Mr. and Mrs. Morland were all compliance,
and Catherine all happiness.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 2 with the given context. | chapter 2|chapter 3|chapter 4 | The narrator reminds us that Catherine is a pretty average seventeen-year-old and is rather naive. Mrs. Morland isn't very savvy and gives Catherine some less than useful advice about her first trip to a big town, telling her to dress warm and stuff like that. Catherine's sister Sally does not care that Catherine is leaving - probably because she gets a room to herself for once. Mr. Morland gives Catherine a small amount of money and tells her to ask for more later if she wants it. So much for Catherine's unlimited shopping spree. The Allens and Catherine travel to Bath. It's pretty boring. They arrive in Bath and go to their lodgings. Mrs. Allen is obsessed with fashion, and is also a bit dimwitted, just FYI. She takes Catherine shopping for days. Catherine gets her hair cut and styled too. Finally, the Allens and Catherine attend their first ball in Bath and it's very crowded. Mr. Allen goes off to play cards. Catherine and Mrs. Allen struggle through the crowd till they find a bench where they can watch all the fashionable people dance. Mrs. Allen isn't much of a conversationalist and Catherine starts getting bored. They all go for tea, which is like party refreshments, but it's still really crowded and Catherine starts getting annoyed by all the people. She finds it uncomfortable since she doesn't know anyone there. Mrs. Allen and Catherine have to sit at a table with strangers during tea and it's really awkward. Mrs. Allen keeps wishing they knew someone there and commenting on the fashion. Finally Mr. Allen comes back from his card game and they all make their way to an exit. Catherine gets noticed by some guys on the way out and overhears two of them say she is pretty. Catherine is way excited. |
----------CHAPTER 2---------
In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland's
personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the
difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath, it may be
stated, for the reader's more certain information, lest the following
pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is
meant to be, that her heart was affectionate; her disposition cheerful
and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind--her manners just
removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing,
and, when in good looks, pretty--and her mind about as ignorant and
uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.
When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of Mrs.
Morland will be naturally supposed to be most severe. A thousand
alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved Catherine from this
terrific separation must oppress her heart with sadness, and drown her
in tears for the last day or two of their being together; and advice of
the most important and applicable nature must of course flow from her
wise lips in their parting conference in her closet. Cautions against
the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young
ladies away to some remote farm-house, must, at such a moment, relieve
the fulness of her heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs. Morland knew
so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their
general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her
daughter from their machinations. Her cautions were confined to the
following points. "I beg, Catherine, you will always wrap yourself up
very warm about the throat, when you come from the rooms at night; and
I wish you would try to keep some account of the money you spend; I will
give you this little book on purpose."
Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will
reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?),
must from situation be at this time the intimate friend and confidante
of her sister. It is remarkable, however, that she neither insisted
on Catherine's writing by every post, nor exacted her promise of
transmitting the character of every new acquaintance, nor a detail
of every interesting conversation that Bath might produce. Everything
indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the
Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed
rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the
refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation
of a heroine from her family ought always to excite. Her father, instead
of giving her an unlimited order on his banker, or even putting an
hundred pounds bank-bill into her hands, gave her only ten guineas, and
promised her more when she wanted it.
Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the
journey began. It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful
safety. Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky
overturn to introduce them to the hero. Nothing more alarming occurred
than a fear, on Mrs. Allen's side, of having once left her clogs behind
her at an inn, and that fortunately proved to be groundless.
They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight--her eyes were
here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking
environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted
them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.
They were soon settled in comfortable lodgings in Pulteney Street.
It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the
reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter
tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will,
probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate
wretchedness of which a last volume is capable--whether by her
imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy--whether by intercepting her letters,
ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.
Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can
raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world
who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty,
genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great
deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind
were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible,
intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted
to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere
and seeing everything herself as any young lady could be. Dress was
her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our
heroine's entree into life could not take place till after three or four
days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperone
was provided with a dress of the newest fashion. Catherine too made
some purchases herself, and when all these matters were arranged, the
important evening came which was to usher her into the Upper Rooms. Her
hair was cut and dressed by the best hand, her clothes put on with care,
and both Mrs. Allen and her maid declared she looked quite as she should
do. With such encouragement, Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured
through the crowd. As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it
came, but she did not depend on it.
Mrs. Allen was so long in dressing that they did not enter the ballroom
till late. The season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies
squeezed in as well as they could. As for Mr. Allen, he repaired
directly to the card-room, and left them to enjoy a mob by themselves.
With more care for the safety of her new gown than for the comfort of
her protegee, Mrs. Allen made her way through the throng of men by
the door, as swiftly as the necessary caution would allow; Catherine,
however, kept close at her side, and linked her arm too firmly within
her friend's to be torn asunder by any common effort of a struggling
assembly. But to her utter amazement she found that to proceed along the
room was by no means the way to disengage themselves from the crowd; it
seemed rather to increase as they went on, whereas she had imagined that
when once fairly within the door, they should easily find seats and be
able to watch the dances with perfect convenience. But this was far from
being the case, and though by unwearied diligence they gained even the
top of the room, their situation was just the same; they saw nothing
of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies. Still they
moved on--something better was yet in view; and by a continued exertion
of strength and ingenuity they found themselves at last in the passage
behind the highest bench. Here there was something less of crowd than
below; and hence Miss Morland had a comprehensive view of all the
company beneath her, and of all the dangers of her late passage through
them. It was a splendid sight, and she began, for the first time that
evening, to feel herself at a ball: she longed to dance, but she had
not an acquaintance in the room. Mrs. Allen did all that she could do
in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, "I wish you
could dance, my dear--I wish you could get a partner." For some time
her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were
repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine
grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.
They were not long able, however, to enjoy the repose of the eminence
they had so laboriously gained. Everybody was shortly in motion for
tea, and they must squeeze out like the rest. Catherine began to feel
something of disappointment--she was tired of being continually pressed
against by people, the generality of whose faces possessed nothing to
interest, and with all of whom she was so wholly unacquainted that she
could not relieve the irksomeness of imprisonment by the exchange of a
syllable with any of her fellow captives; and when at last arrived in
the tea-room, she felt yet more the awkwardness of having no party to
join, no acquaintance to claim, no gentleman to assist them. They saw
nothing of Mr. Allen; and after looking about them in vain for a more
eligible situation, were obliged to sit down at the end of a table, at
which a large party were already placed, without having anything to do
there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.
Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having
preserved her gown from injury. "It would have been very shocking to
have it torn," said she, "would not it? It is such a delicate muslin.
For my part I have not seen anything I like so well in the whole room, I
assure you."
"How uncomfortable it is," whispered Catherine, "not to have a single
acquaintance here!"
"Yes, my dear," replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, "it is very
uncomfortable indeed."
"What shall we do? The gentlemen and ladies at this table look as if
they wondered why we came here--we seem forcing ourselves into their
party."
"Aye, so we do. That is very disagreeable. I wish we had a large
acquaintance here."
"I wish we had any--it would be somebody to go to."
"Very true, my dear; and if we knew anybody we would join them directly.
The Skinners were here last year--I wish they were here now."
"Had not we better go away as it is? Here are no tea-things for us, you
see."
"No more there are, indeed. How very provoking! But I think we had
better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd! How is my
head, my dear? Somebody gave me a push that has hurt it, I am afraid."
"No, indeed, it looks very nice. But, dear Mrs. Allen, are you sure
there is nobody you know in all this multitude of people? I think you
must know somebody."
"I don't, upon my word--I wish I did. I wish I had a large acquaintance
here with all my heart, and then I should get you a partner. I should be
so glad to have you dance. There goes a strange-looking woman! What an
odd gown she has got on! How old-fashioned it is! Look at the back."
After some time they received an offer of tea from one of their
neighbours; it was thankfully accepted, and this introduced a light
conversation with the gentleman who offered it, which was the only time
that anybody spoke to them during the evening, till they were discovered
and joined by Mr. Allen when the dance was over.
"Well, Miss Morland," said he, directly, "I hope you have had an
agreeable ball."
"Very agreeable indeed," she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a
great yawn.
"I wish she had been able to dance," said his wife; "I wish we could
have got a partner for her. I have been saying how glad I should be if
the Skinners were here this winter instead of last; or if the Parrys had
come, as they talked of once, she might have danced with George Parry. I
am so sorry she has not had a partner!"
"We shall do better another evening I hope," was Mr. Allen's
consolation.
The company began to disperse when the dancing was over--enough to leave
space for the remainder to walk about in some comfort; and now was the
time for a heroine, who had not yet played a very distinguished part
in the events of the evening, to be noticed and admired. Every five
minutes, by removing some of the crowd, gave greater openings for her
charms. She was now seen by many young men who had not been near her
before. Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding
her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once
called a divinity by anybody. Yet Catherine was in very good looks, and
had the company only seen her three years before, they would now have
thought her exceedingly handsome.
She was looked at, however, and with some admiration; for, in her own
hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a pretty girl. Such words
had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter
than she had found it before--her humble vanity was contented--she
felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a
true-quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration
of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and
perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.
----------CHAPTER 3---------
Every morning now brought its regular duties--shops were to be visited;
some new part of the town to be looked at; and the pump-room to be
attended, where they paraded up and down for an hour, looking at
everybody and speaking to no one. The wish of a numerous acquaintance
in Bath was still uppermost with Mrs. Allen, and she repeated it after
every fresh proof, which every morning brought, of her knowing nobody at
all.
They made their appearance in the Lower Rooms; and here fortune was more
favourable to our heroine. The master of the ceremonies introduced to
her a very gentlemanlike young man as a partner; his name was Tilney.
He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had a
pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and, if not
quite handsome, was very near it. His address was good, and Catherine
felt herself in high luck. There was little leisure for speaking
while they danced; but when they were seated at tea, she found him as
agreeable as she had already given him credit for being. He talked with
fluency and spirit--and there was an archness and pleasantry in his
manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her. After
chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects
around them, he suddenly addressed her with--"I have hitherto been very
remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not
yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here
before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and
the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been
very negligent--but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these
particulars? If you are I will begin directly."
"You need not give yourself that trouble, sir."
"No trouble, I assure you, madam." Then forming his features into a set
smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering
air, "Have you been long in Bath, madam?"
"About a week, sir," replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
"Really!" with affected astonishment.
"Why should you be surprised, sir?"
"Why, indeed!" said he, in his natural tone. "But some emotion must
appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed,
and not less reasonable than any other. Now let us go on. Were you never
here before, madam?"
"Never, sir."
"Indeed! Have you yet honoured the Upper Rooms?"
"Yes, sir, I was there last Monday."
"Have you been to the theatre?"
"Yes, sir, I was at the play on Tuesday."
"To the concert?"
"Yes, sir, on Wednesday."
"And are you altogether pleased with Bath?"
"Yes--I like it very well."
"Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again."
Catherine turned away her head, not knowing whether she might venture to
laugh. "I see what you think of me," said he gravely--"I shall make but
a poor figure in your journal tomorrow."
"My journal!"
"Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower
Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings--plain black
shoes--appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a
queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed
me by his nonsense."
"Indeed I shall say no such thing."
"Shall I tell you what you ought to say?"
"If you please."
"I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had
a great deal of conversation with him--seems a most extraordinary
genius--hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to
say."
"But, perhaps, I keep no journal."
"Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by
you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a
journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your
life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of
every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every
evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered,
and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be
described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to
a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as
you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journaling which
largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies
are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing
agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something,
but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping
a journal."
"I have sometimes thought," said Catherine, doubtingly, "whether ladies
do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is--I should not
think the superiority was always on our side."
"As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the
usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three
particulars."
"And what are they?"
"A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a
very frequent ignorance of grammar."
"Upon my word! I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the
compliment. You do not think too highly of us in that way."
"I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better
letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better
landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence
is pretty fairly divided between the sexes."
They were interrupted by Mrs. Allen: "My dear Catherine," said she, "do
take this pin out of my sleeve; I am afraid it has torn a hole already;
I shall be quite sorry if it has, for this is a favourite gown, though
it cost but nine shillings a yard."
"That is exactly what I should have guessed it, madam," said Mr. Tilney,
looking at the muslin.
"Do you understand muslins, sir?"
"Particularly well; I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an
excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a
gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a
prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a
yard for it, and a true Indian muslin."
Mrs. Allen was quite struck by his genius. "Men commonly take so little
notice of those things," said she; "I can never get Mr. Allen to know
one of my gowns from another. You must be a great comfort to your
sister, sir."
"I hope I am, madam."
"And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland's gown?"
"It is very pretty, madam," said he, gravely examining it; "but I do not
think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray."
"How can you," said Catherine, laughing, "be so--" She had almost said
"strange."
"I am quite of your opinion, sir," replied Mrs. Allen; "and so I told
Miss Morland when she bought it."
"But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other;
Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or
a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted. I have heard my sister
say so forty times, when she has been extravagant in buying more than
she wanted, or careless in cutting it to pieces."
"Bath is a charming place, sir; there are so many good shops here. We
are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in
Salisbury, but it is so far to go--eight miles is a long way; Mr. Allen
says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than
eight; and it is such a fag--I come back tired to death. Now, here one
can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes."
Mr. Tilney was polite enough to seem interested in what she said; and
she kept him on the subject of muslins till the dancing recommenced.
Catherine feared, as she listened to their discourse, that he indulged
himself a little too much with the foibles of others. "What are you
thinking of so earnestly?" said he, as they walked back to the ballroom;
"not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head, your
meditations are not satisfactory."
Catherine coloured, and said, "I was not thinking of anything."
"That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I had rather be told at once
that you will not tell me."
"Well then, I will not."
"Thank you; for now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to
tease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world
advances intimacy so much."
They danced again; and, when the assembly closed, parted, on the
lady's side at least, with a strong inclination for continuing the
acquaintance. Whether she thought of him so much, while she drank her
warm wine and water, and prepared herself for bed, as to dream of him
when there, cannot be ascertained; but I hope it was no more than in
a slight slumber, or a morning doze at most; for if it be true, as a
celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified
in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared,* it must be
very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the
gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her. How proper Mr. Tilney
might be as a dreamer or a lover had not yet perhaps entered Mr. Allen's
head, but that he was not objectionable as a common acquaintance for
his young charge he was on inquiry satisfied; for he had early in the
evening taken pains to know who her partner was, and had been assured
of Mr. Tilney's being a clergyman, and of a very respectable family in
Gloucestershire.
----------CHAPTER 4---------
With more than usual eagerness did Catherine hasten to the pump-room the
next day, secure within herself of seeing Mr. Tilney there before the
morning were over, and ready to meet him with a smile; but no smile
was demanded--Mr. Tilney did not appear. Every creature in Bath,
except himself, was to be seen in the room at different periods of the
fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and
out, up the steps and down; people whom nobody cared about, and nobody
wanted to see; and he only was absent. "What a delightful place Bath
is," said Mrs. Allen as they sat down near the great clock, after
parading the room till they were tired; "and how pleasant it would be if
we had any acquaintance here."
This sentiment had been uttered so often in vain that Mrs. Allen had no
particular reason to hope it would be followed with more advantage now;
but we are told to "despair of nothing we would attain," as "unwearied
diligence our point would gain"; and the unwearied diligence with which
she had every day wished for the same thing was at length to have its
just reward, for hardly had she been seated ten minutes before a lady of
about her own age, who was sitting by her, and had been looking at her
attentively for several minutes, addressed her with great complaisance
in these words: "I think, madam, I cannot be mistaken; it is a long time
since I had the pleasure of seeing you, but is not your name Allen?"
This question answered, as it readily was, the stranger pronounced hers
to be Thorpe; and Mrs. Allen immediately recognized the features of
a former schoolfellow and intimate, whom she had seen only once since
their respective marriages, and that many years ago. Their joy on this
meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented
to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years. Compliments
on good looks now passed; and, after observing how time had slipped away
since they were last together, how little they had thought of meeting in
Bath, and what a pleasure it was to see an old friend, they proceeded to
make inquiries and give intelligence as to their families, sisters, and
cousins, talking both together, far more ready to give than to receive
information, and each hearing very little of what the other said. Mrs.
Thorpe, however, had one great advantage as a talker, over Mrs. Allen,
in a family of children; and when she expatiated on the talents of her
sons, and the beauty of her daughters, when she related their different
situations and views--that John was at Oxford, Edward at Merchant
Taylors', and William at sea--and all of them more beloved and respected
in their different station than any other three beings ever were, Mrs.
Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press
on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to
sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling
herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that
the lace on Mrs. Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that on
her own.
"Here come my dear girls," cried Mrs. Thorpe, pointing at three
smart-looking females who, arm in arm, were then moving towards her. "My
dear Mrs. Allen, I long to introduce them; they will be so delighted
to see you: the tallest is Isabella, my eldest; is not she a fine young
woman? The others are very much admired too, but I believe Isabella is
the handsomest."
The Miss Thorpes were introduced; and Miss Morland, who had been for a
short time forgotten, was introduced likewise. The name seemed to strike
them all; and, after speaking to her with great civility, the eldest
young lady observed aloud to the rest, "How excessively like her brother
Miss Morland is!"
"The very picture of him indeed!" cried the mother--and "I should have
known her anywhere for his sister!" was repeated by them all, two or
three times over. For a moment Catherine was surprised; but Mrs. Thorpe
and her daughters had scarcely begun the history of their acquaintance
with Mr. James Morland, before she remembered that her eldest brother
had lately formed an intimacy with a young man of his own college, of
the name of Thorpe; and that he had spent the last week of the Christmas
vacation with his family, near London.
The whole being explained, many obliging things were said by the Miss
Thorpes of their wish of being better acquainted with her; of being
considered as already friends, through the friendship of their brothers,
etc., which Catherine heard with pleasure, and answered with all the
pretty expressions she could command; and, as the first proof of amity,
she was soon invited to accept an arm of the eldest Miss Thorpe, and
take a turn with her about the room. Catherine was delighted with this
extension of her Bath acquaintance, and almost forgot Mr. Tilney while
she talked to Miss Thorpe. Friendship is certainly the finest balm for
the pangs of disappointed love.
Their conversation turned upon those subjects, of which the free
discussion has generally much to do in perfecting a sudden intimacy
between two young ladies: such as dress, balls, flirtations, and
quizzes. Miss Thorpe, however, being four years older than Miss Morland,
and at least four years better informed, had a very decided advantage in
discussing such points; she could compare the balls of Bath with those
of Tunbridge, its fashions with the fashions of London; could rectify
the opinions of her new friend in many articles of tasteful attire;
could discover a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only
smiled on each other; and point out a quiz through the thickness of a
crowd. These powers received due admiration from Catherine, to whom they
were entirely new; and the respect which they naturally inspired might
have been too great for familiarity, had not the easy gaiety of Miss
Thorpe's manners, and her frequent expressions of delight on this
acquaintance with her, softened down every feeling of awe, and left
nothing but tender affection. Their increasing attachment was not to be
satisfied with half a dozen turns in the pump-room, but required, when
they all quitted it together, that Miss Thorpe should accompany Miss
Morland to the very door of Mr. Allen's house; and that they should
there part with a most affectionate and lengthened shake of hands, after
learning, to their mutual relief, that they should see each other across
the theatre at night, and say their prayers in the same chapel the next
morning. Catherine then ran directly upstairs, and watched Miss Thorpe's
progress down the street from the drawing-room window; admired the
graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and
dress; and felt grateful, as well she might, for the chance which had
procured her such a friend.
Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a
good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother. Her
eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by
pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and
dressing in the same style, did very well.
This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity
of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past
adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy
the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of
lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which had
passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 5 with the given context. | chapter 5|chapter 6 | That night, Catherine and the Allens attend the theater with the Thorpes. Catherine is disappointed that Henry isn't there. But Henry's mysterious disappearing act lends him an aura of intrigue that Catherine finds attractive. Mrs. Allen is now really happy that she knows people in Bath and says so, repeatedly. Isabella and Catherine bond rapidly and do things like read novels together and walk arm in arm. If friendship bracelets existed back then, they'd totally make some. The narrator gives us a spiel on novels. Other novels tend to bash novels even though they are novels. It's confusing. Novels are considered corrupting material for impressionable young female minds, so heroines in novels typically don't read novels themselves. Our narrator takes issue with this and goes on a satirical rant against commentators who bash the novel and apologetic novelists. Novels, says our narrator, are interesting and entertaining. They are also relevant. And the best thing since sliced bread. |
----------CHAPTER 5---------
Catherine was not so much engaged at the theatre that evening, in
returning the nods and smiles of Miss Thorpe, though they certainly
claimed much of her leisure, as to forget to look with an inquiring eye
for Mr. Tilney in every box which her eye could reach; but she looked in
vain. Mr. Tilney was no fonder of the play than the pump-room. She hoped
to be more fortunate the next day; and when her wishes for fine weather
were answered by seeing a beautiful morning, she hardly felt a doubt of
it; for a fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants,
and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell
their acquaintance what a charming day it is.
As soon as divine service was over, the Thorpes and Allens eagerly
joined each other; and after staying long enough in the pump-room to
discover that the crowd was insupportable, and that there was not
a genteel face to be seen, which everybody discovers every Sunday
throughout the season, they hastened away to the Crescent, to breathe
the fresh air of better company. Here Catherine and Isabella, arm
in arm, again tasted the sweets of friendship in an unreserved
conversation; they talked much, and with much enjoyment; but again
was Catherine disappointed in her hope of reseeing her partner. He was
nowhere to be met with; every search for him was equally unsuccessful,
in morning lounges or evening assemblies; neither at the Upper nor Lower
Rooms, at dressed or undressed balls, was he perceivable; nor among the
walkers, the horsemen, or the curricle-drivers of the morning. His name
was not in the pump-room book, and curiosity could do no more. He must
be gone from Bath. Yet he had not mentioned that his stay would be so
short! This sort of mysteriousness, which is always so becoming in a
hero, threw a fresh grace in Catherine's imagination around his person
and manners, and increased her anxiety to know more of him. From the
Thorpes she could learn nothing, for they had been only two days in Bath
before they met with Mrs. Allen. It was a subject, however, in which
she often indulged with her fair friend, from whom she received every
possible encouragement to continue to think of him; and his impression
on her fancy was not suffered therefore to weaken. Isabella was very
sure that he must be a charming young man, and was equally sure that he
must have been delighted with her dear Catherine, and would therefore
shortly return. She liked him the better for being a clergyman, "for she
must confess herself very partial to the profession"; and something like
a sigh escaped her as she said it. Perhaps Catherine was wrong in not
demanding the cause of that gentle emotion--but she was not experienced
enough in the finesse of love, or the duties of friendship, to know when
delicate raillery was properly called for, or when a confidence should
be forced.
Mrs. Allen was now quite happy--quite satisfied with Bath. She had found
some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family
of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had
found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself. Her
daily expressions were no longer, "I wish we had some acquaintance in
Bath!" They were changed into, "How glad I am we have met with Mrs.
Thorpe!" and she was as eager in promoting the intercourse of the two
families, as her young charge and Isabella themselves could be; never
satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of
Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was
scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of
subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children, and Mrs. Allen
of her gowns.
The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick
as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every
gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof
of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other
by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned
up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the
set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they
were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut
themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not
adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers,
of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the
number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest
enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely
ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she
accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages
with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I
cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such
effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in
threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us
not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions
have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any
other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has
been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes
are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who
collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and
Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne,
are eulogized by a thousand pens--there seems almost a general wish of
decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and
of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to
recommend them. "I am no novel-reader--I seldom look into novels--Do not
imagine that I often read novels--It is really very well for a novel."
Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! It is
only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book
with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or
Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest
powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge
of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a
volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she
have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be
against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication,
of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of
taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement
of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of
conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language,
too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age
that could endure it.
----------CHAPTER 6---------
The following conversation, which took place between the two friends in
the pump-room one morning, after an acquaintance of eight or nine
days, is given as a specimen of their very warm attachment, and of the
delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which
marked the reasonableness of that attachment.
They met by appointment; and as Isabella had arrived nearly five
minutes before her friend, her first address naturally was, "My dearest
creature, what can have made you so late? I have been waiting for you at
least this age!"
"Have you, indeed! I am very sorry for it; but really I thought I was in
very good time. It is but just one. I hope you have not been here long?"
"Oh! These ten ages at least. I am sure I have been here this half hour.
But now, let us go and sit down at the other end of the room, and enjoy
ourselves. I have an hundred things to say to you. In the first place,
I was so afraid it would rain this morning, just as I wanted to set off;
it looked very showery, and that would have thrown me into agonies! Do
you know, I saw the prettiest hat you can imagine, in a shop window in
Milsom Street just now--very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons
instead of green; I quite longed for it. But, my dearest Catherine, what
have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on
with Udolpho?"
"Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the
black veil."
"Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is
behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?"
"Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me--I would not be
told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like
to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been
to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world."
"Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished
Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list
of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
"Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?"
"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook.
Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the
Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.
Those will last us some time."
"Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all
horrid?"
"Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a
sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every
one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with
her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can conceive. I think
her as beautiful as an angel, and I am so vexed with the men for not
admiring her! I scold them all amazingly about it."
"Scold them! Do you scold them for not admiring her?"
"Yes, that I do. There is nothing I would not do for those who are
really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is
not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong. I told
Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was to
tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow
Miss Andrews to be as beautiful as an angel. The men think us incapable
of real friendship, you know, and I am determined to show them the
difference. Now, if I were to hear anybody speak slightingly of you, I
should fire up in a moment: but that is not at all likely, for you are
just the kind of girl to be a great favourite with the men."
"Oh, dear!" cried Catherine, colouring. "How can you say so?"
"I know you very well; you have so much animation, which is exactly
what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess there is something amazingly
insipid about her. Oh! I must tell you, that just after we parted
yesterday, I saw a young man looking at you so earnestly--I am sure he
is in love with you." Catherine coloured, and disclaimed again. Isabella
laughed. "It is very true, upon my honour, but I see how it is; you are
indifferent to everybody's admiration, except that of one gentleman,
who shall be nameless. Nay, I cannot blame you"--speaking more
seriously--"your feelings are easily understood. Where the heart is
really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the
attention of anybody else. Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting,
that does not relate to the beloved object! I can perfectly comprehend
your feelings."
"But you should not persuade me that I think so very much about Mr.
Tilney, for perhaps I may never see him again."
"Not see him again! My dearest creature, do not talk of it. I am sure
you would be miserable if you thought so!"
"No, indeed, I should not. I do not pretend to say that I was not very
much pleased with him; but while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if
nobody could make me miserable. Oh! The dreadful black veil! My dear
Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it."
"It is so odd to me, that you should never have read Udolpho before; but
I suppose Mrs. Morland objects to novels."
"No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself;
but new books do not fall in our way."
"Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not? I
remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume."
"It is not like Udolpho at all; but yet I think it is very
entertaining."
"Do you indeed! You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.
But, my dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on your head
tonight? I am determined at all events to be dressed exactly like you.
The men take notice of that sometimes, you know."
"But it does not signify if they do," said Catherine, very innocently.
"Signify! Oh, heavens! I make it a rule never to mind what they say.
They are very often amazingly impertinent if you do not treat them with
spirit, and make them keep their distance."
"Are they? Well, I never observed that. They always behave very well to
me."
"Oh! They give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited
creatures in the world, and think themselves of so much importance!
By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always
forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you
like them best dark or fair?"
"I hardly know. I never much thought about it. Something between both, I
think. Brown--not fair, and--and not very dark."
"Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I have not forgot your
description of Mr. Tilney--'a brown skin, with dark eyes, and rather
dark hair.' Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as to
complexion--do you know--I like a sallow better than any other. You must
not betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance
answering that description."
"Betray you! What do you mean?"
"Nay, do not distress me. I believe I have said too much. Let us drop
the subject."
Catherine, in some amazement, complied, and after remaining a few
moments silent, was on the point of reverting to what interested her
at that time rather more than anything else in the world, Laurentina's
skeleton, when her friend prevented her, by saying, "For heaven's sake!
Let us move away from this end of the room. Do you know, there are two
odious young men who have been staring at me this half hour. They really
put me quite out of countenance. Let us go and look at the arrivals.
They will hardly follow us there."
Away they walked to the book; and while Isabella examined the names, it
was Catherine's employment to watch the proceedings of these alarming
young men.
"They are not coming this way, are they? I hope they are not so
impertinent as to follow us. Pray let me know if they are coming. I am
determined I will not look up."
In a few moments Catherine, with unaffected pleasure, assured her
that she need not be longer uneasy, as the gentlemen had just left the
pump-room.
"And which way are they gone?" said Isabella, turning hastily round.
"One was a very good-looking young man."
"They went towards the church-yard."
"Well, I am amazingly glad I have got rid of them! And now, what say you
to going to Edgar's Buildings with me, and looking at my new hat? You
said you should like to see it."
Catherine readily agreed. "Only," she added, "perhaps we may overtake
the two young men."
"Oh! Never mind that. If we make haste, we shall pass by them presently,
and I am dying to show you my hat."
"But if we only wait a few minutes, there will be no danger of our
seeing them at all."
"I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you. I have no
notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil
them."
Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning; and therefore,
to show the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling
the sex, they set off immediately as fast as they could walk, in pursuit
of the two young men.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter 12, utilizing the provided context. | chapter 7|chapter 12 | Catherine goes to call on the Tilneys in order to apologize for the mix up yesterday. She asks to see Miss Tilney but the butler tells her she isn't at home. But, as Catherine is leaving, she sees Eleanor leaving the house with her dad. Harsh. Catherine feels dissed and is very upset. Catherine blames herself for the whole business though and decides that Eleanor is responding to Catherine's original rudeness. Catherine goes to the theater that night with the Thorpes and spies the Tilneys. Henry spots her and bows coolly. Catherine is miserable. She plans to find the Tilneys after the play in order to beg forgiveness and to explain herself. After the play, Henry comes over to her and Mrs. Allen to say hello. Catherine gives a very jumbled apology, but Henry gets the gist of what happened. He quickly forgives her. Catherine asks if Eleanor is mad at her, and Henry explains that she had just been called away with her dad right as Catherine called, so she wasn't able to see her. Catherine asks if Henry is mad at her, and he denies that he looked angry or felt angry at all. Henry hangs out for awhile. Catherine notices that John Thorpe is talking to General Tilney, which is weird. She asks Henry how they know each other, and Henry says his father knows a lot of people and he's not really sure. John Thorpe arrives to see Catherine out and brags about knowing General Tilney. He says he saw him at the billiard-room and then tells Catherine a billiard story. John says the General thinks she's the finest girl in Bath. Catherine is astonished. |
----------CHAPTER 7---------
Half a minute conducted them through the pump-yard to the archway,
opposite Union Passage; but here they were stopped. Everybody acquainted
with Bath may remember the difficulties of crossing Cheap Street at
this point; it is indeed a street of so impertinent a nature, so
unfortunately connected with the great London and Oxford roads, and the
principal inn of the city, that a day never passes in which parties of
ladies, however important their business, whether in quest of pastry,
millinery, or even (as in the present case) of young men, are not
detained on one side or other by carriages, horsemen, or carts. This
evil had been felt and lamented, at least three times a day, by Isabella
since her residence in Bath; and she was now fated to feel and lament it
once more, for at the very moment of coming opposite to Union Passage,
and within view of the two gentlemen who were proceeding through the
crowds, and threading the gutters of that interesting alley, they
were prevented crossing by the approach of a gig, driven along on bad
pavement by a most knowing-looking coachman with all the vehemence that
could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his
horse.
"Oh, these odious gigs!" said Isabella, looking up. "How I detest them."
But this detestation, though so just, was of short duration, for she
looked again and exclaimed, "Delightful! Mr. Morland and my brother!"
"Good heaven! 'Tis James!" was uttered at the same moment by Catherine;
and, on catching the young men's eyes, the horse was immediately checked
with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches, and the servant
having now scampered up, the gentlemen jumped out, and the equipage was
delivered to his care.
Catherine, by whom this meeting was wholly unexpected, received her
brother with the liveliest pleasure; and he, being of a very amiable
disposition, and sincerely attached to her, gave every proof on his
side of equal satisfaction, which he could have leisure to do, while the
bright eyes of Miss Thorpe were incessantly challenging his notice;
and to her his devoirs were speedily paid, with a mixture of joy and
embarrassment which might have informed Catherine, had she been more
expert in the development of other people's feelings, and less simply
engrossed by her own, that her brother thought her friend quite as
pretty as she could do herself.
John Thorpe, who in the meantime had been giving orders about the
horses, soon joined them, and from him she directly received the amends
which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the
hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short
bow. He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face
and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore
the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy
where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be
easy. He took out his watch: "How long do you think we have been running
it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?"
"I do not know the distance." Her brother told her that it was
twenty-three miles.
"Three and twenty!" cried Thorpe. "Five and twenty if it is an inch."
Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, innkeepers,
and milestones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer test
of distance. "I know it must be five and twenty," said he, "by the time
we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the
inn-yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man
in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness;
that makes it exactly twenty-five."
"You have lost an hour," said Morland; "it was only ten o'clock when we
came from Tetbury."
"Ten o'clock! It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke. This
brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do
but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in
your life?" (The servant had just mounted the carriage and was driving
off.) "Such true blood! Three hours and and a half indeed coming only
three and twenty miles! Look at that creature, and suppose it possible
if you can."
"He does look very hot, to be sure."
"Hot! He had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church; but look
at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse
cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on.
What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? A neat one, is not it?
Well hung; town-built; I have not had it a month. It was built for a
Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow; he ran
it a few weeks, till, I believe, it was convenient to have done with it.
I happened just then to be looking out for some light thing of the kind,
though I had pretty well determined on a curricle too; but I chanced to
meet him on Magdalen Bridge, as he was driving into Oxford, last term:
'Ah! Thorpe,' said he, 'do you happen to want such a little thing as
this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.'
'Oh! D--,' said I; 'I am your man; what do you ask?' And how much do you
think he did, Miss Morland?"
"I am sure I cannot guess at all."
"Curricle-hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board,
lamps, silver moulding, all you see complete; the iron-work as good
as new, or better. He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly,
threw down the money, and the carriage was mine."
"And I am sure," said Catherine, "I know so little of such things that I
cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear."
"Neither one nor t'other; I might have got it for less, I dare say; but
I hate haggling, and poor Freeman wanted cash."
"That was very good-natured of you," said Catherine, quite pleased.
"Oh! D---- it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend,
I hate to be pitiful."
An inquiry now took place into the intended movements of the young
ladies; and, on finding whither they were going, it was decided that
the gentlemen should accompany them to Edgar's Buildings, and pay their
respects to Mrs. Thorpe. James and Isabella led the way; and so
well satisfied was the latter with her lot, so contentedly was she
endeavouring to ensure a pleasant walk to him who brought the double
recommendation of being her brother's friend, and her friend's brother,
so pure and uncoquettish were her feelings, that, though they overtook
and passed the two offending young men in Milsom Street, she was so far
from seeking to attract their notice, that she looked back at them only
three times.
John Thorpe kept of course with Catherine, and, after a few minutes'
silence, renewed the conversation about his gig. "You will find,
however, Miss Morland, it would be reckoned a cheap thing by some
people, for I might have sold it for ten guineas more the next day;
Jackson, of Oriel, bid me sixty at once; Morland was with me at the
time."
"Yes," said Morland, who overheard this; "but you forget that your horse
was included."
"My horse! Oh, d---- it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are
you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?"
"Yes, very; I have hardly ever an opportunity of being in one; but I am
particularly fond of it."
"I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day."
"Thank you," said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the
propriety of accepting such an offer.
"I will drive you up Lansdown Hill tomorrow."
"Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?"
"Rest! He has only come three and twenty miles today; all nonsense;
nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon.
No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours every day
while I am here."
"Shall you indeed!" said Catherine very seriously. "That will be forty
miles a day."
"Forty! Aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up Lansdown
tomorrow; mind, I am engaged."
"How delightful that will be!" cried Isabella, turning round. "My
dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will
not have room for a third."
"A third indeed! No, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters
about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care of you."
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but
Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her companion's
discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch to nothing more than
a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every
woman they met; and Catherine, after listening and agreeing as long as
she could, with all the civility and deference of the youthful female
mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that
of a self-assured man, especially where the beauty of her own sex is
concerned, ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which
had been long uppermost in her thoughts; it was, "Have you ever read
Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"
"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to
do."
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question,
but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense
and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since
Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the
others, they are the stupidest things in creation."
"I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very
interesting."
"Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's; her
novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature
in them."
"Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some
hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
"No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that
other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about,
she who married the French emigrant."
"I suppose you mean Camilla?"
"Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at
see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon
found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be
before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was
sure I should never be able to get through it."
"I have never read it."
"You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can
imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at
see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not."
This critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor
Catherine, brought them to the door of Mrs. Thorpe's lodgings, and the
feelings of the discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla gave way
to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son, as they met Mrs.
Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage. "Ah, Mother!
How do you do?" said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand. "Where
did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch.
Here is Morland and I come to stay a few days with you, so you must look
out for a couple of good beds somewhere near." And this address seemed
to satisfy all the fondest wishes of the mother's heart, for she
received him with the most delighted and exulting affection. On his
two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal
tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that
they both looked very ugly.
These manners did not please Catherine; but he was James's friend
and Isabella's brother; and her judgment was further bought off by
Isabella's assuring her, when they withdrew to see the new hat, that
John thought her the most charming girl in the world, and by John's
engaging her before they parted to dance with him that evening. Had she
been older or vainer, such attacks might have done little; but, where
youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of
reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl
in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner; and the
consequence was that, when the two Morlands, after sitting an hour with
the Thorpes, set off to walk together to Mr. Allen's, and James, as
the door was closed on them, said, "Well, Catherine, how do you like my
friend Thorpe?" instead of answering, as she probably would have done,
had there been no friendship and no flattery in the case, "I do not like
him at all," she directly replied, "I like him very much; he seems very
agreeable."
"He is as good-natured a fellow as ever lived; a little of a rattle; but
that will recommend him to your sex, I believe: and how do you like the
rest of the family?"
"Very, very much indeed: Isabella particularly."
"I am very glad to hear you say so; she is just the kind of young woman
I could wish to see you attached to; she has so much good sense, and is
so thoroughly unaffected and amiable; I always wanted you to know her;
and she seems very fond of you. She said the highest things in your
praise that could possibly be; and the praise of such a girl as Miss
Thorpe even you, Catherine," taking her hand with affection, "may be
proud of."
"Indeed I am," she replied; "I love her exceedingly, and am delighted
to find that you like her too. You hardly mentioned anything of her when
you wrote to me after your visit there."
"Because I thought I should soon see you myself. I hope you will be a
great deal together while you are in Bath. She is a most amiable girl;
such a superior understanding! How fond all the family are of her; she
is evidently the general favourite; and how much she must be admired in
such a place as this--is not she?"
"Yes, very much indeed, I fancy; Mr. Allen thinks her the prettiest girl
in Bath."
"I dare say he does; and I do not know any man who is a better judge of
beauty than Mr. Allen. I need not ask you whether you are happy here, my
dear Catherine; with such a companion and friend as Isabella Thorpe, it
would be impossible for you to be otherwise; and the Allens, I am sure,
are very kind to you?"
"Yes, very kind; I never was so happy before; and now you are come it
will be more delightful than ever; how good it is of you to come so far
on purpose to see me."
James accepted this tribute of gratitude, and qualified his conscience
for accepting it too, by saying with perfect sincerity, "Indeed,
Catherine, I love you dearly."
Inquiries and communications concerning brothers and sisters, the
situation of some, the growth of the rest, and other family matters now
passed between them, and continued, with only one small digression
on James's part, in praise of Miss Thorpe, till they reached Pulteney
Street, where he was welcomed with great kindness by Mr. and Mrs. Allen,
invited by the former to dine with them, and summoned by the latter
to guess the price and weigh the merits of a new muff and tippet.
A pre-engagement in Edgar's Buildings prevented his accepting the
invitation of one friend, and obliged him to hurry away as soon as he
had satisfied the demands of the other. The time of the two parties
uniting in the Octagon Room being correctly adjusted, Catherine was then
left to the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination
over the pages of Udolpho, lost from all worldly concerns of dressing
and dinner, incapable of soothing Mrs. Allen's fears on the delay of an
expected dressmaker, and having only one minute in sixty to bestow even
on the reflection of her own felicity, in being already engaged for the
evening.
----------CHAPTER 12---------
"Mrs. Allen," said Catherine the next morning, "will there be any harm
in my calling on Miss Tilney today? I shall not be easy till I have
explained everything."
"Go, by all means, my dear; only put on a white gown; Miss Tilney always
wears white."
Catherine cheerfully complied, and being properly equipped, was more
impatient than ever to be at the pump-room, that she might inform
herself of General Tilney's lodgings, for though she believed they were
in Milsom Street, she was not certain of the house, and Mrs. Allen's
wavering convictions only made it more doubtful. To Milsom Street she
was directed, and having made herself perfect in the number, hastened
away with eager steps and a beating heart to pay her visit, explain her
conduct, and be forgiven; tripping lightly through the church-yard, and
resolutely turning away her eyes, that she might not be obliged to
see her beloved Isabella and her dear family, who, she had reason to
believe, were in a shop hard by. She reached the house without any
impediment, looked at the number, knocked at the door, and inquired for
Miss Tilney. The man believed Miss Tilney to be at home, but was not
quite certain. Would she be pleased to send up her name? She gave her
card. In a few minutes the servant returned, and with a look which did
not quite confirm his words, said he had been mistaken, for that Miss
Tilney was walked out. Catherine, with a blush of mortification, left
the house. She felt almost persuaded that Miss Tilney was at home, and
too much offended to admit her; and as she retired down the street,
could not withhold one glance at the drawing-room windows, in
expectation of seeing her there, but no one appeared at them. At the
bottom of the street, however, she looked back again, and then, not at a
window, but issuing from the door, she saw Miss Tilney herself. She was
followed by a gentleman, whom Catherine believed to be her father,
and they turned up towards Edgar's Buildings. Catherine, in deep
mortification, proceeded on her way. She could almost be angry herself
at such angry incivility; but she checked the resentful sensation; she
remembered her own ignorance. She knew not how such an offence as hers
might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree
of unforgivingness it might with propriety lead, nor to what rigours of
rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.
Dejected and humbled, she had even some thoughts of not going with the
others to the theatre that night; but it must be confessed that they
were not of long continuance, for she soon recollected, in the first
place, that she was without any excuse for staying at home; and, in the
second, that it was a play she wanted very much to see. To the theatre
accordingly they all went; no Tilneys appeared to plague or please her;
she feared that, amongst the many perfections of the family, a fondness
for plays was not to be ranked; but perhaps it was because they were
habituated to the finer performances of the London stage, which she
knew, on Isabella's authority, rendered everything else of the kind
"quite horrid." She was not deceived in her own expectation of pleasure;
the comedy so well suspended her care that no one, observing her during
the first four acts, would have supposed she had any wretchedness about
her. On the beginning of the fifth, however, the sudden view of Mr.
Henry Tilney and his father, joining a party in the opposite box,
recalled her to anxiety and distress. The stage could no longer excite
genuine merriment--no longer keep her whole attention. Every other look
upon an average was directed towards the opposite box; and, for the
space of two entire scenes, did she thus watch Henry Tilney, without
being once able to catch his eye. No longer could he be suspected of
indifference for a play; his notice was never withdrawn from the stage
during two whole scenes. At length, however, he did look towards her,
and he bowed--but such a bow! No smile, no continued observance attended
it; his eyes were immediately returned to their former direction.
Catherine was restlessly miserable; she could almost have run round to
the box in which he sat and forced him to hear her explanation. Feelings
rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her
own dignity injured by this ready condemnation--instead of proudly
resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him
who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble
of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by
avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else--she took to herself
all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only
eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause.
The play concluded--the curtain fell--Henry Tilney was no longer to be
seen where he had hitherto sat, but his father remained, and perhaps he
might be now coming round to their box. She was right; in a few minutes
he appeared, and, making his way through the then thinning rows, spoke
with like calm politeness to Mrs. Allen and her friend. Not with such
calmness was he answered by the latter: "Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been
quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You must have thought
me so rude; but indeed it was not my own fault, was it, Mrs. Allen?
Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a
phaeton together? And then what could I do? But I had ten thousand times
rather have been with you; now had not I, Mrs. Allen?"
"My dear, you tumble my gown," was Mrs. Allen's reply.
Her assurance, however, standing sole as it did, was not thrown away; it
brought a more cordial, more natural smile into his countenance, and
he replied in a tone which retained only a little affected reserve:
"We were much obliged to you at any rate for wishing us a pleasant walk
after our passing you in Argyle Street: you were so kind as to look back
on purpose."
"But indeed I did not wish you a pleasant walk; I never thought of such
a thing; but I begged Mr. Thorpe so earnestly to stop; I called out to
him as soon as ever I saw you; now, Mrs. Allen, did not--Oh! You were
not there; but indeed I did; and, if Mr. Thorpe would only have stopped,
I would have jumped out and run after you."
Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a
declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not. With a yet sweeter smile, he
said everything that need be said of his sister's concern, regret, and
dependence on Catherine's honour. "Oh! Do not say Miss Tilney was not
angry," cried Catherine, "because I know she was; for she would not see
me this morning when I called; I saw her walk out of the house the next
minute after my leaving it; I was hurt, but I was not affronted. Perhaps
you did not know I had been there."
"I was not within at the time; but I heard of it from Eleanor, and she
has been wishing ever since to see you, to explain the reason of such
incivility; but perhaps I can do it as well. It was nothing more than
that my father--they were just preparing to walk out, and he being
hurried for time, and not caring to have it put off--made a point of her
being denied. That was all, I do assure you. She was very much vexed,
and meant to make her apology as soon as possible."
Catherine's mind was greatly eased by this information, yet a something
of solicitude remained, from which sprang the following question,
thoroughly artless in itself, though rather distressing to the
gentleman: "But, Mr. Tilney, why were you less generous than your
sister? If she felt such confidence in my good intentions, and could
suppose it to be only a mistake, why should you be so ready to take
offence?"
"Me! I take offence!"
"Nay, I am sure by your look, when you came into the box, you were
angry."
"I angry! I could have no right."
"Well, nobody would have thought you had no right who saw your face." He
replied by asking her to make room for him, and talking of the play.
He remained with them some time, and was only too agreeable for
Catherine to be contented when he went away. Before they parted,
however, it was agreed that the projected walk should be taken as soon
as possible; and, setting aside the misery of his quitting their box,
she was, upon the whole, left one of the happiest creatures in the
world.
While talking to each other, she had observed with some surprise that
John Thorpe, who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes
together, was engaged in conversation with General Tilney; and she felt
something more than surprise when she thought she could perceive herself
the object of their attention and discourse. What could they have to say
of her? She feared General Tilney did not like her appearance: she found
it was implied in his preventing her admittance to his daughter, rather
than postpone his own walk a few minutes. "How came Mr. Thorpe to know
your father?" was her anxious inquiry, as she pointed them out to her
companion. He knew nothing about it; but his father, like every military
man, had a very large acquaintance.
When the entertainment was over, Thorpe came to assist them in getting
out. Catherine was the immediate object of his gallantry; and, while
they waited in the lobby for a chair, he prevented the inquiry which had
travelled from her heart almost to the tip of her tongue, by asking, in
a consequential manner, whether she had seen him talking with General
Tilney: "He is a fine old fellow, upon my soul! Stout, active--looks
as young as his son. I have a great regard for him, I assure you: a
gentleman-like, good sort of fellow as ever lived."
"But how came you to know him?"
"Know him! There are few people much about town that I do not know. I
have met him forever at the Bedford; and I knew his face again today the
moment he came into the billiard-room. One of the best players we have,
by the by; and we had a little touch together, though I was almost
afraid of him at first: the odds were five to four against me; and, if
I had not made one of the cleanest strokes that perhaps ever was made in
this world--I took his ball exactly--but I could not make you understand
it without a table; however, I did beat him. A very fine fellow; as rich
as a Jew. I should like to dine with him; I dare say he gives famous
dinners. But what do you think we have been talking of? You. Yes, by
heavens! And the general thinks you the finest girl in Bath."
"Oh! Nonsense! How can you say so?"
"And what do you think I said?"--lowering his voice--"well done,
general, said I; I am quite of your mind."
Here Catherine, who was much less gratified by his admiration than by
General Tilney's, was not sorry to be called away by Mr. Allen. Thorpe,
however, would see her to her chair, and, till she entered it, continued
the same kind of delicate flattery, in spite of her entreating him to
have done.
That General Tilney, instead of disliking, should admire her, was very
delightful; and she joyfully thought that there was not one of the
family whom she need now fear to meet. The evening had done more, much
more, for her than could have been expected.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter 16 with the given context. | chapter 16|chapter 17 | Catherine goes to dine with the Tilneys, but doesn't have the best time. Eleanor and Henry aren't very talkative. She can't figure out why since the General was so civil and nice. Later she visits Isabella, who insults all the Tilneys and says that they are arrogant and snobby. Isabella notes that John is way nicer and cooler than Henry. Catherine ignores this. There's another ball. These people never stop with the parties. Isabella insists that she won't dance tonight and will instead pine for James in a corner. Sounds like a plan. Catherine hangs out with the Tilneys and has fun at the ball. The eldest Tilney, Captain Frederick Tilney, has arrived in town. He's super-good-looking, but Catherine thinks that Henry has the better personality. The Tilney brothers go off to chat after Henry dances with Catherine. Henry comes back and says that Frederick wants to be introduced to Isabella so he can ask her to dance. Catherine says "no thanks" on her friend's behalf, thinking that Isabella won't want to dance with anyone. Henry laughs about how Catherine is clueless about people and has no understanding of the motives of others. He then compliments her about being so good-natured and nice. Catherine is embarrassed. Then she spies Isabella heading to the dance floor with Captain Tilney. Henry finds this about-face hilarious. Catherine is confused. After the dancing Catherine goes to confront Isabella about dancing when she said she wouldn't. Isabella says she's only dancing because the Captain won't stop pestering her. A few days later , the girls meet again to discuss James's second letter to Isabella. This one lets her know all the details, like their income and property. It turns out it's not a lot and they won't be able to get married for three years, since James has to save up his money. Isabella is not thrilled with this. The Thorpes start insinuating that Mr. Morland is being stingy and that he really has more money. Catherine is upset by these insinuations and says that her father is very generous and totally did the best he could, especially since he has ten kids to consider. Isabella gets herself together and insists she's only upset about having to wait three years, not about the money. Catherine doubts this somewhat, but soon gets over it. |
----------CHAPTER 16---------
Catherine's expectations of pleasure from her visit in Milsom Street
were so very high that disappointment was inevitable; and accordingly,
though she was most politely received by General Tilney, and kindly
welcomed by his daughter, though Henry was at home, and no one else of
the party, she found, on her return, without spending many hours in
the examination of her feelings, that she had gone to her appointment
preparing for happiness which it had not afforded. Instead of finding
herself improved in acquaintance with Miss Tilney, from the intercourse
of the day, she seemed hardly so intimate with her as before; instead
of seeing Henry Tilney to greater advantage than ever, in the ease of a
family party, he had never said so little, nor been so little agreeable;
and, in spite of their father's great civilities to her--in spite of his
thanks, invitations, and compliments--it had been a release to get
away from him. It puzzled her to account for all this. It could not
be General Tilney's fault. That he was perfectly agreeable and
good-natured, and altogether a very charming man, did not admit of a
doubt, for he was tall and handsome, and Henry's father. He could not
be accountable for his children's want of spirits, or for her want of
enjoyment in his company. The former she hoped at last might have
been accidental, and the latter she could only attribute to her own
stupidity. Isabella, on hearing the particulars of the visit, gave
a different explanation: "It was all pride, pride, insufferable
haughtiness and pride! She had long suspected the family to be very
high, and this made it certain. Such insolence of behaviour as Miss
Tilney's she had never heard of in her life! Not to do the honours of
her house with common good breeding! To behave to her guest with such
superciliousness! Hardly even to speak to her!"
"But it was not so bad as that, Isabella; there was no superciliousness;
she was very civil."
"Oh! Don't defend her! And then the brother, he, who had appeared
so attached to you! Good heavens! Well, some people's feelings are
incomprehensible. And so he hardly looked once at you the whole day?"
"I do not say so; but he did not seem in good spirits."
"How contemptible! Of all things in the world inconstancy is my
aversion. Let me entreat you never to think of him again, my dear
Catherine; indeed he is unworthy of you."
"Unworthy! I do not suppose he ever thinks of me."
"That is exactly what I say; he never thinks of you. Such fickleness!
Oh! How different to your brother and to mine! I really believe John has
the most constant heart."
"But as for General Tilney, I assure you it would be impossible for
anybody to behave to me with greater civility and attention; it seemed
to be his only care to entertain and make me happy."
"Oh! I know no harm of him; I do not suspect him of pride. I believe he
is a very gentleman-like man. John thinks very well of him, and John's
judgment--"
"Well, I shall see how they behave to me this evening; we shall meet
them at the rooms."
"And must I go?"
"Do not you intend it? I thought it was all settled."
"Nay, since you make such a point of it, I can refuse you nothing. But
do not insist upon my being very agreeable, for my heart, you know, will
be some forty miles off. And as for dancing, do not mention it, I beg;
that is quite out of the question. Charles Hodges will plague me to
death, I dare say; but I shall cut him very short. Ten to one but he
guesses the reason, and that is exactly what I want to avoid, so I shall
insist on his keeping his conjecture to himself."
Isabella's opinion of the Tilneys did not influence her friend; she was
sure there had been no insolence in the manners either of brother or
sister; and she did not credit there being any pride in their hearts.
The evening rewarded her confidence; she was met by one with the same
kindness, and by the other with the same attention, as heretofore: Miss
Tilney took pains to be near her, and Henry asked her to dance.
Having heard the day before in Milsom Street that their elder brother,
Captain Tilney, was expected almost every hour, she was at no loss for
the name of a very fashionable-looking, handsome young man, whom she had
never seen before, and who now evidently belonged to their party. She
looked at him with great admiration, and even supposed it possible that
some people might think him handsomer than his brother, though, in her
eyes, his air was more assuming, and his countenance less prepossessing.
His taste and manners were beyond a doubt decidedly inferior; for,
within her hearing, he not only protested against every thought of
dancing himself, but even laughed openly at Henry for finding it
possible. From the latter circumstance it may be presumed that, whatever
might be our heroine's opinion of him, his admiration of her was not
of a very dangerous kind; not likely to produce animosities between the
brothers, nor persecutions to the lady. He cannot be the instigator of
the three villains in horsemen's greatcoats, by whom she will hereafter
be forced into a traveling-chaise and four, which will drive off with
incredible speed. Catherine, meanwhile, undisturbed by presentiments of
such an evil, or of any evil at all, except that of having but a short
set to dance down, enjoyed her usual happiness with Henry Tilney,
listening with sparkling eyes to everything he said; and, in finding him
irresistible, becoming so herself.
At the end of the first dance, Captain Tilney came towards them again,
and, much to Catherine's dissatisfaction, pulled his brother away. They
retired whispering together; and, though her delicate sensibility did
not take immediate alarm, and lay it down as fact, that Captain Tilney
must have heard some malevolent misrepresentation of her, which he now
hastened to communicate to his brother, in the hope of separating them
forever, she could not have her partner conveyed from her sight without
very uneasy sensations. Her suspense was of full five minutes' duration;
and she was beginning to think it a very long quarter of an hour, when
they both returned, and an explanation was given, by Henry's requesting
to know if she thought her friend, Miss Thorpe, would have any objection
to dancing, as his brother would be most happy to be introduced to
her. Catherine, without hesitation, replied that she was very sure Miss
Thorpe did not mean to dance at all. The cruel reply was passed on to
the other, and he immediately walked away.
"Your brother will not mind it, I know," said she, "because I heard him
say before that he hated dancing; but it was very good-natured in him
to think of it. I suppose he saw Isabella sitting down, and fancied she
might wish for a partner; but he is quite mistaken, for she would not
dance upon any account in the world."
Henry smiled, and said, "How very little trouble it can give you to
understand the motive of other people's actions."
"Why? What do you mean?"
"With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced, What
is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person's feelings, age,
situation, and probable habits of life considered--but, How should I be
influenced, What would be my inducement in acting so and so?"
"I do not understand you."
"Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly
well."
"Me? Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible."
"Bravo! An excellent satire on modern language."
"But pray tell me what you mean."
"Shall I indeed? Do you really desire it? But you are not aware of the
consequences; it will involve you in a very cruel embarrassment, and
certainly bring on a disagreement between us."
"No, no; it shall not do either; I am not afraid."
"Well, then, I only meant that your attributing my brother's wish of
dancing with Miss Thorpe to good nature alone convinced me of your being
superior in good nature yourself to all the rest of the world."
Catherine blushed and disclaimed, and the gentleman's predictions were
verified. There was a something, however, in his words which repaid her
for the pain of confusion; and that something occupied her mind so much
that she drew back for some time, forgetting to speak or to listen, and
almost forgetting where she was; till, roused by the voice of Isabella,
she looked up and saw her with Captain Tilney preparing to give them
hands across.
Isabella shrugged her shoulders and smiled, the only explanation of this
extraordinary change which could at that time be given; but as it
was not quite enough for Catherine's comprehension, she spoke her
astonishment in very plain terms to her partner.
"I cannot think how it could happen! Isabella was so determined not to
dance."
"And did Isabella never change her mind before?"
"Oh! But, because--And your brother! After what you told him from me,
how could he think of going to ask her?"
"I cannot take surprise to myself on that head. You bid me be surprised
on your friend's account, and therefore I am; but as for my brother, his
conduct in the business, I must own, has been no more than I believed
him perfectly equal to. The fairness of your friend was an open
attraction; her firmness, you know, could only be understood by
yourself."
"You are laughing; but, I assure you, Isabella is very firm in general."
"It is as much as should be said of anyone. To be always firm must be
to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment;
and, without reference to my brother, I really think Miss Thorpe has by
no means chosen ill in fixing on the present hour."
The friends were not able to get together for any confidential discourse
till all the dancing was over; but then, as they walked about the room
arm in arm, Isabella thus explained herself: "I do not wonder at your
surprise; and I am really fatigued to death. He is such a rattle!
Amusing enough, if my mind had been disengaged; but I would have given
the world to sit still."
"Then why did not you?"
"Oh! My dear! It would have looked so particular; and you know how I
abhor doing that. I refused him as long as I possibly could, but he
would take no denial. You have no idea how he pressed me. I begged him
to excuse me, and get some other partner--but no, not he; after aspiring
to my hand, there was nobody else in the room he could bear to think of;
and it was not that he wanted merely to dance, he wanted to be with
me. Oh! Such nonsense! I told him he had taken a very unlikely way to
prevail upon me; for, of all things in the world, I hated fine speeches
and compliments; and so--and so then I found there would be no peace if
I did not stand up. Besides, I thought Mrs. Hughes, who introduced him,
might take it ill if I did not: and your dear brother, I am sure he
would have been miserable if I had sat down the whole evening. I am
so glad it is over! My spirits are quite jaded with listening to his
nonsense: and then, being such a smart young fellow, I saw every eye was
upon us."
"He is very handsome indeed."
"Handsome! Yes, I suppose he may. I dare say people would admire him
in general; but he is not at all in my style of beauty. I hate a florid
complexion and dark eyes in a man. However, he is very well. Amazingly
conceited, I am sure. I took him down several times, you know, in my
way."
When the young ladies next met, they had a far more interesting subject
to discuss. James Morland's second letter was then received, and the
kind intentions of his father fully explained. A living, of which Mr.
Morland was himself patron and incumbent, of about four hundred pounds
yearly value, was to be resigned to his son as soon as he should be
old enough to take it; no trifling deduction from the family income, no
niggardly assignment to one of ten children. An estate of at least equal
value, moreover, was assured as his future inheritance.
James expressed himself on the occasion with becoming gratitude; and
the necessity of waiting between two and three years before they could
marry, being, however unwelcome, no more than he had expected, was borne
by him without discontent. Catherine, whose expectations had been as
unfixed as her ideas of her father's income, and whose judgment was now
entirely led by her brother, felt equally well satisfied, and heartily
congratulated Isabella on having everything so pleasantly settled.
"It is very charming indeed," said Isabella, with a grave face. "Mr.
Morland has behaved vastly handsome indeed," said the gentle Mrs.
Thorpe, looking anxiously at her daughter. "I only wish I could do as
much. One could not expect more from him, you know. If he finds he
can do more by and by, I dare say he will, for I am sure he must be an
excellent good-hearted man. Four hundred is but a small income to begin
on indeed, but your wishes, my dear Isabella, are so moderate, you do
not consider how little you ever want, my dear."
"It is not on my own account I wish for more; but I cannot bear to
be the means of injuring my dear Morland, making him sit down upon an
income hardly enough to find one in the common necessaries of life. For
myself, it is nothing; I never think of myself."
"I know you never do, my dear; and you will always find your reward in
the affection it makes everybody feel for you. There never was a young
woman so beloved as you are by everybody that knows you; and I dare say
when Mr. Morland sees you, my dear child--but do not let us distress
our dear Catherine by talking of such things. Mr. Morland has behaved so
very handsome, you know. I always heard he was a most excellent man;
and you know, my dear, we are not to suppose but what, if you had had a
suitable fortune, he would have come down with something more, for I am
sure he must be a most liberal-minded man."
"Nobody can think better of Mr. Morland than I do, I am sure. But
everybody has their failing, you know, and everybody has a right to
do what they like with their own money." Catherine was hurt by these
insinuations. "I am very sure," said she, "that my father has promised
to do as much as he can afford."
Isabella recollected herself. "As to that, my sweet Catherine, there
cannot be a doubt, and you know me well enough to be sure that a much
smaller income would satisfy me. It is not the want of more money that
makes me just at present a little out of spirits; I hate money; and if
our union could take place now upon only fifty pounds a year, I should
not have a wish unsatisfied. Ah! my Catherine, you have found me out.
There's the sting. The long, long, endless two years and half that are
to pass before your brother can hold the living."
"Yes, yes, my darling Isabella," said Mrs. Thorpe, "we perfectly see
into your heart. You have no disguise. We perfectly understand the
present vexation; and everybody must love you the better for such a
noble honest affection."
Catherine's uncomfortable feelings began to lessen. She endeavoured to
believe that the delay of the marriage was the only source of Isabella's
regret; and when she saw her at their next interview as cheerful and
amiable as ever, endeavoured to forget that she had for a minute thought
otherwise. James soon followed his letter, and was received with the
most gratifying kindness.
----------CHAPTER 17---------
The Allens had now entered on the sixth week of their stay in Bath; and
whether it should be the last was for some time a question, to which
Catherine listened with a beating heart. To have her acquaintance with
the Tilneys end so soon was an evil which nothing could counterbalance.
Her whole happiness seemed at stake, while the affair was in suspense,
and everything secured when it was determined that the lodgings should
be taken for another fortnight. What this additional fortnight was to
produce to her beyond the pleasure of sometimes seeing Henry Tilney made
but a small part of Catherine's speculation. Once or twice indeed, since
James's engagement had taught her what could be done, she had got so
far as to indulge in a secret "perhaps," but in general the felicity of
being with him for the present bounded her views: the present was now
comprised in another three weeks, and her happiness being certain for
that period, the rest of her life was at such a distance as to excite
but little interest. In the course of the morning which saw this
business arranged, she visited Miss Tilney, and poured forth her
joyful feelings. It was doomed to be a day of trial. No sooner had she
expressed her delight in Mr. Allen's lengthened stay than Miss Tilney
told her of her father's having just determined upon quitting Bath
by the end of another week. Here was a blow! The past suspense of
the morning had been ease and quiet to the present disappointment.
Catherine's countenance fell, and in a voice of most sincere concern she
echoed Miss Tilney's concluding words, "By the end of another week!"
"Yes, my father can seldom be prevailed on to give the waters what I
think a fair trial. He has been disappointed of some friends' arrival
whom he expected to meet here, and as he is now pretty well, is in a
hurry to get home."
"I am very sorry for it," said Catherine dejectedly; "if I had known
this before--"
"Perhaps," said Miss Tilney in an embarrassed manner, "you would be so
good--it would make me very happy if--"
The entrance of her father put a stop to the civility, which Catherine
was beginning to hope might introduce a desire of their corresponding.
After addressing her with his usual politeness, he turned to his
daughter and said, "Well, Eleanor, may I congratulate you on being
successful in your application to your fair friend?"
"I was just beginning to make the request, sir, as you came in."
"Well, proceed by all means. I know how much your heart is in it. My
daughter, Miss Morland," he continued, without leaving his daughter time
to speak, "has been forming a very bold wish. We leave Bath, as she has
perhaps told you, on Saturday se'nnight. A letter from my steward tells
me that my presence is wanted at home; and being disappointed in my hope
of seeing the Marquis of Longtown and General Courteney here, some of
my very old friends, there is nothing to detain me longer in Bath. And
could we carry our selfish point with you, we should leave it without a
single regret. Can you, in short, be prevailed on to quit this scene
of public triumph and oblige your friend Eleanor with your company in
Gloucestershire? I am almost ashamed to make the request, though its
presumption would certainly appear greater to every creature in Bath
than yourself. Modesty such as yours--but not for the world would I pain
it by open praise. If you can be induced to honour us with a visit,
you will make us happy beyond expression. 'Tis true, we can offer you
nothing like the gaieties of this lively place; we can tempt you neither
by amusement nor splendour, for our mode of living, as you see, is plain
and unpretending; yet no endeavours shall be wanting on our side to make
Northanger Abbey not wholly disagreeable."
Northanger Abbey! These were thrilling words, and wound up Catherine's
feelings to the highest point of ecstasy. Her grateful and gratified
heart could hardly restrain its expressions within the language of
tolerable calmness. To receive so flattering an invitation! To have her
company so warmly solicited! Everything honourable and soothing, every
present enjoyment, and every future hope was contained in it; and her
acceptance, with only the saving clause of Papa and Mamma's approbation,
was eagerly given. "I will write home directly," said she, "and if they
do not object, as I dare say they will not--"
General Tilney was not less sanguine, having already waited on her
excellent friends in Pulteney Street, and obtained their sanction of
his wishes. "Since they can consent to part with you," said he, "we may
expect philosophy from all the world."
Miss Tilney was earnest, though gentle, in her secondary civilities, and
the affair became in a few minutes as nearly settled as this necessary
reference to Fullerton would allow.
The circumstances of the morning had led Catherine's feelings through
the varieties of suspense, security, and disappointment; but they were
now safely lodged in perfect bliss; and with spirits elated to rapture,
with Henry at her heart, and Northanger Abbey on her lips, she
hurried home to write her letter. Mr. and Mrs. Morland, relying on
the discretion of the friends to whom they had already entrusted their
daughter, felt no doubt of the propriety of an acquaintance which had
been formed under their eye, and sent therefore by return of post their
ready consent to her visit in Gloucestershire. This indulgence, though
not more than Catherine had hoped for, completed her conviction of being
favoured beyond every other human creature, in friends and fortune,
circumstance and chance. Everything seemed to cooperate for her
advantage. By the kindness of her first friends, the Allens, she had
been introduced into scenes where pleasures of every kind had met her.
Her feelings, her preferences, had each known the happiness of a return.
Wherever she felt attachment, she had been able to create it. The
affection of Isabella was to be secured to her in a sister. The Tilneys,
they, by whom, above all, she desired to be favourably thought of,
outstripped even her wishes in the flattering measures by which their
intimacy was to be continued. She was to be their chosen visitor, she
was to be for weeks under the same roof with the person whose society
she mostly prized--and, in addition to all the rest, this roof was to
be the roof of an abbey! Her passion for ancient edifices was next in
degree to her passion for Henry Tilney--and castles and abbeys made
usually the charm of those reveries which his image did not fill. To see
and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters
of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more
than the visitor of an hour had seemed too nearly impossible for desire.
And yet, this was to happen. With all the chances against her of house,
hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey,
and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow
cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she
could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some
awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.
It was wonderful that her friends should seem so little elated by the
possession of such a home, that the consciousness of it should be so
meekly borne. The power of early habit only could account for it. A
distinction to which they had been born gave no pride. Their superiority
of abode was no more to them than their superiority of person.
Many were the inquiries she was eager to make of Miss Tilney; but so
active were her thoughts, that when these inquiries were answered, she
was hardly more assured than before, of Northanger Abbey having been
a richly endowed convent at the time of the Reformation, of its having
fallen into the hands of an ancestor of the Tilneys on its dissolution,
of a large portion of the ancient building still making a part of the
present dwelling although the rest was decayed, or of its standing low
in a valley, sheltered from the north and east by rising woods of oak.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for chapter 19 based on the provided context. | chapter 18|chapter 19 | Catherine starts watching Isabella closely and is alarmed about the changes she sees. Isabella is distracted and starts flirting with Captain Tilney in public all the time. She's also ignoring James. Catherine is concerned for everyone, thinking they will all get their feelings hurt. She still feels that Isabella can't be aware of what she's doing. Catherine speaks with Henry about the love triangle problem. She asks if Henry will talk to his brother. Henry says that he's not his brother's keeper and that his brother is fully aware that Isabella is engaged and is hanging around anyway. Henry then asks Catherine if James is upset that Captain Tilney is hanging around, or if he's upset because Isabella is hanging around Captain Tilney. Catherine doesn't get the difference. She also insists that a woman in love can't flirt with anyone else. Henry asks Catherine if she can't guess what's going on from the evidence. Of course Catherine can't. Henry tells Catherine not to meddle and notes that, if James and Isabella have a solid relationship, they'll be able to work this out. Catherine finally decides to drop it. She spends one last evening with Isabella and James, who are both in good moods. |
----------CHAPTER 18---------
With a mind thus full of happiness, Catherine was hardly aware that two
or three days had passed away, without her seeing Isabella for more than
a few minutes together. She began first to be sensible of this, and
to sigh for her conversation, as she walked along the pump-room one
morning, by Mrs. Allen's side, without anything to say or to hear; and
scarcely had she felt a five minutes' longing of friendship, before the
object of it appeared, and inviting her to a secret conference, led the
way to a seat. "This is my favourite place," said she as they sat
down on a bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of
everybody entering at either; "it is so out of the way."
Catherine, observing that Isabella's eyes were continually bent towards
one door or the other, as in eager expectation, and remembering how
often she had been falsely accused of being arch, thought the present a
fine opportunity for being really so; and therefore gaily said, "Do not
be uneasy, Isabella, James will soon be here."
"Psha! My dear creature," she replied, "do not think me such a simpleton
as to be always wanting to confine him to my elbow. It would be hideous
to be always together; we should be the jest of the place. And so you
are going to Northanger! I am amazingly glad of it. It is one of the
finest old places in England, I understand. I shall depend upon a most
particular description of it."
"You shall certainly have the best in my power to give. But who are you
looking for? Are your sisters coming?"
"I am not looking for anybody. One's eyes must be somewhere, and you
know what a foolish trick I have of fixing mine, when my thoughts are an
hundred miles off. I am amazingly absent; I believe I am the most absent
creature in the world. Tilney says it is always the case with minds of a
certain stamp."
"But I thought, Isabella, you had something in particular to tell me?"
"Oh! Yes, and so I have. But here is a proof of what I was saying. My
poor head, I had quite forgot it. Well, the thing is this: I have just
had a letter from John; you can guess the contents."
"No, indeed, I cannot."
"My sweet love, do not be so abominably affected. What can he write
about, but yourself? You know he is over head and ears in love with
you."
"With me, dear Isabella!"
"Nay, my sweetest Catherine, this is being quite absurd! Modesty, and
all that, is very well in its way, but really a little common honesty is
sometimes quite as becoming. I have no idea of being so overstrained!
It is fishing for compliments. His attentions were such as a child must
have noticed. And it was but half an hour before he left Bath that you
gave him the most positive encouragement. He says so in this letter,
says that he as good as made you an offer, and that you received his
advances in the kindest way; and now he wants me to urge his suit,
and say all manner of pretty things to you. So it is in vain to affect
ignorance."
Catherine, with all the earnestness of truth, expressed her astonishment
at such a charge, protesting her innocence of every thought of Mr.
Thorpe's being in love with her, and the consequent impossibility of
her having ever intended to encourage him. "As to any attentions on his
side, I do declare, upon my honour, I never was sensible of them for a
moment--except just his asking me to dance the first day of his coming.
And as to making me an offer, or anything like it, there must be some
unaccountable mistake. I could not have misunderstood a thing of that
kind, you know! And, as I ever wish to be believed, I solemnly protest
that no syllable of such a nature ever passed between us. The last half
hour before he went away! It must be all and completely a mistake--for I
did not see him once that whole morning."
"But that you certainly did, for you spent the whole morning in Edgar's
Buildings--it was the day your father's consent came--and I am pretty
sure that you and John were alone in the parlour some time before you
left the house."
"Are you? Well, if you say it, it was so, I dare say--but for the life
of me, I cannot recollect it. I do remember now being with you, and
seeing him as well as the rest--but that we were ever alone for five
minutes--However, it is not worth arguing about, for whatever might pass
on his side, you must be convinced, by my having no recollection of it,
that I never thought, nor expected, nor wished for anything of the kind
from him. I am excessively concerned that he should have any regard for
me--but indeed it has been quite unintentional on my side; I never had
the smallest idea of it. Pray undeceive him as soon as you can, and tell
him I beg his pardon--that is--I do not know what I ought to say--but
make him understand what I mean, in the properest way. I would not speak
disrespectfully of a brother of yours, Isabella, I am sure; but you know
very well that if I could think of one man more than another--he is not
the person." Isabella was silent. "My dear friend, you must not be angry
with me. I cannot suppose your brother cares so very much about me. And,
you know, we shall still be sisters."
"Yes, yes" (with a blush), "there are more ways than one of our being
sisters. But where am I wandering to? Well, my dear Catherine, the case
seems to be that you are determined against poor John--is not it so?"
"I certainly cannot return his affection, and as certainly never meant
to encourage it."
"Since that is the case, I am sure I shall not tease you any further.
John desired me to speak to you on the subject, and therefore I have.
But I confess, as soon as I read his letter, I thought it a very
foolish, imprudent business, and not likely to promote the good of
either; for what were you to live upon, supposing you came together? You
have both of you something, to be sure, but it is not a trifle that will
support a family nowadays; and after all that romancers may say, there
is no doing without money. I only wonder John could think of it; he
could not have received my last."
"You do acquit me, then, of anything wrong?--You are convinced that I
never meant to deceive your brother, never suspected him of liking me
till this moment?"
"Oh! As to that," answered Isabella laughingly, "I do not pretend to
determine what your thoughts and designs in time past may have been. All
that is best known to yourself. A little harmless flirtation or so will
occur, and one is often drawn on to give more encouragement than one
wishes to stand by. But you may be assured that I am the last person in
the world to judge you severely. All those things should be allowed for
in youth and high spirits. What one means one day, you know, one may not
mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter."
"But my opinion of your brother never did alter; it was always the same.
You are describing what never happened."
"My dearest Catherine," continued the other without at all listening to
her, "I would not for all the world be the means of hurrying you into an
engagement before you knew what you were about. I do not think anything
would justify me in wishing you to sacrifice all your happiness merely
to oblige my brother, because he is my brother, and who perhaps after
all, you know, might be just as happy without you, for people seldom
know what they would be at, young men especially, they are so amazingly
changeable and inconstant. What I say is, why should a brother's
happiness be dearer to me than a friend's? You know I carry my notions
of friendship pretty high. But, above all things, my dear Catherine, do
not be in a hurry. Take my word for it, that if you are in too great
a hurry, you will certainly live to repent it. Tilney says there is
nothing people are so often deceived in as the state of their own
affections, and I believe he is very right. Ah! Here he comes; never
mind, he will not see us, I am sure."
Catherine, looking up, perceived Captain Tilney; and Isabella,
earnestly fixing her eye on him as she spoke, soon caught his notice. He
approached immediately, and took the seat to which her movements invited
him. His first address made Catherine start. Though spoken low, she
could distinguish, "What! Always to be watched, in person or by proxy!"
"Psha, nonsense!" was Isabella's answer in the same half whisper. "Why
do you put such things into my head? If I could believe it--my spirit,
you know, is pretty independent."
"I wish your heart were independent. That would be enough for me."
"My heart, indeed! What can you have to do with hearts? You men have
none of you any hearts."
"If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough."
"Do they? I am sorry for it; I am sorry they find anything so
disagreeable in me. I will look another way. I hope this pleases you"
(turning her back on him); "I hope your eyes are not tormented now."
"Never more so; for the edge of a blooming cheek is still in view--at
once too much and too little."
Catherine heard all this, and quite out of countenance, could listen
no longer. Amazed that Isabella could endure it, and jealous for her
brother, she rose up, and saying she should join Mrs. Allen, proposed
their walking. But for this Isabella showed no inclination. She was so
amazingly tired, and it was so odious to parade about the pump-room;
and if she moved from her seat she should miss her sisters; she was
expecting her sisters every moment; so that her dearest Catherine must
excuse her, and must sit quietly down again. But Catherine could be
stubborn too; and Mrs. Allen just then coming up to propose their
returning home, she joined her and walked out of the pump-room, leaving
Isabella still sitting with Captain Tilney. With much uneasiness did
she thus leave them. It seemed to her that Captain Tilney was falling
in love with Isabella, and Isabella unconsciously encouraging him;
unconsciously it must be, for Isabella's attachment to James was as
certain and well acknowledged as her engagement. To doubt her truth
or good intentions was impossible; and yet, during the whole of their
conversation her manner had been odd. She wished Isabella had talked
more like her usual self, and not so much about money, and had not
looked so well pleased at the sight of Captain Tilney. How strange that
she should not perceive his admiration! Catherine longed to give her a
hint of it, to put her on her guard, and prevent all the pain which
her too lively behaviour might otherwise create both for him and her
brother.
The compliment of John Thorpe's affection did not make amends for this
thoughtlessness in his sister. She was almost as far from believing as
from wishing it to be sincere; for she had not forgotten that he
could mistake, and his assertion of the offer and of her encouragement
convinced her that his mistakes could sometimes be very egregious.
In vanity, therefore, she gained but little; her chief profit was in
wonder. That he should think it worth his while to fancy himself in love
with her was a matter of lively astonishment. Isabella talked of his
attentions; she had never been sensible of any; but Isabella had said
many things which she hoped had been spoken in haste, and would never
be said again; and upon this she was glad to rest altogether for present
ease and comfort.
----------CHAPTER 19---------
A few days passed away, and Catherine, though not allowing herself to
suspect her friend, could not help watching her closely. The result of
her observations was not agreeable. Isabella seemed an altered creature.
When she saw her, indeed, surrounded only by their immediate friends
in Edgar's Buildings or Pulteney Street, her change of manners was so
trifling that, had it gone no farther, it might have passed unnoticed.
A something of languid indifference, or of that boasted absence of
mind which Catherine had never heard of before, would occasionally come
across her; but had nothing worse appeared, that might only have spread
a new grace and inspired a warmer interest. But when Catherine saw her
in public, admitting Captain Tilney's attentions as readily as they were
offered, and allowing him almost an equal share with James in her notice
and smiles, the alteration became too positive to be passed over. What
could be meant by such unsteady conduct, what her friend could be at,
was beyond her comprehension. Isabella could not be aware of the pain
she was inflicting; but it was a degree of wilful thoughtlessness which
Catherine could not but resent. James was the sufferer. She saw him
grave and uneasy; and however careless of his present comfort the woman
might be who had given him her heart, to her it was always an object.
For poor Captain Tilney too she was greatly concerned. Though his looks
did not please her, his name was a passport to her goodwill, and she
thought with sincere compassion of his approaching disappointment; for,
in spite of what she had believed herself to overhear in the pump-room,
his behaviour was so incompatible with a knowledge of Isabella's
engagement that she could not, upon reflection, imagine him aware of it.
He might be jealous of her brother as a rival, but if more had seemed
implied, the fault must have been in her misapprehension. She wished, by
a gentle remonstrance, to remind Isabella of her situation, and make
her aware of this double unkindness; but for remonstrance, either
opportunity or comprehension was always against her. If able to suggest
a hint, Isabella could never understand it. In this distress, the
intended departure of the Tilney family became her chief consolation;
their journey into Gloucestershire was to take place within a few days,
and Captain Tilney's removal would at least restore peace to every heart
but his own. But Captain Tilney had at present no intention of removing;
he was not to be of the party to Northanger; he was to continue at Bath.
When Catherine knew this, her resolution was directly made. She spoke to
Henry Tilney on the subject, regretting his brother's evident partiality
for Miss Thorpe, and entreating him to make known her prior engagement.
"My brother does know it," was Henry's answer.
"Does he? Then why does he stay here?"
He made no reply, and was beginning to talk of something else; but she
eagerly continued, "Why do not you persuade him to go away? The longer
he stays, the worse it will be for him at last. Pray advise him for his
own sake, and for everybody's sake, to leave Bath directly. Absence will
in time make him comfortable again; but he can have no hope here, and it
is only staying to be miserable."
Henry smiled and said, "I am sure my brother would not wish to do that."
"Then you will persuade him to go away?"
"Persuasion is not at command; but pardon me, if I cannot even endeavour
to persuade him. I have myself told him that Miss Thorpe is engaged. He
knows what he is about, and must be his own master."
"No, he does not know what he is about," cried Catherine; "he does not
know the pain he is giving my brother. Not that James has ever told me
so, but I am sure he is very uncomfortable."
"And are you sure it is my brother's doing?"
"Yes, very sure."
"Is it my brother's attentions to Miss Thorpe, or Miss Thorpe's
admission of them, that gives the pain?"
"Is not it the same thing?"
"I think Mr. Morland would acknowledge a difference. No man is offended
by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only
who can make it a torment."
Catherine blushed for her friend, and said, "Isabella is wrong. But I
am sure she cannot mean to torment, for she is very much attached to my
brother. She has been in love with him ever since they first met, and
while my father's consent was uncertain, she fretted herself almost into
a fever. You know she must be attached to him."
"I understand: she is in love with James, and flirts with Frederick."
"Oh! no, not flirts. A woman in love with one man cannot flirt with
another."
"It is probable that she will neither love so well, nor flirt so
well, as she might do either singly. The gentlemen must each give up a
little."
After a short pause, Catherine resumed with, "Then you do not believe
Isabella so very much attached to my brother?"
"I can have no opinion on that subject."
"But what can your brother mean? If he knows her engagement, what can he
mean by his behaviour?"
"You are a very close questioner."
"Am I? I only ask what I want to be told."
"But do you only ask what I can be expected to tell?"
"Yes, I think so; for you must know your brother's heart."
"My brother's heart, as you term it, on the present occasion, I assure
you I can only guess at."
"Well?"
"Well! Nay, if it is to be guesswork, let us all guess for ourselves. To
be guided by second-hand conjecture is pitiful. The premises are before
you. My brother is a lively and perhaps sometimes a thoughtless young
man; he has had about a week's acquaintance with your friend, and he has
known her engagement almost as long as he has known her."
"Well," said Catherine, after some moments' consideration, "you may be
able to guess at your brother's intentions from all this; but I am sure
I cannot. But is not your father uncomfortable about it? Does not he
want Captain Tilney to go away? Sure, if your father were to speak to
him, he would go."
"My dear Miss Morland," said Henry, "in this amiable solicitude for your
brother's comfort, may you not be a little mistaken? Are you not carried
a little too far? Would he thank you, either on his own account or
Miss Thorpe's, for supposing that her affection, or at least her good
behaviour, is only to be secured by her seeing nothing of Captain
Tilney? Is he safe only in solitude? Or is her heart constant to him
only when unsolicited by anyone else? He cannot think this--and you may
be sure that he would not have you think it. I will not say, 'Do not
be uneasy,' because I know that you are so, at this moment; but be as
little uneasy as you can. You have no doubt of the mutual attachment
of your brother and your friend; depend upon it, therefore, that
real jealousy never can exist between them; depend upon it that no
disagreement between them can be of any duration. Their hearts are open
to each other, as neither heart can be to you; they know exactly what
is required and what can be borne; and you may be certain that one will
never tease the other beyond what is known to be pleasant."
Perceiving her still to look doubtful and grave, he added, "Though
Frederick does not leave Bath with us, he will probably remain but a
very short time, perhaps only a few days behind us. His leave of absence
will soon expire, and he must return to his regiment. And what will then
be their acquaintance? The mess-room will drink Isabella Thorpe for
a fortnight, and she will laugh with your brother over poor Tilney's
passion for a month."
Catherine would contend no longer against comfort. She had resisted its
approaches during the whole length of a speech, but it now carried her
captive. Henry Tilney must know best. She blamed herself for the extent
of her fears, and resolved never to think so seriously on the subject
again.
Her resolution was supported by Isabella's behaviour in their parting
interview. The Thorpes spent the last evening of Catherine's stay in
Pulteney Street, and nothing passed between the lovers to excite
her uneasiness, or make her quit them in apprehension. James was in
excellent spirits, and Isabella most engagingly placid. Her tenderness
for her friend seemed rather the first feeling of her heart; but that
at such a moment was allowable; and once she gave her lover a flat
contradiction, and once she drew back her hand; but Catherine remembered
Henry's instructions, and placed it all to judicious affection. The
embraces, tears, and promises of the parting fair ones may be fancied.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 26 using the context provided. | chapter 23|chapter 26 | No one hears anything from either Isabella or Frederick Tilney, and Henry, Catherine, and Eleanor are really confused as to what exactly is going on. Are they getting married or not? Catherine is a bit worried when she hears that the General is really concerned about money. She's definitely not rich. But Catherine decides that the Tilneys seem to love her and the General probably doesn't care as much about money as his kids say. The General declares a few days later that they'll all pay a visit to Henry's house in Woodston. Catherine is thrilled but is disappointed when Henry has to run off to prepare for their visit. Catherine is miserable about James and is depressed by Henry's absence. The day of the visit finally arrives and they have a lovely ride to Woodston. Catherine thinks it's a lot like Fullerton, except better. The General chats up Woodston and Henry's house - not that he really needs to, Catherine is already sold. They arrive and take a tour. Catherine thinks it's the best house ever and the General agrees with every observation she makes. At least Catherine doesn't realize that Henry is being embarrassed by his dad in front of his kinda/sorta girlfriend. But wait, Catherine finally gets clued in. The General hints that Catherine may be in charge of decorating an empty room soon. And Catherine figures out what he's hinting at and clams up quickly. The day passes fast and Catherine is sad to leave. |
----------CHAPTER 23---------
An hour passed away before the general came in, spent, on the part of
his young guest, in no very favourable consideration of his character.
"This lengthened absence, these solitary rambles, did not speak a mind
at ease, or a conscience void of reproach." At length he appeared; and,
whatever might have been the gloom of his meditations, he could still
smile with them. Miss Tilney, understanding in part her friend's
curiosity to see the house, soon revived the subject; and her father
being, contrary to Catherine's expectations, unprovided with any
pretence for further delay, beyond that of stopping five minutes to
order refreshments to be in the room by their return, was at last ready
to escort them.
They set forward; and, with a grandeur of air, a dignified step,
which caught the eye, but could not shake the doubts of the well-read
Catherine, he led the way across the hall, through the common
drawing-room and one useless antechamber, into a room magnificent both
in size and furniture--the real drawing-room, used only with company of
consequence. It was very noble--very grand--very charming!--was all that
Catherine had to say, for her indiscriminating eye scarcely discerned
the colour of the satin; and all minuteness of praise, all praise
that had much meaning, was supplied by the general: the costliness or
elegance of any room's fitting-up could be nothing to her; she cared for
no furniture of a more modern date than the fifteenth century. When the
general had satisfied his own curiosity, in a close examination of every
well-known ornament, they proceeded into the library, an apartment, in
its way, of equal magnificence, exhibiting a collection of books, on
which an humble man might have looked with pride. Catherine heard,
admired, and wondered with more genuine feeling than before--gathered
all that she could from this storehouse of knowledge, by running over
the titles of half a shelf, and was ready to proceed. But suites of
apartments did not spring up with her wishes. Large as was the building,
she had already visited the greatest part; though, on being told that,
with the addition of the kitchen, the six or seven rooms she had now
seen surrounded three sides of the court, she could scarcely believe it,
or overcome the suspicion of there being many chambers secreted. It was
some relief, however, that they were to return to the rooms in common
use, by passing through a few of less importance, looking into the
court, which, with occasional passages, not wholly unintricate,
connected the different sides; and she was further soothed in her
progress by being told that she was treading what had once been a
cloister, having traces of cells pointed out, and observing several
doors that were neither opened nor explained to her--by finding herself
successively in a billiard-room, and in the general's private apartment,
without comprehending their connection, or being able to turn aright
when she left them; and lastly, by passing through a dark little room,
owning Henry's authority, and strewed with his litter of books, guns,
and greatcoats.
From the dining-room, of which, though already seen, and always to be
seen at five o'clock, the general could not forgo the pleasure of pacing
out the length, for the more certain information of Miss Morland, as
to what she neither doubted nor cared for, they proceeded by quick
communication to the kitchen--the ancient kitchen of the convent, rich
in the massy walls and smoke of former days, and in the stoves and hot
closets of the present. The general's improving hand had not loitered
here: every modern invention to facilitate the labour of the cooks had
been adopted within this, their spacious theatre; and, when the genius
of others had failed, his own had often produced the perfection wanted.
His endowments of this spot alone might at any time have placed him high
among the benefactors of the convent.
With the walls of the kitchen ended all the antiquity of the abbey; the
fourth side of the quadrangle having, on account of its decaying state,
been removed by the general's father, and the present erected in its
place. All that was venerable ceased here. The new building was not
only new, but declared itself to be so; intended only for offices, and
enclosed behind by stable-yards, no uniformity of architecture had been
thought necessary. Catherine could have raved at the hand which had
swept away what must have been beyond the value of all the rest, for the
purposes of mere domestic economy; and would willingly have been spared
the mortification of a walk through scenes so fallen, had the general
allowed it; but if he had a vanity, it was in the arrangement of his
offices; and as he was convinced that, to a mind like Miss Morland's,
a view of the accommodations and comforts, by which the labours of her
inferiors were softened, must always be gratifying, he should make
no apology for leading her on. They took a slight survey of all; and
Catherine was impressed, beyond her expectation, by their multiplicity
and their convenience. The purposes for which a few shapeless pantries
and a comfortless scullery were deemed sufficient at Fullerton, were
here carried on in appropriate divisions, commodious and roomy. The
number of servants continually appearing did not strike her less than
the number of their offices. Wherever they went, some pattened girl
stopped to curtsy, or some footman in dishabille sneaked off. Yet this
was an abbey! How inexpressibly different in these domestic arrangements
from such as she had read about--from abbeys and castles, in which,
though certainly larger than Northanger, all the dirty work of the house
was to be done by two pair of female hands at the utmost. How they could
get through it all had often amazed Mrs. Allen; and, when Catherine saw
what was necessary here, she began to be amazed herself.
They returned to the hall, that the chief staircase might be ascended,
and the beauty of its wood, and ornaments of rich carving might be
pointed out: having gained the top, they turned in an opposite direction
from the gallery in which her room lay, and shortly entered one on
the same plan, but superior in length and breadth. She was here shown
successively into three large bed-chambers, with their dressing-rooms,
most completely and handsomely fitted up; everything that money and
taste could do, to give comfort and elegance to apartments, had been
bestowed on these; and, being furnished within the last five years, they
were perfect in all that would be generally pleasing, and wanting in all
that could give pleasure to Catherine. As they were surveying the last,
the general, after slightly naming a few of the distinguished characters
by whom they had at times been honoured, turned with a smiling
countenance to Catherine, and ventured to hope that henceforward some of
their earliest tenants might be "our friends from Fullerton." She felt
the unexpected compliment, and deeply regretted the impossibility of
thinking well of a man so kindly disposed towards herself, and so full
of civility to all her family.
The gallery was terminated by folding doors, which Miss Tilney,
advancing, had thrown open, and passed through, and seemed on the point
of doing the same by the first door to the left, in another long reach
of gallery, when the general, coming forwards, called her hastily, and,
as Catherine thought, rather angrily back, demanding whether she were
going?--And what was there more to be seen?--Had not Miss Morland
already seen all that could be worth her notice?--And did she not
suppose her friend might be glad of some refreshment after so much
exercise? Miss Tilney drew back directly, and the heavy doors were
closed upon the mortified Catherine, who, having seen, in a momentary
glance beyond them, a narrower passage, more numerous openings, and
symptoms of a winding staircase, believed herself at last within the
reach of something worth her notice; and felt, as she unwillingly paced
back the gallery, that she would rather be allowed to examine that end
of the house than see all the finery of all the rest. The general's
evident desire of preventing such an examination was an additional
stimulant. Something was certainly to be concealed; her fancy, though
it had trespassed lately once or twice, could not mislead her here;
and what that something was, a short sentence of Miss Tilney's, as they
followed the general at some distance downstairs, seemed to point out:
"I was going to take you into what was my mother's room--the room
in which she died--" were all her words; but few as they were, they
conveyed pages of intelligence to Catherine. It was no wonder that the
general should shrink from the sight of such objects as that room
must contain; a room in all probability never entered by him since the
dreadful scene had passed, which released his suffering wife, and left
him to the stings of conscience.
She ventured, when next alone with Eleanor, to express her wish of being
permitted to see it, as well as all the rest of that side of the house;
and Eleanor promised to attend her there, whenever they should have a
convenient hour. Catherine understood her: the general must be watched
from home, before that room could be entered. "It remains as it was, I
suppose?" said she, in a tone of feeling.
"Yes, entirely."
"And how long ago may it be that your mother died?"
"She has been dead these nine years." And nine years, Catherine knew,
was a trifle of time, compared with what generally elapsed after the
death of an injured wife, before her room was put to rights.
"You were with her, I suppose, to the last?"
"No," said Miss Tilney, sighing; "I was unfortunately from home. Her
illness was sudden and short; and, before I arrived it was all over."
Catherine's blood ran cold with the horrid suggestions which naturally
sprang from these words. Could it be possible? Could Henry's father--?
And yet how many were the examples to justify even the blackest
suspicions! And, when she saw him in the evening, while she worked
with her friend, slowly pacing the drawing-room for an hour together in
silent thoughtfulness, with downcast eyes and contracted brow, she felt
secure from all possibility of wronging him. It was the air and attitude
of a Montoni! What could more plainly speak the gloomy workings of a
mind not wholly dead to every sense of humanity, in its fearful review
of past scenes of guilt? Unhappy man! And the anxiousness of her spirits
directed her eyes towards his figure so repeatedly, as to catch Miss
Tilney's notice. "My father," she whispered, "often walks about the room
in this way; it is nothing unusual."
"So much the worse!" thought Catherine; such ill-timed exercise was of a
piece with the strange unseasonableness of his morning walks, and boded
nothing good.
After an evening, the little variety and seeming length of which made
her peculiarly sensible of Henry's importance among them, she was
heartily glad to be dismissed; though it was a look from the general not
designed for her observation which sent his daughter to the bell.
When the butler would have lit his master's candle, however, he was
forbidden. The latter was not going to retire. "I have many pamphlets to
finish," said he to Catherine, "before I can close my eyes, and perhaps
may be poring over the affairs of the nation for hours after you are
asleep. Can either of us be more meetly employed? My eyes will be
blinding for the good of others, and yours preparing by rest for future
mischief."
But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment,
could win Catherine from thinking that some very different object must
occasion so serious a delay of proper repose. To be kept up for hours,
after the family were in bed, by stupid pamphlets was not very likely.
There must be some deeper cause: something was to be done which could
be done only while the household slept; and the probability that Mrs.
Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the
pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food, was the
conclusion which necessarily followed. Shocking as was the idea, it
was at least better than a death unfairly hastened, as, in the natural
course of things, she must ere long be released. The suddenness of her
reputed illness, the absence of her daughter, and probably of her other
children, at the time--all favoured the supposition of her imprisonment.
Its origin--jealousy perhaps, or wanton cruelty--was yet to be
unravelled.
In revolving these matters, while she undressed, it suddenly struck her
as not unlikely that she might that morning have passed near the very
spot of this unfortunate woman's confinement--might have been within
a few paces of the cell in which she languished out her days; for what
part of the abbey could be more fitted for the purpose than that which
yet bore the traces of monastic division? In the high-arched passage,
paved with stone, which already she had trodden with peculiar awe, she
well remembered the doors of which the general had given no account. To
what might not those doors lead? In support of the plausibility of this
conjecture, it further occurred to her that the forbidden gallery, in
which lay the apartments of the unfortunate Mrs. Tilney, must be, as
certainly as her memory could guide her, exactly over this suspected
range of cells, and the staircase by the side of those apartments of
which she had caught a transient glimpse, communicating by some
secret means with those cells, might well have favoured the barbarous
proceedings of her husband. Down that staircase she had perhaps been
conveyed in a state of well-prepared insensibility!
Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and
sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far; but they were
supported by such appearances as made their dismissal impossible.
The side of the quadrangle, in which she supposed the guilty scene to be
acting, being, according to her belief, just opposite her own, it struck
her that, if judiciously watched, some rays of light from the general's
lamp might glimmer through the lower windows, as he passed to the prison
of his wife; and, twice before she stepped into bed, she stole gently
from her room to the corresponding window in the gallery, to see if it
appeared; but all abroad was dark, and it must yet be too early. The
various ascending noises convinced her that the servants must still be
up. Till midnight, she supposed it would be in vain to watch; but then,
when the clock had struck twelve, and all was quiet, she would, if not
quite appalled by darkness, steal out and look once more. The clock
struck twelve--and Catherine had been half an hour asleep.
----------CHAPTER 26---------
From this time, the subject was frequently canvassed by the three young
people; and Catherine found, with some surprise, that her two young
friends were perfectly agreed in considering Isabella's want of
consequence and fortune as likely to throw great difficulties in the way
of her marrying their brother. Their persuasion that the general would,
upon this ground alone, independent of the objection that might be
raised against her character, oppose the connection, turned her feelings
moreover with some alarm towards herself. She was as insignificant,
and perhaps as portionless, as Isabella; and if the heir of the Tilney
property had not grandeur and wealth enough in himself, at what point
of interest were the demands of his younger brother to rest? The very
painful reflections to which this thought led could only be dispersed by
a dependence on the effect of that particular partiality, which, as she
was given to understand by his words as well as his actions, she had
from the first been so fortunate as to excite in the general; and by a
recollection of some most generous and disinterested sentiments on the
subject of money, which she had more than once heard him utter, and
which tempted her to think his disposition in such matters misunderstood
by his children.
They were so fully convinced, however, that their brother would not
have the courage to apply in person for his father's consent, and so
repeatedly assured her that he had never in his life been less likely to
come to Northanger than at the present time, that she suffered her mind
to be at ease as to the necessity of any sudden removal of her own. But
as it was not to be supposed that Captain Tilney, whenever he made his
application, would give his father any just idea of Isabella's conduct,
it occurred to her as highly expedient that Henry should lay the whole
business before him as it really was, enabling the general by that means
to form a cool and impartial opinion, and prepare his objections on
a fairer ground than inequality of situations. She proposed it to him
accordingly; but he did not catch at the measure so eagerly as she had
expected. "No," said he, "my father's hands need not be strengthened,
and Frederick's confession of folly need not be forestalled. He must
tell his own story."
"But he will tell only half of it."
"A quarter would be enough."
A day or two passed away and brought no tidings of Captain Tilney. His
brother and sister knew not what to think. Sometimes it appeared to
them as if his silence would be the natural result of the suspected
engagement, and at others that it was wholly incompatible with it.
The general, meanwhile, though offended every morning by Frederick's
remissness in writing, was free from any real anxiety about him, and had
no more pressing solicitude than that of making Miss Morland's time at
Northanger pass pleasantly. He often expressed his uneasiness on this
head, feared the sameness of every day's society and employments would
disgust her with the place, wished the Lady Frasers had been in the
country, talked every now and then of having a large party to dinner,
and once or twice began even to calculate the number of young dancing
people in the neighbourhood. But then it was such a dead time of year,
no wild-fowl, no game, and the Lady Frasers were not in the country.
And it all ended, at last, in his telling Henry one morning that when he
next went to Woodston, they would take him by surprise there some day
or other, and eat their mutton with him. Henry was greatly honoured and
very happy, and Catherine was quite delighted with the scheme. "And when
do you think, sir, I may look forward to this pleasure? I must be at
Woodston on Monday to attend the parish meeting, and shall probably be
obliged to stay two or three days."
"Well, well, we will take our chance some one of those days. There is
no need to fix. You are not to put yourself at all out of your way.
Whatever you may happen to have in the house will be enough. I think I
can answer for the young ladies making allowance for a bachelor's table.
Let me see; Monday will be a busy day with you, we will not come on
Monday; and Tuesday will be a busy one with me. I expect my surveyor
from Brockham with his report in the morning; and afterwards I cannot in
decency fail attending the club. I really could not face my acquaintance
if I stayed away now; for, as I am known to be in the country, it would
be taken exceedingly amiss; and it is a rule with me, Miss Morland,
never to give offence to any of my neighbours, if a small sacrifice of
time and attention can prevent it. They are a set of very worthy men.
They have half a buck from Northanger twice a year; and I dine with them
whenever I can. Tuesday, therefore, we may say is out of the question.
But on Wednesday, I think, Henry, you may expect us; and we shall be
with you early, that we may have time to look about us. Two hours and
three quarters will carry us to Woodston, I suppose; we shall be in the
carriage by ten; so, about a quarter before one on Wednesday, you may
look for us."
A ball itself could not have been more welcome to Catherine than
this little excursion, so strong was her desire to be acquainted with
Woodston; and her heart was still bounding with joy when Henry, about an
hour afterwards, came booted and greatcoated into the room where she
and Eleanor were sitting, and said, "I am come, young ladies, in a
very moralizing strain, to observe that our pleasures in this world
are always to be paid for, and that we often purchase them at a great
disadvantage, giving ready-monied actual happiness for a draft on the
future, that may not be honoured. Witness myself, at this present hour.
Because I am to hope for the satisfaction of seeing you at Woodston on
Wednesday, which bad weather, or twenty other causes, may prevent, I
must go away directly, two days before I intended it."
"Go away!" said Catherine, with a very long face. "And why?"
"Why! How can you ask the question? Because no time is to be lost in
frightening my old housekeeper out of her wits, because I must go and
prepare a dinner for you, to be sure."
"Oh! Not seriously!"
"Aye, and sadly too--for I had much rather stay."
"But how can you think of such a thing, after what the general said?
When he so particularly desired you not to give yourself any trouble,
because anything would do."
Henry only smiled. "I am sure it is quite unnecessary upon your sister's
account and mine. You must know it to be so; and the general made such
a point of your providing nothing extraordinary: besides, if he had not
said half so much as he did, he has always such an excellent dinner
at home, that sitting down to a middling one for one day could not
signify."
"I wish I could reason like you, for his sake and my own. Good-bye. As
tomorrow is Sunday, Eleanor, I shall not return."
He went; and, it being at any time a much simpler operation to Catherine
to doubt her own judgment than Henry's, she was very soon obliged to
give him credit for being right, however disagreeable to her his going.
But the inexplicability of the general's conduct dwelt much on her
thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own
unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say
one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most
unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood? Who but
Henry could have been aware of what his father was at?
From Saturday to Wednesday, however, they were now to be without Henry.
This was the sad finale of every reflection: and Captain Tilney's letter
would certainly come in his absence; and Wednesday she was very sure
would be wet. The past, present, and future were all equally in gloom.
Her brother so unhappy, and her loss in Isabella so great; and Eleanor's
spirits always affected by Henry's absence! What was there to interest
or amuse her? She was tired of the woods and the shrubberies--always so
smooth and so dry; and the abbey in itself was no more to her now than
any other house. The painful remembrance of the folly it had helped
to nourish and perfect was the only emotion which could spring from a
consideration of the building. What a revolution in her ideas! She, who
had so longed to be in an abbey! Now, there was nothing so charming
to her imagination as the unpretending comfort of a well-connected
parsonage, something like Fullerton, but better: Fullerton had its
faults, but Woodston probably had none. If Wednesday should ever come!
It did come, and exactly when it might be reasonably looked for. It
came--it was fine--and Catherine trod on air. By ten o'clock, the chaise
and four conveyed the trio from the abbey; and, after an agreeable drive
of almost twenty miles, they entered Woodston, a large and populous
village, in a situation not unpleasant. Catherine was ashamed to say
how pretty she thought it, as the general seemed to think an apology
necessary for the flatness of the country, and the size of the village;
but in her heart she preferred it to any place she had ever been at,
and looked with great admiration at every neat house above the rank of
a cottage, and at all the little chandler's shops which they passed. At
the further end of the village, and tolerably disengaged from the rest
of it, stood the parsonage, a new-built substantial stone house, with
its semicircular sweep and green gates; and, as they drove up to the
door, Henry, with the friends of his solitude, a large Newfoundland
puppy and two or three terriers, was ready to receive and make much of
them.
Catherine's mind was too full, as she entered the house, for her either
to observe or to say a great deal; and, till called on by the general
for her opinion of it, she had very little idea of the room in which she
was sitting. Upon looking round it then, she perceived in a moment that
it was the most comfortable room in the world; but she was too guarded
to say so, and the coldness of her praise disappointed him.
"We are not calling it a good house," said he. "We are not comparing
it with Fullerton and Northanger--we are considering it as a mere
parsonage, small and confined, we allow, but decent, perhaps, and
habitable; and altogether not inferior to the generality; or, in other
words, I believe there are few country parsonages in England half so
good. It may admit of improvement, however. Far be it from me to say
otherwise; and anything in reason--a bow thrown out, perhaps--though,
between ourselves, if there is one thing more than another my aversion,
it is a patched-on bow."
Catherine did not hear enough of this speech to understand or be pained
by it; and other subjects being studiously brought forward and supported
by Henry, at the same time that a tray full of refreshments was
introduced by his servant, the general was shortly restored to his
complacency, and Catherine to all her usual ease of spirits.
The room in question was of a commodious, well-proportioned size, and
handsomely fitted up as a dining-parlour; and on their quitting it to
walk round the grounds, she was shown, first into a smaller apartment,
belonging peculiarly to the master of the house, and made unusually tidy
on the occasion; and afterwards into what was to be the drawing-room,
with the appearance of which, though unfurnished, Catherine was
delighted enough even to satisfy the general. It was a prettily shaped
room, the windows reaching to the ground, and the view from them
pleasant, though only over green meadows; and she expressed her
admiration at the moment with all the honest simplicity with which she
felt it. "Oh! Why do not you fit up this room, Mr. Tilney? What a pity
not to have it fitted up! It is the prettiest room I ever saw; it is the
prettiest room in the world!"
"I trust," said the general, with a most satisfied smile, "that it will
very speedily be furnished: it waits only for a lady's taste!"
"Well, if it was my house, I should never sit anywhere else. Oh! What a
sweet little cottage there is among the trees--apple trees, too! It is
the prettiest cottage!"
"You like it--you approve it as an object--it is enough. Henry, remember
that Robinson is spoken to about it. The cottage remains."
Such a compliment recalled all Catherine's consciousness, and silenced
her directly; and, though pointedly applied to by the general for her
choice of the prevailing colour of the paper and hangings, nothing like
an opinion on the subject could be drawn from her. The influence of
fresh objects and fresh air, however, was of great use in dissipating
these embarrassing associations; and, having reached the ornamental part
of the premises, consisting of a walk round two sides of a meadow, on
which Henry's genius had begun to act about half a year ago, she was
sufficiently recovered to think it prettier than any pleasure-ground she
had ever been in before, though there was not a shrub in it higher than
the green bench in the corner.
A saunter into other meadows, and through part of the village, with a
visit to the stables to examine some improvements, and a charming game
of play with a litter of puppies just able to roll about, brought them
to four o'clock, when Catherine scarcely thought it could be three. At
four they were to dine, and at six to set off on their return. Never had
any day passed so quickly!
She could not but observe that the abundance of the dinner did not seem
to create the smallest astonishment in the general; nay, that he was
even looking at the side-table for cold meat which was not there. His
son and daughter's observations were of a different kind. They had
seldom seen him eat so heartily at any table but his own, and never
before known him so little disconcerted by the melted butter's being
oiled.
At six o'clock, the general having taken his coffee, the carriage again
received them; and so gratifying had been the tenor of his conduct
throughout the whole visit, so well assured was her mind on the subject
of his expectations, that, could she have felt equally confident of the
wishes of his son, Catherine would have quitted Woodston with little
anxiety as to the How or the When she might return to it.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 31 using the context provided. | chapter 27|chapter 31|chapter i | The Morlands are surprised but excited that Henry wants to marry Catherine and they consent. Mrs. Morland warns Henry that Catherine will make a lousy housekeeper though. Mama Morland is so supportive. The only problem is that the General won't give his consent. Henry and Catherine don't want any money from him, but they do want his permission so they won't have to elope. Henry and Catherine part and hope that the General will change his mind soon. Luckily, Eleanor Tilney gets married that summer to a random and wealthy guy we have never heard of before. The narrator admits this and the whole thing is ludicrous and funny. It turns out the long-suffering Eleanor was prevented from marrying the man she loved because he had no money. But, fortunately for her, this man suddenly comes into a fortune and becomes a Viscount. So he and Eleanor marry quickly. The General is beyond thrilled by this and Eleanor, now a Viscountess, convinces him to give his consent to Henry and Catherine and assures him that Catherine isn't dirt poor, just not as rich as the Tilneys. So the General says OK. Henry and Catherine finally get married and have a happy life, according to the narrator. |
----------CHAPTER 27---------
The next morning brought the following very unexpected letter from
Isabella:
Bath, April
My dearest Catherine, I received your two kind letters with the greatest
delight, and have a thousand apologies to make for not answering them
sooner. I really am quite ashamed of my idleness; but in this horrid
place one can find time for nothing. I have had my pen in my hand to
begin a letter to you almost every day since you left Bath, but have
always been prevented by some silly trifler or other. Pray write to me
soon, and direct to my own home. Thank God, we leave this vile place
tomorrow. Since you went away, I have had no pleasure in it--the dust
is beyond anything; and everybody one cares for is gone. I believe if I
could see you I should not mind the rest, for you are dearer to me than
anybody can conceive. I am quite uneasy about your dear brother, not
having heard from him since he went to Oxford; and am fearful of some
misunderstanding. Your kind offices will set all right: he is the only
man I ever did or could love, and I trust you will convince him of it.
The spring fashions are partly down; and the hats the most frightful you
can imagine. I hope you spend your time pleasantly, but am afraid you
never think of me. I will not say all that I could of the family you are
with, because I would not be ungenerous, or set you against those you
esteem; but it is very difficult to know whom to trust, and young men
never know their minds two days together. I rejoice to say that the
young man whom, of all others, I particularly abhor, has left Bath. You
will know, from this description, I must mean Captain Tilney, who, as
you may remember, was amazingly disposed to follow and tease me, before
you went away. Afterwards he got worse, and became quite my shadow. Many
girls might have been taken in, for never were such attentions; but I
knew the fickle sex too well. He went away to his regiment two days ago,
and I trust I shall never be plagued with him again. He is the greatest
coxcomb I ever saw, and amazingly disagreeable. The last two days he was
always by the side of Charlotte Davis: I pitied his taste, but took no
notice of him. The last time we met was in Bath Street, and I turned
directly into a shop that he might not speak to me; I would not even
look at him. He went into the pump-room afterwards; but I would not have
followed him for all the world. Such a contrast between him and your
brother! Pray send me some news of the latter--I am quite unhappy about
him; he seemed so uncomfortable when he went away, with a cold, or
something that affected his spirits. I would write to him myself, but
have mislaid his direction; and, as I hinted above, am afraid he
took something in my conduct amiss. Pray explain everything to his
satisfaction; or, if he still harbours any doubt, a line from himself
to me, or a call at Putney when next in town, might set all to rights.
I have not been to the rooms this age, nor to the play, except going in
last night with the Hodges, for a frolic, at half price: they teased
me into it; and I was determined they should not say I shut myself up
because Tilney was gone. We happened to sit by the Mitchells, and they
pretended to be quite surprised to see me out. I knew their spite: at
one time they could not be civil to me, but now they are all friendship;
but I am not such a fool as to be taken in by them. You know I have a
pretty good spirit of my own. Anne Mitchell had tried to put on a
turban like mine, as I wore it the week before at the concert, but made
wretched work of it--it happened to become my odd face, I believe, at
least Tilney told me so at the time, and said every eye was upon me; but
he is the last man whose word I would take. I wear nothing but purple
now: I know I look hideous in it, but no matter--it is your dear
brother's favourite colour. Lose no time, my dearest, sweetest
Catherine, in writing to him and to me, Who ever am, etc.
Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine.
Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood struck her from the
very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever
loved her. Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her
excuses were empty, and her demands impudent. "Write to James on her
behalf! No, James should never hear Isabella's name mentioned by her
again."
On Henry's arrival from Woodston, she made known to him and Eleanor
their brother's safety, congratulating them with sincerity on it, and
reading aloud the most material passages of her letter with strong
indignation. When she had finished it--"So much for Isabella," she
cried, "and for all our intimacy! She must think me an idiot, or she
could not have written so; but perhaps this has served to make her
character better known to me than mine is to her. I see what she has
been about. She is a vain coquette, and her tricks have not answered. I
do not believe she had ever any regard either for James or for me, and I
wish I had never known her."
"It will soon be as if you never had," said Henry.
"There is but one thing that I cannot understand. I see that she has
had designs on Captain Tilney, which have not succeeded; but I do not
understand what Captain Tilney has been about all this time. Why should
he pay her such attentions as to make her quarrel with my brother, and
then fly off himself?"
"I have very little to say for Frederick's motives, such as I believe
them to have been. He has his vanities as well as Miss Thorpe, and the
chief difference is, that, having a stronger head, they have not yet
injured himself. If the effect of his behaviour does not justify him
with you, we had better not seek after the cause."
"Then you do not suppose he ever really cared about her?"
"I am persuaded that he never did."
"And only made believe to do so for mischief's sake?"
Henry bowed his assent.
"Well, then, I must say that I do not like him at all. Though it has
turned out so well for us, I do not like him at all. As it happens,
there is no great harm done, because I do not think Isabella has any
heart to lose. But, suppose he had made her very much in love with him?"
"But we must first suppose Isabella to have had a heart to
lose--consequently to have been a very different creature; and, in that
case, she would have met with very different treatment."
"It is very right that you should stand by your brother."
"And if you would stand by yours, you would not be much distressed by
the disappointment of Miss Thorpe. But your mind is warped by an innate
principle of general integrity, and therefore not accessible to the cool
reasonings of family partiality, or a desire of revenge."
Catherine was complimented out of further bitterness. Frederick could
not be unpardonably guilty, while Henry made himself so agreeable. She
resolved on not answering Isabella's letter, and tried to think no more
of it.
----------CHAPTER 31---------
Mr. and Mrs. Morland's surprise on being applied to by Mr. Tilney for
their consent to his marrying their daughter was, for a few minutes,
considerable, it having never entered their heads to suspect an
attachment on either side; but as nothing, after all, could be more
natural than Catherine's being beloved, they soon learnt to consider it
with only the happy agitation of gratified pride, and, as far as they
alone were concerned, had not a single objection to start. His pleasing
manners and good sense were self-evident recommendations; and having
never heard evil of him, it was not their way to suppose any evil could
be told. Goodwill supplying the place of experience, his character
needed no attestation. "Catherine would make a sad, heedless young
housekeeper to be sure," was her mother's foreboding remark; but quick
was the consolation of there being nothing like practice.
There was but one obstacle, in short, to be mentioned; but till that one
was removed, it must be impossible for them to sanction the engagement.
Their tempers were mild, but their principles were steady, and while
his parent so expressly forbade the connection, they could not allow
themselves to encourage it. That the general should come forward to
solicit the alliance, or that he should even very heartily approve it,
they were not refined enough to make any parading stipulation; but
the decent appearance of consent must be yielded, and that once
obtained--and their own hearts made them trust that it could not be
very long denied--their willing approbation was instantly to follow. His
consent was all that they wished for. They were no more inclined than
entitled to demand his money. Of a very considerable fortune, his son
was, by marriage settlements, eventually secure; his present income was
an income of independence and comfort, and under every pecuniary view,
it was a match beyond the claims of their daughter.
The young people could not be surprised at a decision like this. They
felt and they deplored--but they could not resent it; and they parted,
endeavouring to hope that such a change in the general, as each believed
almost impossible, might speedily take place, to unite them again in
the fullness of privileged affection. Henry returned to what was now
his only home, to watch over his young plantations, and extend his
improvements for her sake, to whose share in them he looked anxiously
forward; and Catherine remained at Fullerton to cry. Whether the
torments of absence were softened by a clandestine correspondence, let
us not inquire. Mr. and Mrs. Morland never did--they had been too kind
to exact any promise; and whenever Catherine received a letter, as, at
that time, happened pretty often, they always looked another way.
The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion
of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final
event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will
see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are
all hastening together to perfect felicity. The means by which their
early marriage was effected can be the only doubt: what probable
circumstance could work upon a temper like the general's? The
circumstance which chiefly availed was the marriage of his daughter with
a man of fortune and consequence, which took place in the course of
the summer--an accession of dignity that threw him into a fit of good
humour, from which he did not recover till after Eleanor had obtained
his forgiveness of Henry, and his permission for him "to be a fool if he
liked it!"
The marriage of Eleanor Tilney, her removal from all the evils of such
a home as Northanger had been made by Henry's banishment, to the home of
her choice and the man of her choice, is an event which I expect to
give general satisfaction among all her acquaintance. My own joy on the
occasion is very sincere. I know no one more entitled, by unpretending
merit, or better prepared by habitual suffering, to receive and enjoy
felicity. Her partiality for this gentleman was not of recent origin;
and he had been long withheld only by inferiority of situation from
addressing her. His unexpected accession to title and fortune had
removed all his difficulties; and never had the general loved his
daughter so well in all her hours of companionship, utility, and patient
endurance as when he first hailed her "Your Ladyship!" Her husband was
really deserving of her; independent of his peerage, his wealth, and
his attachment, being to a precision the most charming young man in the
world. Any further definition of his merits must be unnecessary; the
most charming young man in the world is instantly before the imagination
of us all. Concerning the one in question, therefore, I have only to
add--aware that the rules of composition forbid the introduction of a
character not connected with my fable--that this was the very
gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of
washing-bills, resulting from a long visit at Northanger, by which my
heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures.
The influence of the viscount and viscountess in their brother's behalf
was assisted by that right understanding of Mr. Morland's circumstances
which, as soon as the general would allow himself to be informed, they
were qualified to give. It taught him that he had been scarcely
more misled by Thorpe's first boast of the family wealth than by his
subsequent malicious overthrow of it; that in no sense of the word were
they necessitous or poor, and that Catherine would have three thousand
pounds. This was so material an amendment of his late expectations that
it greatly contributed to smooth the descent of his pride; and by no
means without its effect was the private intelligence, which he was at
some pains to procure, that the Fullerton estate, being entirely at
the disposal of its present proprietor, was consequently open to every
greedy speculation.
On the strength of this, the general, soon after Eleanor's marriage,
permitted his son to return to Northanger, and thence made him the
bearer of his consent, very courteously worded in a page full of empty
professions to Mr. Morland. The event which it authorized soon followed:
Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled;
and, as this took place within a twelvemonth from the first day of their
meeting, it will not appear, after all the dreadful delays occasioned by
the general's cruelty, that they were essentially hurt by it. To begin
perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is
to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the
general's unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to
their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their
knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment,
I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the
tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or
reward filial disobedience.
----------CHAPTER I---------
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have
supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character
of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were
all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being
neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name
was Richard--and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable
independence besides two good livings--and he was not in the least
addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful
plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a
good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and
instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might
expect, she still lived on--lived to have six children more--to see them
growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family
of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are
heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had
little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and
Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin
awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong
features--so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism
seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred
cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of
infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a
rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered
flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief--at least
so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was
forbidden to take. Such were her propensities--her abilities were quite
as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything
before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often
inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in
teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her
next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine
was always stupid--by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and
Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her
to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was
very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight
years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs.
Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in
spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which
dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life.
Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain
the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd
piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses
and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing
and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her
proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in
both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character!--for
with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither
a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever
quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions
of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and
cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the
green slope at the back of the house.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending;
she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved,
her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more
animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to
an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had
now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark
on her personal improvement. "Catherine grows quite a good-looking
girl--she is almost pretty today," were words which caught her ears now
and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an
acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the
first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever
receive.
Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children
everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in
lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were
inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful
that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should
prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about
the country at the age of fourteen, to books--or at least books of
information--for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be
gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she
had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen
she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines
must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so
serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.
From Pope, she learnt to censure those who
"bear about the mockery of woe."
From Gray, that
"Many a flower is born to blush unseen,
"And waste its fragrance on the desert air."
From Thompson, that--
"It is a delightful task
"To teach the young idea how to shoot."
And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information--amongst
the rest, that--
"Trifles light as air,
"Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,
"As proofs of Holy Writ."
That
"The poor beetle, which we tread upon,
"In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
"As when a giant dies."
And that a young woman in love always looks--
"like Patience on a monument
"Smiling at Grief."
So far her improvement was sufficient--and in many other points she came
on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought
herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing
a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own
composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very
little fatigue. Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil--she had no
notion of drawing--not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's
profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell
miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know
her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the
age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call
forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and
without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate
and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be
generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was
not one lord in the neighbourhood; no--not even a baronet. There was not
one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy
accidentally found at their door--not one young man whose origin
was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no
children.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty
surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen
to throw a hero in her way.
Mr. Allen, who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton, the
village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived, was ordered to Bath
for the benefit of a gouty constitution--and his lady, a good-humoured
woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will
not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad,
invited her to go with them. Mr. and Mrs. Morland were all compliance,
and Catherine all happiness.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter ii using the context provided. | chapter ii|chapter iii|chapter iv | The chapter begins with the narrator's expansion on Catherine's character: "her heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind. her person pleasing, and, when in looks, pretty - and her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is. Catherine prepares for her departure to Bath. Catherine's mother, defying convention, is not overly worried about her daughter's impending departure. Catherine's father gives Catherine a modest sum of money to take with her. As the party departs, the narrator describes Mrs. Allen, saying she has "neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner," but a quiet, good-tempered nature that helped her attract a "sensible, intelligent man" like Mr. Allen. Once the three arrive in Bath, they attend a ball. Catherine remains close to Mrs. Allen, who constantly laments the lack of an acquaintance in Bath. Mrs. Allen takes pains to protect her gown, while Catherine hopes in vain to be asked to dance. Mr. Allen spends most of his time in the card-room. The ball ends without Catherine having been asked to dance, but she is pleased to hear two men say she is pretty before she leaves. |
----------CHAPTER II---------
In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland's
personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the
difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath, it may be
stated, for the reader's more certain information, lest the following
pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is
meant to be, that her heart was affectionate; her disposition cheerful
and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind--her manners just
removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing,
and, when in good looks, pretty--and her mind about as ignorant and
uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.
When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of Mrs.
Morland will be naturally supposed to be most severe. A thousand
alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved Catherine from this
terrific separation must oppress her heart with sadness, and drown her
in tears for the last day or two of their being together; and advice of
the most important and applicable nature must of course flow from her
wise lips in their parting conference in her closet. Cautions against
the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young
ladies away to some remote farm-house, must, at such a moment, relieve
the fulness of her heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs. Morland knew
so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their
general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her
daughter from their machinations. Her cautions were confined to the
following points. "I beg, Catherine, you will always wrap yourself up
very warm about the throat, when you come from the rooms at night; and
I wish you would try to keep some account of the money you spend; I will
give you this little book on purpose."
Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will
reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?),
must from situation be at this time the intimate friend and confidante
of her sister. It is remarkable, however, that she neither insisted
on Catherine's writing by every post, nor exacted her promise of
transmitting the character of every new acquaintance, nor a detail
of every interesting conversation that Bath might produce. Everything
indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the
Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed
rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the
refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation
of a heroine from her family ought always to excite. Her father, instead
of giving her an unlimited order on his banker, or even putting an
hundred pounds bank-bill into her hands, gave her only ten guineas, and
promised her more when she wanted it.
Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the
journey began. It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful
safety. Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky
overturn to introduce them to the hero. Nothing more alarming occurred
than a fear, on Mrs. Allen's side, of having once left her clogs behind
her at an inn, and that fortunately proved to be groundless.
They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight--her eyes were
here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking
environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted
them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.
They were soon settled in comfortable lodgings in Pulteney Street.
It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the
reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter
tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will,
probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate
wretchedness of which a last volume is capable--whether by her
imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy--whether by intercepting her letters,
ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.
Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can
raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world
who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty,
genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great
deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind
were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible,
intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted
to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere
and seeing everything herself as any young lady could be. Dress was
her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our
heroine's entree into life could not take place till after three or four
days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperone
was provided with a dress of the newest fashion. Catherine too made
some purchases herself, and when all these matters were arranged, the
important evening came which was to usher her into the Upper Rooms. Her
hair was cut and dressed by the best hand, her clothes put on with care,
and both Mrs. Allen and her maid declared she looked quite as she should
do. With such encouragement, Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured
through the crowd. As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it
came, but she did not depend on it.
Mrs. Allen was so long in dressing that they did not enter the ballroom
till late. The season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies
squeezed in as well as they could. As for Mr. Allen, he repaired
directly to the card-room, and left them to enjoy a mob by themselves.
With more care for the safety of her new gown than for the comfort of
her protegee, Mrs. Allen made her way through the throng of men by
the door, as swiftly as the necessary caution would allow; Catherine,
however, kept close at her side, and linked her arm too firmly within
her friend's to be torn asunder by any common effort of a struggling
assembly. But to her utter amazement she found that to proceed along the
room was by no means the way to disengage themselves from the crowd; it
seemed rather to increase as they went on, whereas she had imagined that
when once fairly within the door, they should easily find seats and be
able to watch the dances with perfect convenience. But this was far from
being the case, and though by unwearied diligence they gained even the
top of the room, their situation was just the same; they saw nothing
of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies. Still they
moved on--something better was yet in view; and by a continued exertion
of strength and ingenuity they found themselves at last in the passage
behind the highest bench. Here there was something less of crowd than
below; and hence Miss Morland had a comprehensive view of all the
company beneath her, and of all the dangers of her late passage through
them. It was a splendid sight, and she began, for the first time that
evening, to feel herself at a ball: she longed to dance, but she had
not an acquaintance in the room. Mrs. Allen did all that she could do
in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, "I wish you
could dance, my dear--I wish you could get a partner." For some time
her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were
repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine
grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.
They were not long able, however, to enjoy the repose of the eminence
they had so laboriously gained. Everybody was shortly in motion for
tea, and they must squeeze out like the rest. Catherine began to feel
something of disappointment--she was tired of being continually pressed
against by people, the generality of whose faces possessed nothing to
interest, and with all of whom she was so wholly unacquainted that she
could not relieve the irksomeness of imprisonment by the exchange of a
syllable with any of her fellow captives; and when at last arrived in
the tea-room, she felt yet more the awkwardness of having no party to
join, no acquaintance to claim, no gentleman to assist them. They saw
nothing of Mr. Allen; and after looking about them in vain for a more
eligible situation, were obliged to sit down at the end of a table, at
which a large party were already placed, without having anything to do
there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.
Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having
preserved her gown from injury. "It would have been very shocking to
have it torn," said she, "would not it? It is such a delicate muslin.
For my part I have not seen anything I like so well in the whole room, I
assure you."
"How uncomfortable it is," whispered Catherine, "not to have a single
acquaintance here!"
"Yes, my dear," replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, "it is very
uncomfortable indeed."
"What shall we do? The gentlemen and ladies at this table look as if
they wondered why we came here--we seem forcing ourselves into their
party."
"Aye, so we do. That is very disagreeable. I wish we had a large
acquaintance here."
"I wish we had any--it would be somebody to go to."
"Very true, my dear; and if we knew anybody we would join them directly.
The Skinners were here last year--I wish they were here now."
"Had not we better go away as it is? Here are no tea-things for us, you
see."
"No more there are, indeed. How very provoking! But I think we had
better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd! How is my
head, my dear? Somebody gave me a push that has hurt it, I am afraid."
"No, indeed, it looks very nice. But, dear Mrs. Allen, are you sure
there is nobody you know in all this multitude of people? I think you
must know somebody."
"I don't, upon my word--I wish I did. I wish I had a large acquaintance
here with all my heart, and then I should get you a partner. I should be
so glad to have you dance. There goes a strange-looking woman! What an
odd gown she has got on! How old-fashioned it is! Look at the back."
After some time they received an offer of tea from one of their
neighbours; it was thankfully accepted, and this introduced a light
conversation with the gentleman who offered it, which was the only time
that anybody spoke to them during the evening, till they were discovered
and joined by Mr. Allen when the dance was over.
"Well, Miss Morland," said he, directly, "I hope you have had an
agreeable ball."
"Very agreeable indeed," she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a
great yawn.
"I wish she had been able to dance," said his wife; "I wish we could
have got a partner for her. I have been saying how glad I should be if
the Skinners were here this winter instead of last; or if the Parrys had
come, as they talked of once, she might have danced with George Parry. I
am so sorry she has not had a partner!"
"We shall do better another evening I hope," was Mr. Allen's
consolation.
The company began to disperse when the dancing was over--enough to leave
space for the remainder to walk about in some comfort; and now was the
time for a heroine, who had not yet played a very distinguished part
in the events of the evening, to be noticed and admired. Every five
minutes, by removing some of the crowd, gave greater openings for her
charms. She was now seen by many young men who had not been near her
before. Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding
her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once
called a divinity by anybody. Yet Catherine was in very good looks, and
had the company only seen her three years before, they would now have
thought her exceedingly handsome.
She was looked at, however, and with some admiration; for, in her own
hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a pretty girl. Such words
had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter
than she had found it before--her humble vanity was contented--she
felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a
true-quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration
of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and
perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.
----------CHAPTER III---------
Every morning now brought its regular duties--shops were to be visited;
some new part of the town to be looked at; and the pump-room to be
attended, where they paraded up and down for an hour, looking at
everybody and speaking to no one. The wish of a numerous acquaintance
in Bath was still uppermost with Mrs. Allen, and she repeated it after
every fresh proof, which every morning brought, of her knowing nobody at
all.
They made their appearance in the Lower Rooms; and here fortune was more
favourable to our heroine. The master of the ceremonies introduced to
her a very gentlemanlike young man as a partner; his name was Tilney.
He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had a
pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and, if not
quite handsome, was very near it. His address was good, and Catherine
felt herself in high luck. There was little leisure for speaking
while they danced; but when they were seated at tea, she found him as
agreeable as she had already given him credit for being. He talked with
fluency and spirit--and there was an archness and pleasantry in his
manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her. After
chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects
around them, he suddenly addressed her with--"I have hitherto been very
remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not
yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here
before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and
the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been
very negligent--but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these
particulars? If you are I will begin directly."
"You need not give yourself that trouble, sir."
"No trouble, I assure you, madam." Then forming his features into a set
smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering
air, "Have you been long in Bath, madam?"
"About a week, sir," replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
"Really!" with affected astonishment.
"Why should you be surprised, sir?"
"Why, indeed!" said he, in his natural tone. "But some emotion must
appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed,
and not less reasonable than any other. Now let us go on. Were you never
here before, madam?"
"Never, sir."
"Indeed! Have you yet honoured the Upper Rooms?"
"Yes, sir, I was there last Monday."
"Have you been to the theatre?"
"Yes, sir, I was at the play on Tuesday."
"To the concert?"
"Yes, sir, on Wednesday."
"And are you altogether pleased with Bath?"
"Yes--I like it very well."
"Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again."
Catherine turned away her head, not knowing whether she might venture to
laugh. "I see what you think of me," said he gravely--"I shall make but
a poor figure in your journal tomorrow."
"My journal!"
"Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower
Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings--plain black
shoes--appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a
queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed
me by his nonsense."
"Indeed I shall say no such thing."
"Shall I tell you what you ought to say?"
"If you please."
"I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had
a great deal of conversation with him--seems a most extraordinary
genius--hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to
say."
"But, perhaps, I keep no journal."
"Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by
you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a
journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your
life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of
every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every
evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered,
and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be
described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to
a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as
you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journaling which
largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies
are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing
agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something,
but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping
a journal."
"I have sometimes thought," said Catherine, doubtingly, "whether ladies
do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is--I should not
think the superiority was always on our side."
"As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the
usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three
particulars."
"And what are they?"
"A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a
very frequent ignorance of grammar."
"Upon my word! I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the
compliment. You do not think too highly of us in that way."
"I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better
letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better
landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence
is pretty fairly divided between the sexes."
They were interrupted by Mrs. Allen: "My dear Catherine," said she, "do
take this pin out of my sleeve; I am afraid it has torn a hole already;
I shall be quite sorry if it has, for this is a favourite gown, though
it cost but nine shillings a yard."
"That is exactly what I should have guessed it, madam," said Mr. Tilney,
looking at the muslin.
"Do you understand muslins, sir?"
"Particularly well; I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an
excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a
gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a
prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a
yard for it, and a true Indian muslin."
Mrs. Allen was quite struck by his genius. "Men commonly take so little
notice of those things," said she; "I can never get Mr. Allen to know
one of my gowns from another. You must be a great comfort to your
sister, sir."
"I hope I am, madam."
"And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland's gown?"
"It is very pretty, madam," said he, gravely examining it; "but I do not
think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray."
"How can you," said Catherine, laughing, "be so--" She had almost said
"strange."
"I am quite of your opinion, sir," replied Mrs. Allen; "and so I told
Miss Morland when she bought it."
"But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other;
Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or
a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted. I have heard my sister
say so forty times, when she has been extravagant in buying more than
she wanted, or careless in cutting it to pieces."
"Bath is a charming place, sir; there are so many good shops here. We
are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in
Salisbury, but it is so far to go--eight miles is a long way; Mr. Allen
says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than
eight; and it is such a fag--I come back tired to death. Now, here one
can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes."
Mr. Tilney was polite enough to seem interested in what she said; and
she kept him on the subject of muslins till the dancing recommenced.
Catherine feared, as she listened to their discourse, that he indulged
himself a little too much with the foibles of others. "What are you
thinking of so earnestly?" said he, as they walked back to the ballroom;
"not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head, your
meditations are not satisfactory."
Catherine coloured, and said, "I was not thinking of anything."
"That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I had rather be told at once
that you will not tell me."
"Well then, I will not."
"Thank you; for now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to
tease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world
advances intimacy so much."
They danced again; and, when the assembly closed, parted, on the
lady's side at least, with a strong inclination for continuing the
acquaintance. Whether she thought of him so much, while she drank her
warm wine and water, and prepared herself for bed, as to dream of him
when there, cannot be ascertained; but I hope it was no more than in
a slight slumber, or a morning doze at most; for if it be true, as a
celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified
in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared,* it must be
very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the
gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her. How proper Mr. Tilney
might be as a dreamer or a lover had not yet perhaps entered Mr. Allen's
head, but that he was not objectionable as a common acquaintance for
his young charge he was on inquiry satisfied; for he had early in the
evening taken pains to know who her partner was, and had been assured
of Mr. Tilney's being a clergyman, and of a very respectable family in
Gloucestershire.
----------CHAPTER IV---------
With more than usual eagerness did Catherine hasten to the pump-room the
next day, secure within herself of seeing Mr. Tilney there before the
morning were over, and ready to meet him with a smile; but no smile
was demanded--Mr. Tilney did not appear. Every creature in Bath,
except himself, was to be seen in the room at different periods of the
fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and
out, up the steps and down; people whom nobody cared about, and nobody
wanted to see; and he only was absent. "What a delightful place Bath
is," said Mrs. Allen as they sat down near the great clock, after
parading the room till they were tired; "and how pleasant it would be if
we had any acquaintance here."
This sentiment had been uttered so often in vain that Mrs. Allen had no
particular reason to hope it would be followed with more advantage now;
but we are told to "despair of nothing we would attain," as "unwearied
diligence our point would gain"; and the unwearied diligence with which
she had every day wished for the same thing was at length to have its
just reward, for hardly had she been seated ten minutes before a lady of
about her own age, who was sitting by her, and had been looking at her
attentively for several minutes, addressed her with great complaisance
in these words: "I think, madam, I cannot be mistaken; it is a long time
since I had the pleasure of seeing you, but is not your name Allen?"
This question answered, as it readily was, the stranger pronounced hers
to be Thorpe; and Mrs. Allen immediately recognized the features of
a former schoolfellow and intimate, whom she had seen only once since
their respective marriages, and that many years ago. Their joy on this
meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented
to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years. Compliments
on good looks now passed; and, after observing how time had slipped away
since they were last together, how little they had thought of meeting in
Bath, and what a pleasure it was to see an old friend, they proceeded to
make inquiries and give intelligence as to their families, sisters, and
cousins, talking both together, far more ready to give than to receive
information, and each hearing very little of what the other said. Mrs.
Thorpe, however, had one great advantage as a talker, over Mrs. Allen,
in a family of children; and when she expatiated on the talents of her
sons, and the beauty of her daughters, when she related their different
situations and views--that John was at Oxford, Edward at Merchant
Taylors', and William at sea--and all of them more beloved and respected
in their different station than any other three beings ever were, Mrs.
Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press
on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to
sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling
herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that
the lace on Mrs. Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that on
her own.
"Here come my dear girls," cried Mrs. Thorpe, pointing at three
smart-looking females who, arm in arm, were then moving towards her. "My
dear Mrs. Allen, I long to introduce them; they will be so delighted
to see you: the tallest is Isabella, my eldest; is not she a fine young
woman? The others are very much admired too, but I believe Isabella is
the handsomest."
The Miss Thorpes were introduced; and Miss Morland, who had been for a
short time forgotten, was introduced likewise. The name seemed to strike
them all; and, after speaking to her with great civility, the eldest
young lady observed aloud to the rest, "How excessively like her brother
Miss Morland is!"
"The very picture of him indeed!" cried the mother--and "I should have
known her anywhere for his sister!" was repeated by them all, two or
three times over. For a moment Catherine was surprised; but Mrs. Thorpe
and her daughters had scarcely begun the history of their acquaintance
with Mr. James Morland, before she remembered that her eldest brother
had lately formed an intimacy with a young man of his own college, of
the name of Thorpe; and that he had spent the last week of the Christmas
vacation with his family, near London.
The whole being explained, many obliging things were said by the Miss
Thorpes of their wish of being better acquainted with her; of being
considered as already friends, through the friendship of their brothers,
etc., which Catherine heard with pleasure, and answered with all the
pretty expressions she could command; and, as the first proof of amity,
she was soon invited to accept an arm of the eldest Miss Thorpe, and
take a turn with her about the room. Catherine was delighted with this
extension of her Bath acquaintance, and almost forgot Mr. Tilney while
she talked to Miss Thorpe. Friendship is certainly the finest balm for
the pangs of disappointed love.
Their conversation turned upon those subjects, of which the free
discussion has generally much to do in perfecting a sudden intimacy
between two young ladies: such as dress, balls, flirtations, and
quizzes. Miss Thorpe, however, being four years older than Miss Morland,
and at least four years better informed, had a very decided advantage in
discussing such points; she could compare the balls of Bath with those
of Tunbridge, its fashions with the fashions of London; could rectify
the opinions of her new friend in many articles of tasteful attire;
could discover a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only
smiled on each other; and point out a quiz through the thickness of a
crowd. These powers received due admiration from Catherine, to whom they
were entirely new; and the respect which they naturally inspired might
have been too great for familiarity, had not the easy gaiety of Miss
Thorpe's manners, and her frequent expressions of delight on this
acquaintance with her, softened down every feeling of awe, and left
nothing but tender affection. Their increasing attachment was not to be
satisfied with half a dozen turns in the pump-room, but required, when
they all quitted it together, that Miss Thorpe should accompany Miss
Morland to the very door of Mr. Allen's house; and that they should
there part with a most affectionate and lengthened shake of hands, after
learning, to their mutual relief, that they should see each other across
the theatre at night, and say their prayers in the same chapel the next
morning. Catherine then ran directly upstairs, and watched Miss Thorpe's
progress down the street from the drawing-room window; admired the
graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and
dress; and felt grateful, as well she might, for the chance which had
procured her such a friend.
Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a
good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother. Her
eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by
pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and
dressing in the same style, did very well.
This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity
of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past
adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy
the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of
lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which had
passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for chapter v with the given context. | chapter v|chapter vi | Catherine and Isabella spend more time together in Bath. Catherine tells Isabella about Henry Tilney, and Isabella encourages her friend's crush. Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe continue their acquaintance, continually sparring with one another. Mrs. Allen brags about her wealth, and Mrs. Thorpe brags about her children. In describing the friendship between Catherine and Isabella, the narrator mentions that the women occasionally spend their time reading novels. The narrator then gives a long defense of novel-reading. The narrator suggests that the reader ignore the groans of reviewers and support her heroine in her love of novels. After all, if the heroine of a novel spurns novels , who will support them. The narrator claims that novels are works "in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the loveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world. The chapter ends by criticizing the "yellow press," the sensationalist newspapers that were very popular in this period |
----------CHAPTER V---------
Catherine was not so much engaged at the theatre that evening, in
returning the nods and smiles of Miss Thorpe, though they certainly
claimed much of her leisure, as to forget to look with an inquiring eye
for Mr. Tilney in every box which her eye could reach; but she looked in
vain. Mr. Tilney was no fonder of the play than the pump-room. She hoped
to be more fortunate the next day; and when her wishes for fine weather
were answered by seeing a beautiful morning, she hardly felt a doubt of
it; for a fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants,
and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell
their acquaintance what a charming day it is.
As soon as divine service was over, the Thorpes and Allens eagerly
joined each other; and after staying long enough in the pump-room to
discover that the crowd was insupportable, and that there was not
a genteel face to be seen, which everybody discovers every Sunday
throughout the season, they hastened away to the Crescent, to breathe
the fresh air of better company. Here Catherine and Isabella, arm
in arm, again tasted the sweets of friendship in an unreserved
conversation; they talked much, and with much enjoyment; but again
was Catherine disappointed in her hope of reseeing her partner. He was
nowhere to be met with; every search for him was equally unsuccessful,
in morning lounges or evening assemblies; neither at the Upper nor Lower
Rooms, at dressed or undressed balls, was he perceivable; nor among the
walkers, the horsemen, or the curricle-drivers of the morning. His name
was not in the pump-room book, and curiosity could do no more. He must
be gone from Bath. Yet he had not mentioned that his stay would be so
short! This sort of mysteriousness, which is always so becoming in a
hero, threw a fresh grace in Catherine's imagination around his person
and manners, and increased her anxiety to know more of him. From the
Thorpes she could learn nothing, for they had been only two days in Bath
before they met with Mrs. Allen. It was a subject, however, in which
she often indulged with her fair friend, from whom she received every
possible encouragement to continue to think of him; and his impression
on her fancy was not suffered therefore to weaken. Isabella was very
sure that he must be a charming young man, and was equally sure that he
must have been delighted with her dear Catherine, and would therefore
shortly return. She liked him the better for being a clergyman, "for she
must confess herself very partial to the profession"; and something like
a sigh escaped her as she said it. Perhaps Catherine was wrong in not
demanding the cause of that gentle emotion--but she was not experienced
enough in the finesse of love, or the duties of friendship, to know when
delicate raillery was properly called for, or when a confidence should
be forced.
Mrs. Allen was now quite happy--quite satisfied with Bath. She had found
some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family
of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had
found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself. Her
daily expressions were no longer, "I wish we had some acquaintance in
Bath!" They were changed into, "How glad I am we have met with Mrs.
Thorpe!" and she was as eager in promoting the intercourse of the two
families, as her young charge and Isabella themselves could be; never
satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of
Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was
scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of
subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children, and Mrs. Allen
of her gowns.
The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick
as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every
gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof
of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other
by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned
up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the
set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they
were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut
themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not
adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers,
of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the
number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest
enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely
ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she
accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages
with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I
cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such
effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in
threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us
not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions
have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any
other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has
been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes
are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who
collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and
Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne,
are eulogized by a thousand pens--there seems almost a general wish of
decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and
of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to
recommend them. "I am no novel-reader--I seldom look into novels--Do not
imagine that I often read novels--It is really very well for a novel."
Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! It is
only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book
with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or
Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest
powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge
of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a
volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she
have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be
against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication,
of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of
taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement
of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of
conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language,
too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age
that could endure it.
----------CHAPTER VI---------
The following conversation, which took place between the two friends in
the pump-room one morning, after an acquaintance of eight or nine
days, is given as a specimen of their very warm attachment, and of the
delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which
marked the reasonableness of that attachment.
They met by appointment; and as Isabella had arrived nearly five
minutes before her friend, her first address naturally was, "My dearest
creature, what can have made you so late? I have been waiting for you at
least this age!"
"Have you, indeed! I am very sorry for it; but really I thought I was in
very good time. It is but just one. I hope you have not been here long?"
"Oh! These ten ages at least. I am sure I have been here this half hour.
But now, let us go and sit down at the other end of the room, and enjoy
ourselves. I have an hundred things to say to you. In the first place,
I was so afraid it would rain this morning, just as I wanted to set off;
it looked very showery, and that would have thrown me into agonies! Do
you know, I saw the prettiest hat you can imagine, in a shop window in
Milsom Street just now--very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons
instead of green; I quite longed for it. But, my dearest Catherine, what
have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on
with Udolpho?"
"Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the
black veil."
"Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is
behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?"
"Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me--I would not be
told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like
to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been
to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world."
"Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished
Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list
of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
"Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?"
"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook.
Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the
Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.
Those will last us some time."
"Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all
horrid?"
"Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a
sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every
one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with
her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can conceive. I think
her as beautiful as an angel, and I am so vexed with the men for not
admiring her! I scold them all amazingly about it."
"Scold them! Do you scold them for not admiring her?"
"Yes, that I do. There is nothing I would not do for those who are
really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is
not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong. I told
Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was to
tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow
Miss Andrews to be as beautiful as an angel. The men think us incapable
of real friendship, you know, and I am determined to show them the
difference. Now, if I were to hear anybody speak slightingly of you, I
should fire up in a moment: but that is not at all likely, for you are
just the kind of girl to be a great favourite with the men."
"Oh, dear!" cried Catherine, colouring. "How can you say so?"
"I know you very well; you have so much animation, which is exactly
what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess there is something amazingly
insipid about her. Oh! I must tell you, that just after we parted
yesterday, I saw a young man looking at you so earnestly--I am sure he
is in love with you." Catherine coloured, and disclaimed again. Isabella
laughed. "It is very true, upon my honour, but I see how it is; you are
indifferent to everybody's admiration, except that of one gentleman,
who shall be nameless. Nay, I cannot blame you"--speaking more
seriously--"your feelings are easily understood. Where the heart is
really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the
attention of anybody else. Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting,
that does not relate to the beloved object! I can perfectly comprehend
your feelings."
"But you should not persuade me that I think so very much about Mr.
Tilney, for perhaps I may never see him again."
"Not see him again! My dearest creature, do not talk of it. I am sure
you would be miserable if you thought so!"
"No, indeed, I should not. I do not pretend to say that I was not very
much pleased with him; but while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if
nobody could make me miserable. Oh! The dreadful black veil! My dear
Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it."
"It is so odd to me, that you should never have read Udolpho before; but
I suppose Mrs. Morland objects to novels."
"No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself;
but new books do not fall in our way."
"Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not? I
remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume."
"It is not like Udolpho at all; but yet I think it is very
entertaining."
"Do you indeed! You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.
But, my dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on your head
tonight? I am determined at all events to be dressed exactly like you.
The men take notice of that sometimes, you know."
"But it does not signify if they do," said Catherine, very innocently.
"Signify! Oh, heavens! I make it a rule never to mind what they say.
They are very often amazingly impertinent if you do not treat them with
spirit, and make them keep their distance."
"Are they? Well, I never observed that. They always behave very well to
me."
"Oh! They give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited
creatures in the world, and think themselves of so much importance!
By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always
forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you
like them best dark or fair?"
"I hardly know. I never much thought about it. Something between both, I
think. Brown--not fair, and--and not very dark."
"Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I have not forgot your
description of Mr. Tilney--'a brown skin, with dark eyes, and rather
dark hair.' Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as to
complexion--do you know--I like a sallow better than any other. You must
not betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance
answering that description."
"Betray you! What do you mean?"
"Nay, do not distress me. I believe I have said too much. Let us drop
the subject."
Catherine, in some amazement, complied, and after remaining a few
moments silent, was on the point of reverting to what interested her
at that time rather more than anything else in the world, Laurentina's
skeleton, when her friend prevented her, by saying, "For heaven's sake!
Let us move away from this end of the room. Do you know, there are two
odious young men who have been staring at me this half hour. They really
put me quite out of countenance. Let us go and look at the arrivals.
They will hardly follow us there."
Away they walked to the book; and while Isabella examined the names, it
was Catherine's employment to watch the proceedings of these alarming
young men.
"They are not coming this way, are they? I hope they are not so
impertinent as to follow us. Pray let me know if they are coming. I am
determined I will not look up."
In a few moments Catherine, with unaffected pleasure, assured her
that she need not be longer uneasy, as the gentlemen had just left the
pump-room.
"And which way are they gone?" said Isabella, turning hastily round.
"One was a very good-looking young man."
"They went towards the church-yard."
"Well, I am amazingly glad I have got rid of them! And now, what say you
to going to Edgar's Buildings with me, and looking at my new hat? You
said you should like to see it."
Catherine readily agreed. "Only," she added, "perhaps we may overtake
the two young men."
"Oh! Never mind that. If we make haste, we shall pass by them presently,
and I am dying to show you my hat."
"But if we only wait a few minutes, there will be no danger of our
seeing them at all."
"I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you. I have no
notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil
them."
Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning; and therefore,
to show the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling
the sex, they set off immediately as fast as they could walk, in pursuit
of the two young men.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter xii, utilizing the provided context. | chapter vii|chapter xii | The next morning, Catherine goes to the place where the Tilneys are staying, planning to explain everything. The servant tells her that Eleanor is not at home, but as Catherine walks away she sees Eleanor exit with her father. Mortified, Catherine fears she has greatly offended the Tilneys. At the theater that night, Catherine spots Henry. Catherine thinks Henry looks at her angrily. After the play he makes his way to Catherine. Henry was somewhat offended by the incident, but when Catherine tells him that she begged John Thorpe to stop the carriage, and would have joined Henry and Eleanor immediately if he had, Henry's coolness melts. Henry seems most relieved when he discovers how little attachment Catherine feels to John Thorpe. Catherine and Henry talk about the play, and while they speak, Catherine sees John Thorpe talking to General Tilney, Henry's father. After Henry leaves and John returns to help Catherine out of her seat, John tells her that the General said she was the "finest girl in Bath. Heartened by this news--she had feared that the General would not like her--Catherine quickly slips away from John with the Allens. |
----------CHAPTER VII---------
Half a minute conducted them through the pump-yard to the archway,
opposite Union Passage; but here they were stopped. Everybody acquainted
with Bath may remember the difficulties of crossing Cheap Street at
this point; it is indeed a street of so impertinent a nature, so
unfortunately connected with the great London and Oxford roads, and the
principal inn of the city, that a day never passes in which parties of
ladies, however important their business, whether in quest of pastry,
millinery, or even (as in the present case) of young men, are not
detained on one side or other by carriages, horsemen, or carts. This
evil had been felt and lamented, at least three times a day, by Isabella
since her residence in Bath; and she was now fated to feel and lament it
once more, for at the very moment of coming opposite to Union Passage,
and within view of the two gentlemen who were proceeding through the
crowds, and threading the gutters of that interesting alley, they
were prevented crossing by the approach of a gig, driven along on bad
pavement by a most knowing-looking coachman with all the vehemence that
could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his
horse.
"Oh, these odious gigs!" said Isabella, looking up. "How I detest them."
But this detestation, though so just, was of short duration, for she
looked again and exclaimed, "Delightful! Mr. Morland and my brother!"
"Good heaven! 'Tis James!" was uttered at the same moment by Catherine;
and, on catching the young men's eyes, the horse was immediately checked
with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches, and the servant
having now scampered up, the gentlemen jumped out, and the equipage was
delivered to his care.
Catherine, by whom this meeting was wholly unexpected, received her
brother with the liveliest pleasure; and he, being of a very amiable
disposition, and sincerely attached to her, gave every proof on his
side of equal satisfaction, which he could have leisure to do, while the
bright eyes of Miss Thorpe were incessantly challenging his notice;
and to her his devoirs were speedily paid, with a mixture of joy and
embarrassment which might have informed Catherine, had she been more
expert in the development of other people's feelings, and less simply
engrossed by her own, that her brother thought her friend quite as
pretty as she could do herself.
John Thorpe, who in the meantime had been giving orders about the
horses, soon joined them, and from him she directly received the amends
which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the
hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short
bow. He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face
and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore
the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy
where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be
easy. He took out his watch: "How long do you think we have been running
it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?"
"I do not know the distance." Her brother told her that it was
twenty-three miles.
"Three and twenty!" cried Thorpe. "Five and twenty if it is an inch."
Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, innkeepers,
and milestones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer test
of distance. "I know it must be five and twenty," said he, "by the time
we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the
inn-yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man
in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness;
that makes it exactly twenty-five."
"You have lost an hour," said Morland; "it was only ten o'clock when we
came from Tetbury."
"Ten o'clock! It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke. This
brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do
but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in
your life?" (The servant had just mounted the carriage and was driving
off.) "Such true blood! Three hours and and a half indeed coming only
three and twenty miles! Look at that creature, and suppose it possible
if you can."
"He does look very hot, to be sure."
"Hot! He had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church; but look
at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse
cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on.
What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? A neat one, is not it?
Well hung; town-built; I have not had it a month. It was built for a
Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow; he ran
it a few weeks, till, I believe, it was convenient to have done with it.
I happened just then to be looking out for some light thing of the kind,
though I had pretty well determined on a curricle too; but I chanced to
meet him on Magdalen Bridge, as he was driving into Oxford, last term:
'Ah! Thorpe,' said he, 'do you happen to want such a little thing as
this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.'
'Oh! D--,' said I; 'I am your man; what do you ask?' And how much do you
think he did, Miss Morland?"
"I am sure I cannot guess at all."
"Curricle-hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board,
lamps, silver moulding, all you see complete; the iron-work as good
as new, or better. He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly,
threw down the money, and the carriage was mine."
"And I am sure," said Catherine, "I know so little of such things that I
cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear."
"Neither one nor t'other; I might have got it for less, I dare say; but
I hate haggling, and poor Freeman wanted cash."
"That was very good-natured of you," said Catherine, quite pleased.
"Oh! D---- it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend,
I hate to be pitiful."
An inquiry now took place into the intended movements of the young
ladies; and, on finding whither they were going, it was decided that
the gentlemen should accompany them to Edgar's Buildings, and pay their
respects to Mrs. Thorpe. James and Isabella led the way; and so
well satisfied was the latter with her lot, so contentedly was she
endeavouring to ensure a pleasant walk to him who brought the double
recommendation of being her brother's friend, and her friend's brother,
so pure and uncoquettish were her feelings, that, though they overtook
and passed the two offending young men in Milsom Street, she was so far
from seeking to attract their notice, that she looked back at them only
three times.
John Thorpe kept of course with Catherine, and, after a few minutes'
silence, renewed the conversation about his gig. "You will find,
however, Miss Morland, it would be reckoned a cheap thing by some
people, for I might have sold it for ten guineas more the next day;
Jackson, of Oriel, bid me sixty at once; Morland was with me at the
time."
"Yes," said Morland, who overheard this; "but you forget that your horse
was included."
"My horse! Oh, d---- it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are
you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?"
"Yes, very; I have hardly ever an opportunity of being in one; but I am
particularly fond of it."
"I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day."
"Thank you," said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the
propriety of accepting such an offer.
"I will drive you up Lansdown Hill tomorrow."
"Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?"
"Rest! He has only come three and twenty miles today; all nonsense;
nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon.
No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours every day
while I am here."
"Shall you indeed!" said Catherine very seriously. "That will be forty
miles a day."
"Forty! Aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up Lansdown
tomorrow; mind, I am engaged."
"How delightful that will be!" cried Isabella, turning round. "My
dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will
not have room for a third."
"A third indeed! No, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters
about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care of you."
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but
Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her companion's
discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch to nothing more than
a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every
woman they met; and Catherine, after listening and agreeing as long as
she could, with all the civility and deference of the youthful female
mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that
of a self-assured man, especially where the beauty of her own sex is
concerned, ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which
had been long uppermost in her thoughts; it was, "Have you ever read
Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"
"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to
do."
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question,
but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense
and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since
Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the
others, they are the stupidest things in creation."
"I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very
interesting."
"Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's; her
novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature
in them."
"Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some
hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
"No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that
other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about,
she who married the French emigrant."
"I suppose you mean Camilla?"
"Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at
see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon
found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be
before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was
sure I should never be able to get through it."
"I have never read it."
"You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can
imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at
see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not."
This critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor
Catherine, brought them to the door of Mrs. Thorpe's lodgings, and the
feelings of the discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla gave way
to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son, as they met Mrs.
Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage. "Ah, Mother!
How do you do?" said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand. "Where
did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch.
Here is Morland and I come to stay a few days with you, so you must look
out for a couple of good beds somewhere near." And this address seemed
to satisfy all the fondest wishes of the mother's heart, for she
received him with the most delighted and exulting affection. On his
two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal
tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that
they both looked very ugly.
These manners did not please Catherine; but he was James's friend
and Isabella's brother; and her judgment was further bought off by
Isabella's assuring her, when they withdrew to see the new hat, that
John thought her the most charming girl in the world, and by John's
engaging her before they parted to dance with him that evening. Had she
been older or vainer, such attacks might have done little; but, where
youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of
reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl
in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner; and the
consequence was that, when the two Morlands, after sitting an hour with
the Thorpes, set off to walk together to Mr. Allen's, and James, as
the door was closed on them, said, "Well, Catherine, how do you like my
friend Thorpe?" instead of answering, as she probably would have done,
had there been no friendship and no flattery in the case, "I do not like
him at all," she directly replied, "I like him very much; he seems very
agreeable."
"He is as good-natured a fellow as ever lived; a little of a rattle; but
that will recommend him to your sex, I believe: and how do you like the
rest of the family?"
"Very, very much indeed: Isabella particularly."
"I am very glad to hear you say so; she is just the kind of young woman
I could wish to see you attached to; she has so much good sense, and is
so thoroughly unaffected and amiable; I always wanted you to know her;
and she seems very fond of you. She said the highest things in your
praise that could possibly be; and the praise of such a girl as Miss
Thorpe even you, Catherine," taking her hand with affection, "may be
proud of."
"Indeed I am," she replied; "I love her exceedingly, and am delighted
to find that you like her too. You hardly mentioned anything of her when
you wrote to me after your visit there."
"Because I thought I should soon see you myself. I hope you will be a
great deal together while you are in Bath. She is a most amiable girl;
such a superior understanding! How fond all the family are of her; she
is evidently the general favourite; and how much she must be admired in
such a place as this--is not she?"
"Yes, very much indeed, I fancy; Mr. Allen thinks her the prettiest girl
in Bath."
"I dare say he does; and I do not know any man who is a better judge of
beauty than Mr. Allen. I need not ask you whether you are happy here, my
dear Catherine; with such a companion and friend as Isabella Thorpe, it
would be impossible for you to be otherwise; and the Allens, I am sure,
are very kind to you?"
"Yes, very kind; I never was so happy before; and now you are come it
will be more delightful than ever; how good it is of you to come so far
on purpose to see me."
James accepted this tribute of gratitude, and qualified his conscience
for accepting it too, by saying with perfect sincerity, "Indeed,
Catherine, I love you dearly."
Inquiries and communications concerning brothers and sisters, the
situation of some, the growth of the rest, and other family matters now
passed between them, and continued, with only one small digression
on James's part, in praise of Miss Thorpe, till they reached Pulteney
Street, where he was welcomed with great kindness by Mr. and Mrs. Allen,
invited by the former to dine with them, and summoned by the latter
to guess the price and weigh the merits of a new muff and tippet.
A pre-engagement in Edgar's Buildings prevented his accepting the
invitation of one friend, and obliged him to hurry away as soon as he
had satisfied the demands of the other. The time of the two parties
uniting in the Octagon Room being correctly adjusted, Catherine was then
left to the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination
over the pages of Udolpho, lost from all worldly concerns of dressing
and dinner, incapable of soothing Mrs. Allen's fears on the delay of an
expected dressmaker, and having only one minute in sixty to bestow even
on the reflection of her own felicity, in being already engaged for the
evening.
----------CHAPTER XII---------
"Mrs. Allen," said Catherine the next morning, "will there be any harm
in my calling on Miss Tilney today? I shall not be easy till I have
explained everything."
"Go, by all means, my dear; only put on a white gown; Miss Tilney always
wears white."
Catherine cheerfully complied, and being properly equipped, was more
impatient than ever to be at the pump-room, that she might inform
herself of General Tilney's lodgings, for though she believed they were
in Milsom Street, she was not certain of the house, and Mrs. Allen's
wavering convictions only made it more doubtful. To Milsom Street she
was directed, and having made herself perfect in the number, hastened
away with eager steps and a beating heart to pay her visit, explain her
conduct, and be forgiven; tripping lightly through the church-yard, and
resolutely turning away her eyes, that she might not be obliged to
see her beloved Isabella and her dear family, who, she had reason to
believe, were in a shop hard by. She reached the house without any
impediment, looked at the number, knocked at the door, and inquired for
Miss Tilney. The man believed Miss Tilney to be at home, but was not
quite certain. Would she be pleased to send up her name? She gave her
card. In a few minutes the servant returned, and with a look which did
not quite confirm his words, said he had been mistaken, for that Miss
Tilney was walked out. Catherine, with a blush of mortification, left
the house. She felt almost persuaded that Miss Tilney was at home, and
too much offended to admit her; and as she retired down the street,
could not withhold one glance at the drawing-room windows, in
expectation of seeing her there, but no one appeared at them. At the
bottom of the street, however, she looked back again, and then, not at a
window, but issuing from the door, she saw Miss Tilney herself. She was
followed by a gentleman, whom Catherine believed to be her father,
and they turned up towards Edgar's Buildings. Catherine, in deep
mortification, proceeded on her way. She could almost be angry herself
at such angry incivility; but she checked the resentful sensation; she
remembered her own ignorance. She knew not how such an offence as hers
might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree
of unforgivingness it might with propriety lead, nor to what rigours of
rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.
Dejected and humbled, she had even some thoughts of not going with the
others to the theatre that night; but it must be confessed that they
were not of long continuance, for she soon recollected, in the first
place, that she was without any excuse for staying at home; and, in the
second, that it was a play she wanted very much to see. To the theatre
accordingly they all went; no Tilneys appeared to plague or please her;
she feared that, amongst the many perfections of the family, a fondness
for plays was not to be ranked; but perhaps it was because they were
habituated to the finer performances of the London stage, which she
knew, on Isabella's authority, rendered everything else of the kind
"quite horrid." She was not deceived in her own expectation of pleasure;
the comedy so well suspended her care that no one, observing her during
the first four acts, would have supposed she had any wretchedness about
her. On the beginning of the fifth, however, the sudden view of Mr.
Henry Tilney and his father, joining a party in the opposite box,
recalled her to anxiety and distress. The stage could no longer excite
genuine merriment--no longer keep her whole attention. Every other look
upon an average was directed towards the opposite box; and, for the
space of two entire scenes, did she thus watch Henry Tilney, without
being once able to catch his eye. No longer could he be suspected of
indifference for a play; his notice was never withdrawn from the stage
during two whole scenes. At length, however, he did look towards her,
and he bowed--but such a bow! No smile, no continued observance attended
it; his eyes were immediately returned to their former direction.
Catherine was restlessly miserable; she could almost have run round to
the box in which he sat and forced him to hear her explanation. Feelings
rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her
own dignity injured by this ready condemnation--instead of proudly
resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him
who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble
of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by
avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else--she took to herself
all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only
eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause.
The play concluded--the curtain fell--Henry Tilney was no longer to be
seen where he had hitherto sat, but his father remained, and perhaps he
might be now coming round to their box. She was right; in a few minutes
he appeared, and, making his way through the then thinning rows, spoke
with like calm politeness to Mrs. Allen and her friend. Not with such
calmness was he answered by the latter: "Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been
quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You must have thought
me so rude; but indeed it was not my own fault, was it, Mrs. Allen?
Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a
phaeton together? And then what could I do? But I had ten thousand times
rather have been with you; now had not I, Mrs. Allen?"
"My dear, you tumble my gown," was Mrs. Allen's reply.
Her assurance, however, standing sole as it did, was not thrown away; it
brought a more cordial, more natural smile into his countenance, and
he replied in a tone which retained only a little affected reserve:
"We were much obliged to you at any rate for wishing us a pleasant walk
after our passing you in Argyle Street: you were so kind as to look back
on purpose."
"But indeed I did not wish you a pleasant walk; I never thought of such
a thing; but I begged Mr. Thorpe so earnestly to stop; I called out to
him as soon as ever I saw you; now, Mrs. Allen, did not--Oh! You were
not there; but indeed I did; and, if Mr. Thorpe would only have stopped,
I would have jumped out and run after you."
Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a
declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not. With a yet sweeter smile, he
said everything that need be said of his sister's concern, regret, and
dependence on Catherine's honour. "Oh! Do not say Miss Tilney was not
angry," cried Catherine, "because I know she was; for she would not see
me this morning when I called; I saw her walk out of the house the next
minute after my leaving it; I was hurt, but I was not affronted. Perhaps
you did not know I had been there."
"I was not within at the time; but I heard of it from Eleanor, and she
has been wishing ever since to see you, to explain the reason of such
incivility; but perhaps I can do it as well. It was nothing more than
that my father--they were just preparing to walk out, and he being
hurried for time, and not caring to have it put off--made a point of her
being denied. That was all, I do assure you. She was very much vexed,
and meant to make her apology as soon as possible."
Catherine's mind was greatly eased by this information, yet a something
of solicitude remained, from which sprang the following question,
thoroughly artless in itself, though rather distressing to the
gentleman: "But, Mr. Tilney, why were you less generous than your
sister? If she felt such confidence in my good intentions, and could
suppose it to be only a mistake, why should you be so ready to take
offence?"
"Me! I take offence!"
"Nay, I am sure by your look, when you came into the box, you were
angry."
"I angry! I could have no right."
"Well, nobody would have thought you had no right who saw your face." He
replied by asking her to make room for him, and talking of the play.
He remained with them some time, and was only too agreeable for
Catherine to be contented when he went away. Before they parted,
however, it was agreed that the projected walk should be taken as soon
as possible; and, setting aside the misery of his quitting their box,
she was, upon the whole, left one of the happiest creatures in the
world.
While talking to each other, she had observed with some surprise that
John Thorpe, who was never in the same part of the house for ten minutes
together, was engaged in conversation with General Tilney; and she felt
something more than surprise when she thought she could perceive herself
the object of their attention and discourse. What could they have to say
of her? She feared General Tilney did not like her appearance: she found
it was implied in his preventing her admittance to his daughter, rather
than postpone his own walk a few minutes. "How came Mr. Thorpe to know
your father?" was her anxious inquiry, as she pointed them out to her
companion. He knew nothing about it; but his father, like every military
man, had a very large acquaintance.
When the entertainment was over, Thorpe came to assist them in getting
out. Catherine was the immediate object of his gallantry; and, while
they waited in the lobby for a chair, he prevented the inquiry which had
travelled from her heart almost to the tip of her tongue, by asking, in
a consequential manner, whether she had seen him talking with General
Tilney: "He is a fine old fellow, upon my soul! Stout, active--looks
as young as his son. I have a great regard for him, I assure you: a
gentleman-like, good sort of fellow as ever lived."
"But how came you to know him?"
"Know him! There are few people much about town that I do not know. I
have met him forever at the Bedford; and I knew his face again today the
moment he came into the billiard-room. One of the best players we have,
by the by; and we had a little touch together, though I was almost
afraid of him at first: the odds were five to four against me; and, if
I had not made one of the cleanest strokes that perhaps ever was made in
this world--I took his ball exactly--but I could not make you understand
it without a table; however, I did beat him. A very fine fellow; as rich
as a Jew. I should like to dine with him; I dare say he gives famous
dinners. But what do you think we have been talking of? You. Yes, by
heavens! And the general thinks you the finest girl in Bath."
"Oh! Nonsense! How can you say so?"
"And what do you think I said?"--lowering his voice--"well done,
general, said I; I am quite of your mind."
Here Catherine, who was much less gratified by his admiration than by
General Tilney's, was not sorry to be called away by Mr. Allen. Thorpe,
however, would see her to her chair, and, till she entered it, continued
the same kind of delicate flattery, in spite of her entreating him to
have done.
That General Tilney, instead of disliking, should admire her, was very
delightful; and she joyfully thought that there was not one of the
family whom she need now fear to meet. The evening had done more, much
more, for her than could have been expected.
|
Notes From Underground.pa | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter 1, utilizing the provided context. | chapter 1|chapter 2|chapter 3|chapter 4 | Dostoevsky begins with a footnote in which he explains that the narrator is imaginary; but he claims people such as the narrator must exist, for he represents all of those who are forced to live "underground" because they cannot relate to or accept the society as it exists. |
----------CHAPTER 1---------
I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a
doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and
doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to
respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be
superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a
doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I
understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely
that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well
aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I
know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and
no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite.
My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
I have been going on like that for a long time--twenty years. Now I am
forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I
was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I
did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in
that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote
it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself
that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch
it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I
sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when
I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the
most part they were all timid people--of course, they were petitioners.
But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not
endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a
disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over
that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it.
That happened in my youth, though.
But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?
Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that
continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly
conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an
embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and
amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll
to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should
be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I
should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with
shame for months after. That was my way.
I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was
lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and
with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was
conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely
opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these
opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life
and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not
let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me
till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and--sickened me, at
last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that
I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your
forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ...
However, I assure you I do not care if you are....
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to
become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an
honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life
in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation
that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is
only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth
century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless
creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited
creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old
now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is
extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is
vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely
and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I
tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all
these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that
to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to
sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath
...
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are
mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you
imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble
(and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I
am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the
service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that
reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand
roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled
down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I
have settled down in it. My room is a wretched, horrid one in the
outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured
from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her.
I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my
small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and
monitors.... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away
from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is
absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
----------CHAPTER 2---------
I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not,
why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I
have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to
that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a
real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have
been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated
man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal
ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional
town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and
unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance,
to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is
more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and
even swagger over them?
Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on
their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not
dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded
that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in
fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a
minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the
very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all
that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it
would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do
such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all,
perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was
"sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the
more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was
that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it
were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal
condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last
all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended
by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was
perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what
agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same
with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a
secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the
point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in
returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,
acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action
again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly
gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at
last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness,
and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into
enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep
wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I
will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness
of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had
reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not
be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could
become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you
to change into something different you would most likely not wish to
change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because
perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in
accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness,
and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that
consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely
nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness,
that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any
consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he
actually is a scoundrel. But enough.... Ech, I have talked a lot of
nonsense, but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be
explained? But I will explain it. I will get to the bottom of it!
That is why I have taken up my pen....
I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious
and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I
sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the
face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in
earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that
a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but
in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one
is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And
when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being
rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is,
look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the
most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to
blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of
nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of
the people surrounding me. (I have always considered myself cleverer
than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe
it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my
life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people
straight in the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of
its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do
anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant
would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot
forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to
the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same. Finally, even if I
had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary
to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on
any one for anything because I should certainly never have made up my
mind to do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not have
made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few words.
----------CHAPTER 3---------
With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for
themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed,
let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is
nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being. Such a
gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull
with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the
way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and
men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an
evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is
not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very
glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they
are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something
tranquillising, morally soothing, final--maybe even something
mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his
tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the
face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal
man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful,
in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can
call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis
of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has
come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this
is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this
retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his
antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely
thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely
conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself,
his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do
so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in
action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and
it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too.
There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME
DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that
spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. For through his innate stupidity
the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in
consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in
the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act
of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless
mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the
form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many
unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of
fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of
the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their
healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss
all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt
in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its
mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our
insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in
cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years
together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most
ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still
more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own
imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it
will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge
itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind
the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to
vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its
efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom
it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself.
On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest
accumulated over all the years and ...
But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for
forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful
hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires
turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined
for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that
strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so
difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even
simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of
it. "Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people
will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the
face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,
perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and
so I speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But
set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the
face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you
may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given
so few slaps in the face during my life. But enough ... not another
word on that subject of such extreme interest to you.
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not
understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain
circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though
this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have
said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The
impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the
laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As
soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a
monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they
prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to
you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this
conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties
and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it,
there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just
try refuting it.
"Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a
case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she
has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or
dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently
all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so
on."
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and
arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact
that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall
by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to
knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because
it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did
contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as
twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How much better
it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all the
impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of
those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be
reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical
combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting
theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame,
though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least,
and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into
luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for
you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never
will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a
bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these
uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the
more you do not know, the worse the ache.
----------CHAPTER 4---------
"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you
cry, with a laugh.
"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had
toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of
course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not
candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole
point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans;
if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good
example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the
first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating
to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you
spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same
while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no
enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in
spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your
teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and
if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that
finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is
left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your
wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.
Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,
end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree
of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans
of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache,
on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,
not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has
toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by
progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the
soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His
moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days
and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no
sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is
only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows
that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his
whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of
faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,
more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing
himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these
recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.
As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your
hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake
then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a
hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,
an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see
through me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let
it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a
minute...." You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems
our development and our consciousness must go further to understand
all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My
jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect
myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter 5, utilizing the provided context. | chapter 5|chapter 6|chapter 7 | The narrator explains how people find pleasure in the pain they are suffering. He uses a toothache as an example. A person moans when his tooth hurts, because there is a kind of pleasure in the moaning. When the moaning is heard by another person, it is even more pleasurable, for the moaner is inflicting his suffering upon someone else. |
----------CHAPTER 5---------
Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of
his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? I am
not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse. And, indeed, I
could never endure saying, "Forgive me, Papa, I won't do it again," not
because I am incapable of saying that--on the contrary, perhaps just
because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too. As
though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to
blame in any way. That was the nastiest part of it. At the same time
I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of
course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there
was a sick feeling in my heart at the time.... For that one could not
blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have
continually all my life offended me more than anything. It is
loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then. Of
course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all
a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence,
this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry
myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with
one's hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. That is really
it. Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will
understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up
a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has
happened to me--well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose,
for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at
nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last
to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an
impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it
in myself. Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.
I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart
there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but
yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside
myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI;
inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of
consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious
sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I
repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action
are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that?
I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate
and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade
themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have
found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are
at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you
know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of
doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?
Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my
foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in
reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws
after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That
is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection. It
must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result of it
in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of
vengeance. (I am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man
revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found
a primary cause, that is, justice. And so he is at rest on all sides,
and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully,
being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing. But I see no
justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently
if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve
quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is
not a cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began
with that just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed
laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical
disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your
reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes
not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no
one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up
with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.
And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly,
without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at
least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands
folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin
despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a
soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I
consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have
been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a
babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to
be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is
babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
----------CHAPTER 6---------
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least
have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could
have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how
very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would
mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a
member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in
continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself
all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as
his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply
with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite
right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should
have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That "sublime
and beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for
myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking
to the health of everything "sublime and beautiful." I should have
snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to
drain it to all that is "sublime and beautiful." I should then have
turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest,
unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the
beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An artist,
for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I
love all that is "sublime and beautiful." An author has written AS YOU
WILL: at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love
all that is "sublime and beautiful."
I should claim respect for doing so. I should persecute anyone who
would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with
dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good
round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have
established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset! Here
is something real and solid!" And, say what you like, it is very
agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.
----------CHAPTER 7---------
But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first
announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things
because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were
enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man
would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and
noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage,
he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all
know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?
Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place,
when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has
acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions
of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background
and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully,
struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the
darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter
to them than any advantage.... Advantage! What is advantage? And will
you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the
advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's
advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his
desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not
advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole
principle falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases?
You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's
advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some
which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included
under any classification? You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of
my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the
averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your
advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so
on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly
in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine,
too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that
all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon
up human advantages invariably leave out one? They don't even take it
into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the
whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no greater matter, they
would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.
But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any
classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for
instance ... Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend! When he
prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to
you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with
the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with
excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony
he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own
interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter
of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through
something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will
go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to
what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws
of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ... I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to
almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical)
there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which
we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than
all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready
to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason,
honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in opposition to all those
excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental,
most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but
it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll
make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that
it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every
system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In
fact, it upsets everything. But before I mention this advantage to
you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly
declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining
to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably
striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and
noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes,
logical exercises. Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of
mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind
almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle,
that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less
bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to
follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems
and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth
intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring
instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams,
and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole
of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon--the
Great and also the present one. Take North America--the eternal union.
Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that
civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind
is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely
nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man
may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already
happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas
and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so
conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they
are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to
us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more
bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In
old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace
exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy
than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that
Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking
gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from
their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the
comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too,
because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that
though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages,
he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would
dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn
when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a
normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from
INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set
his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say,
science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous
luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own,
and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the
stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws
of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it,
but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have
only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to
answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which
everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will
be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be
established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical
exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the
twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In
fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing
(this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully
dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be
calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be
extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything.
It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that
would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I
dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all
stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like
him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least
surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of
general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a
reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his
arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to
send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more
at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what
is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the
nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one
would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere
and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose
and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may
choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice,
one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at
times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we
have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And
how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally
advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice,
whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And
choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 11 using the context provided. | chapter 8|chapter 9|chapter 10|chapter 11 | The narrator ponders man's desires and points out how important they are. He feels it would be terrible to live in the Crystal Palace, a glass structure in London, where he would be inhibited from pursuing his desires. He knows he would not be comfortable sticking out his tongue there even if he wanted to, for the whole world could see him and judge him. The narrator feels that man should always be able to pursue his desires, which define his being. He also acknowledges that a man cannot be satisfied until he obtains his true desires; substitutes are never sufficient to erase the real desire. |
----------CHAPTER 8---------
"Ha! ha! ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality,
say what you like," you will interpose with a chuckle. "Science has
succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and
what is called freedom of will is nothing else than--"
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was
rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows
what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing,
but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled myself up. And
here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day
discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an
explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they
develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on,
that is a real mathematical formula--then, most likely, man will at
once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who
would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed
from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for
what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if
not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the
chances--can such a thing happen or not?
"H'm!" you decide. "Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view
of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our
foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a
supposed advantage. But when all that is explained and worked out on
paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and
senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never
understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist.
For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then
reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our
reason to be SENSELESS in our desires, and in that way knowingly act
against reason and desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and
reasoning can be really calculated--because there will some day be
discovered the laws of our so-called free will--so, joking apart, there
may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we
really shall choose in accordance with it. If, for instance, some day
they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone
because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to do
it in that particular way, what FREEDOM is left me, especially if I am
a learned man and have taken my degree somewhere? Then I should be
able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short,
if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do;
anyway, we should have to understand that. And, in fact, we ought
unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves that at such and such a time and in
such and such circumstances nature does not ask our leave; that we have
got to take her as she is and not fashion her to suit our fancy, and if
we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and well, even ... to
the chemical retort, there's no help for it, we must accept the retort
too, or else it will be accepted without our consent...."
Yes, but here I come to a stop! Gentlemen, you must excuse me for
being over-philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground!
Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an
excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but
reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will
is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life
including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this
manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply
extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to
live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my
capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my
capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it
has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn;
this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature
acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or
unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect,
gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me
again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the
future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous
to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly
agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time,
there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely,
desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very
stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even
what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only
what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of
ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than
anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular
it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us
obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason
concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us
what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our
individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most
precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in
agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept
within bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But
very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly
opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is
profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy? Gentlemen, let us suppose
that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if
only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is
wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful!
Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition
of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his
worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity,
perpetual--from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period.
Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long
been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than
moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the
history of mankind. What will you see? Is it a grand spectacle?
Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's
worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that
some say that it is the work of man's hands, while others maintain that
it has been created by nature herself. Is it many-coloured? May be it
is many-coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and
civilian, of all peoples in all ages--that alone is worth something,
and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of
it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? May be
it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now,
they fought first and they fought last--you will admit, that it is
almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about the
history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered
imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The
very word sticks in one's throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing
that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life
moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it
their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as
possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in
order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally
in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or
later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a
most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he
is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every
earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but
bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic
prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat
cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even
then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some
nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately
desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply
to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic
element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he
will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though
that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a
piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that
soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that
is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if
this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then
he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something
perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if
he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will
contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will
launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his
privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may
be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince
himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all
this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and
curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand
would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would
purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I
believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems
to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a
man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be
by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to
rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on
something we don't know?
You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one
is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my
will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own
normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.
Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to
tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make
four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant
that!
----------CHAPTER 9---------
Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not
brilliant, but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am,
perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by
questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of
their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and
good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also
that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to
the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how
do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to
go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that
not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the
conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous
for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this
is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law
of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to
defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal,
predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in
engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads,
WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go
off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road,
and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may
be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always
does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less
important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to
save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving
way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all
the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact
beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction
and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a
couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and
destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it)
because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and
completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only
loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it
at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want
to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES
ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the
ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of
that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.
With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the
ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to
their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and
incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the
process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no
saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind
is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other
words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must
always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four,
and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of
death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical
certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing
but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices
his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I
assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing
for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at
least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to
the police-station--and there is occupation for a week. But where can
man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when
he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but
does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very
absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind
of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all,
something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a
piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands
with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice
two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything
its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the
normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to
welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as
regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides
well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering
is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes
extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a
fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that;
only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as
my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to
me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very
pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for
well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being
guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in
vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it
is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the
good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it?
And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is,
destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of
consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that
consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes
it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for
instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you
have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to
understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five
senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to
consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at
least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up.
Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.
----------CHAPTER 10---------
You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed--a
palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a
long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this
edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one
cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly.
You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into
it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a
palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say
that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion. Yes, I
answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.
But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not
the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live
in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate
it when you have changed my preference. Well, do change it, allure me
with something else, give me another ideal. But meanwhile I will not
take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle
dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and
that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the
old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. But what does it
matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since
it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.
Perhaps you are laughing again? Laugh away; I will put up with any
mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I
know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a
recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature
and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my desires a
block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand
years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out. Destroy
my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will
follow you. You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble;
but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing
things seriously; but if you won't deign to give me your attention, I
will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole.
But while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were
withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Don't remind me
that I have just rejected the palace of crystal for the sole reason
that one cannot put out one's tongue at it. I did not say because I am
so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was,
that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not
put out one's tongue. On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut
off out of gratitude if things could be so arranged that I should lose
all desire to put it out. It is not my fault that things cannot be so
arranged, and that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am
I made with such desires? Can I have been constructed simply in order
to come to the conclusion that all my construction is a cheat? Can
this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it.
But do you know what: I am convinced that we underground folk ought to
be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without
speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we
talk and talk and talk....
----------CHAPTER 11---------
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do
nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my
bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now
(though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground
life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can ... Oh, but
even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not
underground that is better, but something different, quite different,
for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I
myself believed in anything of what I have just written. I swear to
you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have
written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at
the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.
"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to
put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then
come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached!
How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?"
"Isn't that shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps,
wagging your heads contemptuously. "You thirst for life and try to
settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how persistent,
how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you
are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent
things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them. You
declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to
ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are
gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to
amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are
evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may, perhaps,
have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering.
You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest
vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You
doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through
fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a
cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure
of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened
and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without
a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace!
Lies, lies, lies!"
Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is
from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through
a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was
nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have learned it by
heart and it has taken a literary form....
But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all
this and give it to you to read too? And another problem: why do I
call you "gentlemen," why do I address you as though you really were my
readers? Such confessions as I intend to make are never printed nor
given to other people to read. Anyway, I am not strong-minded enough
for that, and I don't see why I should be. But you see a fancy has
occurred to me and I want to realise it at all costs. Let me explain.
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but
only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would
not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in
secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even
to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored
away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such
things in his mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember
some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even
with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but
have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the
experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and
not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis,
that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility,
and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau
certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even
intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right;
I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity,
attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well
conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made
their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish
to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing
readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that
form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never have readers. I have
made this plain already ...
I don't wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of
my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things
down as I remember them.
But here, perhaps, someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you
really don't reckon on readers, why do you make such compacts with
yourself--and on paper too--that is, that you won't attempt any system
or method, that you jot things down as you remember them, and so on,
and so on? Why are you explaining? Why do you apologise?
Well, there it is, I answer.
There is a whole psychology in all this, though. Perhaps it is simply
that I am a coward. And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience
before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write. There
are perhaps thousands of reasons. Again, what is my object precisely
in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I
not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them
on paper?
Quite so; but yet it is more imposing on paper. There is something
more impressive in it; I shall be better able to criticise myself and
improve my style. Besides, I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from
writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory
of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and
has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid
of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such
reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and
oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I
should get rid of it. Why not try?
Besides, I am bored, and I never have anything to do. Writing will be
a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest.
Well, here is a chance for me, anyway.
Snow is falling today, yellow and dingy. It fell yesterday, too, and a
few days ago. I fancy it is the wet snow that has reminded me of that
incident which I cannot shake off now. And so let it be a story A
PROPOS of the falling snow.
PART II
A Propos of the Wet Snow
When from dark error's subjugation
My words of passionate exhortation
Had wrenched thy fainting spirit free;
And writhing prone in thine affliction
Thou didst recall with malediction
The vice that had encompassed thee:
And when thy slumbering conscience, fretting
By recollection's torturing flame,
Thou didst reveal the hideous setting
Of thy life's current ere I came:
When suddenly I saw thee sicken,
And weeping, hide thine anguished face,
Revolted, maddened, horror-stricken,
At memories of foul disgrace.
NEKRASSOV
(translated by Juliet Soskice).
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of chapter 2 using the context provided. | chapter 2|chapter 5 | In Part II, the narrator gives a flashback to his past, when he was twenty-four years old. Because he felt inferior, he lived a lonely life with no friends. At work, he felt self-conscious and believed his peers looked down on him. He worried about his appearance and began to hate the look of his own face, for he believed others judged him as ugly even though they were unconcerned about their own appearance. As time passed, he both feared and hated his co- workers. Since he had no companions, the young narrator spent a lot of time reading in solitude. When he longed for excitement, he would go out and indulge in some "filthy vice," usually at a house of prostitution; afterwards, he would always feel ashamed of his behavior. One night as he traveled towards home after one of his forays, he saw a man being tossed out the window of a tavern. He entered the tavern to see what was happening. When an officer pushed him out of the way, he felt greatly insulted and believed he had not been treated like a human being. He wanted to protest, but instead he sneaked away, for he lacked the moral courage to challenge the officer. Although the narrator longed to return to the tavern and settle the insult, he could not do it, for he feared others would laugh at him. Instead, he stewed about it for years. To retaliate, he wrote a satire about the officer and tried unsuccessfully to have it published. He then composed a letter to the officer asking for an apology, but he never mailed it. He then came up with a plan to make the officer step aside for him on the street. Since the officer always stepped aside in respect for important people, the narrator decided to dress himself up. He took an advance from work and borrowed money in order to buy some appropriate clothing. Then dressing himself as a person of importance, he went to Nevsky Street, where the officer worked; but when the narrator met the officer, he found himself stepping aside for the uniformed man. Horrified at his own behavior, he decided he would try again. Every time he dressed up and encountered the officer, the same thing would happen. The narrator would loose courage and step aside for the officer. After each failure, he would literally feel sick. One day the narrator saw the officer, closed his eyes, and did not step aside. As a result, the two of them bumped into each other. The narrator was delighted that he had held his ground and went home feeling triumphant. |
----------CHAPTER 2---------
But the period of my dissipation would end and I always felt very sick
afterwards. It was followed by remorse--I tried to drive it away; I
felt too sick. By degrees, however, I grew used to that too. I grew
used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned myself to enduring
it. But I had a means of escape that reconciled everything--that was
to find refuge in "the sublime and the beautiful," in dreams, of
course. I was a terrible dreamer, I would dream for three months on
end, tucked away in my corner, and you may believe me that at those
moments I had no resemblance to the gentleman who, in the perturbation
of his chicken heart, put a collar of German beaver on his great-coat.
I suddenly became a hero. I would not have admitted my six-foot
lieutenant even if he had called on me. I could not even picture him
before me then. What were my dreams and how I could satisfy myself
with them--it is hard to say now, but at the time I was satisfied with
them. Though, indeed, even now, I am to some extent satisfied with
them. Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a spell of
dissipation; they came with remorse and with tears, with curses and
transports. There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such
happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on
my honour. I had faith, hope, love. I believed blindly at such times
that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would
suddenly open out, expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable
activity--beneficent, good, and, above all, READY MADE (what sort of
activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should be all
ready for me)--would rise up before me--and I should come out into the
light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.
Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and
for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in
reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud--there was
nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I
comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and
the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful
to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and
so he might defile himself. It is worth noting that these attacks of
the "sublime and the beautiful" visited me even during the period of
dissipation and just at the times when I was touching the bottom. They
came in separate spurts, as though reminding me of themselves, but did
not banish the dissipation by their appearance. On the contrary, they
seemed to add a zest to it by contrast, and were only sufficiently
present to serve as an appetising sauce. That sauce was made up of
contradictions and sufferings, of agonising inward analysis, and all
these pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance
to my dissipation--in fact, completely answered the purpose of an
appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I
could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct
debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What
could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the
street? No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all.
And what loving-kindness, oh Lord, what loving-kindness I felt at times
in those dreams of mine! in those "flights into the sublime and the
beautiful"; though it was fantastic love, though it was never applied
to anything human in reality, yet there was so much of this love that
one did not feel afterwards even the impulse to apply it in reality;
that would have been superfluous. Everything, however, passed
satisfactorily by a lazy and fascinating transition into the sphere of
art, that is, into the beautiful forms of life, lying ready, largely
stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs
and uses. I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of
course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to
recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a
grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and
immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed
before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not
merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful"
something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what
idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and
hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against
the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would
be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then
there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on
the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred
to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes,
and so on, and so on--as though you did not know all about it? You
will say that it is vulgar and contemptible to drag all this into
public after all the tears and transports which I have myself
confessed. But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that I am
ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life,
gentlemen? And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no
means badly composed.... It did not all happen on the shores of Lake
Como. And yet you are right--it really is vulgar and contemptible.
And most contemptible of all it is that now I am attempting to justify
myself to you. And even more contemptible than that is my making this
remark now. But that's enough, or there will be no end to it; each
step will be more contemptible than the last....
I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time
without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To
plunge into society meant to visit my superior at the office, Anton
Antonitch Syetotchkin. He was the only permanent acquaintance I have
had in my life, and I wonder at the fact myself now. But I only went
to see him when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached
such a point of bliss that it became essential at once to embrace my
fellows and all mankind; and for that purpose I needed, at least, one
human being, actually existing. I had to call on Anton Antonitch,
however, on Tuesday--his at-home day; so I had always to time my
passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a
Tuesday.
This Anton Antonitch lived on the fourth storey in a house in Five
Corners, in four low-pitched rooms, one smaller than the other, of a
particularly frugal and sallow appearance. He had two daughters and
their aunt, who used to pour out the tea. Of the daughters one was
thirteen and another fourteen, they both had snub noses, and I was
awfully shy of them because they were always whispering and giggling
together. The master of the house usually sat in his study on a
leather couch in front of the table with some grey-headed gentleman,
usually a colleague from our office or some other department. I never
saw more than two or three visitors there, always the same. They
talked about the excise duty; about business in the senate, about
salaries, about promotions, about His Excellency, and the best means of
pleasing him, and so on. I had the patience to sit like a fool beside
these people for four hours at a stretch, listening to them without
knowing what to say to them or venturing to say a word. I became
stupefied, several times I felt myself perspiring, I was overcome by a
sort of paralysis; but this was pleasant and good for me. On returning
home I deferred for a time my desire to embrace all mankind.
I had however one other acquaintance of a sort, Simonov, who was an old
schoolfellow. I had a number of schoolfellows, indeed, in Petersburg,
but I did not associate with them and had even given up nodding to them
in the street. I believe I had transferred into the department I was
in simply to avoid their company and to cut off all connection with my
hateful childhood. Curses on that school and all those terrible years
of penal servitude! In short, I parted from my schoolfellows as soon
as I got out into the world. There were two or three left to whom I
nodded in the street. One of them was Simonov, who had in no way been
distinguished at school, was of a quiet and equable disposition; but I
discovered in him a certain independence of character and even honesty
I don't even suppose that he was particularly stupid. I had at one
time spent some rather soulful moments with him, but these had not
lasted long and had somehow been suddenly clouded over. He was
evidently uncomfortable at these reminiscences, and was, I fancy,
always afraid that I might take up the same tone again. I suspected
that he had an aversion for me, but still I went on going to see him,
not being quite certain of it.
And so on one occasion, unable to endure my solitude and knowing that
as it was Thursday Anton Antonitch's door would be closed, I thought of
Simonov. Climbing up to his fourth storey I was thinking that the man
disliked me and that it was a mistake to go and see him. But as it
always happened that such reflections impelled me, as though purposely,
to put myself into a false position, I went in. It was almost a year
since I had last seen Simonov.
----------CHAPTER 5---------
"So this is it, this is it at last--contact with real life," I muttered
as I ran headlong downstairs. "This is very different from the Pope's
leaving Rome and going to Brazil, very different from the ball on Lake
Como!"
"You are a scoundrel," a thought flashed through my mind, "if you laugh
at this now."
"No matter!" I cried, answering myself. "Now everything is lost!"
There was no trace to be seen of them, but that made no difference--I
knew where they had gone.
At the steps was standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough
peasant coat, powdered over with the still falling, wet, and as it were
warm, snow. It was hot and steamy. The little shaggy piebald horse
was also covered with snow and coughing, I remember that very well. I
made a rush for the roughly made sledge; but as soon as I raised my
foot to get into it, the recollection of how Simonov had just given me
six roubles seemed to double me up and I tumbled into the sledge like a
sack.
"No, I must do a great deal to make up for all that," I cried. "But I
will make up for it or perish on the spot this very night. Start!"
We set off. There was a perfect whirl in my head.
"They won't go down on their knees to beg for my friendship. That is a
mirage, cheap mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastical--that's
another ball on Lake Como. And so I am bound to slap Zverkov's face!
It is my duty to. And so it is settled; I am flying to give him a slap
in the face. Hurry up!"
The driver tugged at the reins.
"As soon as I go in I'll give it him. Ought I before giving him the
slap to say a few words by way of preface? No. I'll simply go in and
give it him. They will all be sitting in the drawing-room, and he with
Olympia on the sofa. That damned Olympia! She laughed at my looks on
one occasion and refused me. I'll pull Olympia's hair, pull Zverkov's
ears! No, better one ear, and pull him by it round the room. Maybe
they will all begin beating me and will kick me out. That's most
likely, indeed. No matter! Anyway, I shall first slap him; the
initiative will be mine; and by the laws of honour that is everything:
he will be branded and cannot wipe off the slap by any blows, by
nothing but a duel. He will be forced to fight. And let them beat me
now. Let them, the ungrateful wretches! Trudolyubov will beat me
hardest, he is so strong; Ferfitchkin will be sure to catch hold
sideways and tug at my hair. But no matter, no matter! That's what I
am going for. The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy
of it all! When they drag me to the door I shall call out to them that
in reality they are not worth my little finger. Get on, driver, get
on!" I cried to the driver. He started and flicked his whip, I shouted
so savagely.
"We shall fight at daybreak, that's a settled thing. I've done with
the office. Ferfitchkin made a joke about it just now. But where can
I get pistols? Nonsense! I'll get my salary in advance and buy them.
And powder, and bullets? That's the second's business. And how can it
all be done by daybreak? and where am I to get a second? I have no
friends. Nonsense!" I cried, lashing myself up more and more. "It's of
no consequence! The first person I meet in the street is bound to be my
second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of water.
The most eccentric things may happen. Even if I were to ask the
director himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to
consent, if only from a feeling of chivalry, and to keep the secret!
Anton Antonitch...."
The fact is, that at that very minute the disgusting absurdity of my
plan and the other side of the question was clearer and more vivid to
my imagination than it could be to anyone on earth. But ....
"Get on, driver, get on, you rascal, get on!"
"Ugh, sir!" said the son of toil.
Cold shivers suddenly ran down me. Wouldn't it be better ... to go
straight home? My God, my God! Why did I invite myself to this dinner
yesterday? But no, it's impossible. And my walking up and down for
three hours from the table to the stove? No, they, they and no one
else must pay for my walking up and down! They must wipe out this
dishonour! Drive on!
And what if they give me into custody? They won't dare! They'll be
afraid of the scandal. And what if Zverkov is so contemptuous that he
refuses to fight a duel? He is sure to; but in that case I'll show
them ... I will turn up at the posting station when he's setting off
tomorrow, I'll catch him by the leg, I'll pull off his coat when he
gets into the carriage. I'll get my teeth into his hand, I'll bite him.
"See what lengths you can drive a desperate man to!" He may hit me on
the head and they may belabour me from behind. I will shout to the
assembled multitude: "Look at this young puppy who is driving off to
captivate the Circassian girls after letting me spit in his face!"
Of course, after that everything will be over! The office will have
vanished off the face of the earth. I shall be arrested, I shall be
tried, I shall be dismissed from the service, thrown in prison, sent to
Siberia. Never mind! In fifteen years when they let me out of prison I
will trudge off to him, a beggar, in rags. I shall find him in some
provincial town. He will be married and happy. He will have a
grown-up daughter.... I shall say to him: "Look, monster, at my hollow
cheeks and my rags! I've lost everything--my career, my happiness,
art, science, THE WOMAN I LOVED, and all through you. Here are
pistols. I have come to discharge my pistol and ... and I ... forgive
you. Then I shall fire into the air and he will hear nothing more of
me...."
I was actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at
that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's SILVIO and Lermontov's
MASQUERADE. And all at once I felt horribly ashamed, so ashamed that I
stopped the horse, got out of the sledge, and stood still in the snow
in the middle of the street. The driver gazed at me, sighing and
astonished.
What was I to do? I could not go on there--it was evidently stupid,
and I could not leave things as they were, because that would seem as
though ... Heavens, how could I leave things! And after such insults!
"No!" I cried, throwing myself into the sledge again. "It is ordained!
It is fate! Drive on, drive on!"
And in my impatience I punched the sledge-driver on the back of the
neck.
"What are you up to? What are you hitting me for?" the peasant
shouted, but he whipped up his nag so that it began kicking.
The wet snow was falling in big flakes; I unbuttoned myself, regardless
of it. I forgot everything else, for I had finally decided on the
slap, and felt with horror that it was going to happen NOW, AT ONCE,
and that NO FORCE COULD STOP IT. The deserted street lamps gleamed
sullenly in the snowy darkness like torches at a funeral. The snow
drifted under my great-coat, under my coat, under my cravat, and melted
there. I did not wrap myself up--all was lost, anyway.
At last we arrived. I jumped out, almost unconscious, ran up the steps
and began knocking and kicking at the door. I felt fearfully weak,
particularly in my legs and knees. The door was opened quickly as
though they knew I was coming. As a fact, Simonov had warned them that
perhaps another gentleman would arrive, and this was a place in which
one had to give notice and to observe certain precautions. It was one
of those "millinery establishments" which were abolished by the police
a good time ago. By day it really was a shop; but at night, if one had
an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes.
I walked rapidly through the dark shop into the familiar drawing-room,
where there was only one candle burning, and stood still in amazement:
there was no one there. "Where are they?" I asked somebody. But by
now, of course, they had separated. Before me was standing a person
with a stupid smile, the "madam" herself, who had seen me before. A
minute later a door opened and another person came in.
Taking no notice of anything I strode about the room, and, I believe, I
talked to myself. I felt as though I had been saved from death and was
conscious of this, joyfully, all over: I should have given that slap, I
should certainly, certainly have given it! But now they were not here
and ... everything had vanished and changed! I looked round. I could
not realise my condition yet. I looked mechanically at the girl who
had come in: and had a glimpse of a fresh, young, rather pale face,
with straight, dark eyebrows, and with grave, as it were wondering,
eyes that attracted me at once; I should have hated her if she had been
smiling. I began looking at her more intently and, as it were, with
effort. I had not fully collected my thoughts. There was something
simple and good-natured in her face, but something strangely grave. I
am sure that this stood in her way here, and no one of those fools had
noticed her. She could not, however, have been called a beauty, though
she was tall, strong-looking, and well built. She was very simply
dressed. Something loathsome stirred within me. I went straight up to
her.
I chanced to look into the glass. My harassed face struck me as
revolting in the extreme, pale, angry, abject, with dishevelled hair.
"No matter, I am glad of it," I thought; "I am glad that I shall seem
repulsive to her; I like that."
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of chapter 10, utilizing the provided context. | null | When the young narrator appears before Liza, he feels angry and ashamed. He hates that she sees him in his old clothing and his poverty. He does, however, ask her to come in and sit down. He also sends Apollon out to get some tea and some food to eat. After the servant has left, the young narrator excuses himself for a moment and goes to his room. There he goes into a fit of hysteria, which Liza overhears. She comes and tries to comfort him. Because he is embarrassed, the young narrator says nothing to Liza for five or ten minutes. During this time, he acknowledges to himself that he feels sorry for the girl, but he turns his heart against her. Even after she explains that she really wants to escape her job as a prostitute, he continues his silence and decides he will feel no compassion for her. Since she is being ignored, Liza says she is going to leave. In order to stop her, the young narrator finally breaks his silence and turns on the girl, speaking rapidly and cruelly. He demands to know why she has come to see him since he had mocked her in the brothel. He now laughs at her ignorance for allowing herself to being treated poorly and allowing him to have power over her. He also tries to shame her for coming to his apartment. When Liza realizes that the young narrator is sad and miserable, she comes to him and embraces him. The underground man reacts with another fit of hysterics, obviously to hide his true emotions for her and to avoid talking. Although the fit is real, he is also trying to keep Liza from knowing that she now has power over him. |
----------CHAPTER 7---------
"Oh, hush, Liza! How can you talk about being like a book, when it
makes even me, an outsider, feel sick? Though I don't look at it as an
outsider, for, indeed, it touches me to the heart.... Is it possible,
is it possible that you do not feel sick at being here yourself?
Evidently habit does wonders! God knows what habit can do with anyone.
Can you seriously think that you will never grow old, that you will
always be good-looking, and that they will keep you here for ever and
ever? I say nothing of the loathsomeness of the life here.... Though
let me tell you this about it--about your present life, I mean; here
though you are young now, attractive, nice, with soul and feeling, yet
you know as soon as I came to myself just now I felt at once sick at
being here with you! One can only come here when one is drunk. But if
you were anywhere else, living as good people live, I should perhaps be
more than attracted by you, should fall in love with you, should be
glad of a look from you, let alone a word; I should hang about your
door, should go down on my knees to you, should look upon you as my
betrothed and think it an honour to be allowed to. I should not dare
to have an impure thought about you. But here, you see, I know that I
have only to whistle and you have to come with me whether you like it
or not. I don't consult your wishes, but you mine. The lowest
labourer hires himself as a workman, but he doesn't make a slave of
himself altogether; besides, he knows that he will be free again
presently. But when are you free? Only think what you are giving up
here? What is it you are making a slave of? It is your soul, together
with your body; you are selling your soul which you have no right to
dispose of! You give your love to be outraged by every drunkard!
Love! But that's everything, you know, it's a priceless diamond, it's
a maiden's treasure, love--why, a man would be ready to give his soul,
to face death to gain that love. But how much is your love worth now?
You are sold, all of you, body and soul, and there is no need to strive
for love when you can have everything without love. And you know there
is no greater insult to a girl than that, do you understand? To be
sure, I have heard that they comfort you, poor fools, they let you have
lovers of your own here. But you know that's simply a farce, that's
simply a sham, it's just laughing at you, and you are taken in by it!
Why, do you suppose he really loves you, that lover of yours? I don't
believe it. How can he love you when he knows you may be called away
from him any minute? He would be a low fellow if he did! Will he have
a grain of respect for you? What have you in common with him? He
laughs at you and robs you--that is all his love amounts to! You are
lucky if he does not beat you. Very likely he does beat you, too. Ask
him, if you have got one, whether he will marry you. He will laugh in
your face, if he doesn't spit in it or give you a blow--though maybe he
is not worth a bad halfpenny himself. And for what have you ruined
your life, if you come to think of it? For the coffee they give you to
drink and the plentiful meals? But with what object are they feeding
you up? An honest girl couldn't swallow the food, for she would know
what she was being fed for. You are in debt here, and, of course, you
will always be in debt, and you will go on in debt to the end, till the
visitors here begin to scorn you. And that will soon happen, don't
rely upon your youth--all that flies by express train here, you know.
You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that
she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you
had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth
and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her,
beggared her, robbed her. And don't expect anyone to take your part:
the others, your companions, will attack you, too, win her favour, for
all are in slavery here, and have lost all conscience and pity here
long ago. They have become utterly vile, and nothing on earth is
viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than their abuse. And you
are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth and health and
beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of
five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to
God for that! No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time
and no work to do! Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the
world or ever has been. One would think that the heart alone would be
worn out with tears. And you won't dare to say a word, not half a word
when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were
to blame. You will change to another house, then to a third, then
somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket. There you
will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors
don't know how to be friendly without beating you. You don't believe
that it is so hateful there? Go and look for yourself some time, you
can see with your own eyes. Once, one New Year's Day, I saw a woman at
a door. They had turned her out as a joke, to give her a taste of the
frost because she had been crying so much, and they shut the door
behind her. At nine o'clock in the morning she was already quite
drunk, dishevelled, half-naked, covered with bruises, her face was
powdered, but she had a black-eye, blood was trickling from her nose
and her teeth; some cabman had just given her a drubbing. She was
sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand;
she was crying, wailing something about her luck and beating with the
fish on the steps, and cabmen and drunken soldiers were crowding in the
doorway taunting her. You don't believe that you will ever be like
that? I should be sorry to believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe
ten years, eight years ago that very woman with the salt fish came here
fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil, blushing at every
word. Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready to take offence, not like
the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew what happiness
was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should love.
Do you see how it ended? And what if at that very minute when she was
beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and
dishevelled--what if at that very minute she recalled the pure early
days in her father's house, when she used to go to school and the
neighbour's son watched for her on the way, declaring that he would
love her as long as he lived, that he would devote his life to her, and
when they vowed to love one another for ever and be married as soon as
they were grown up! No, Liza, it would be happy for you if you were to
die soon of consumption in some corner, in some cellar like that woman
just now. In the hospital, do you say? You will be lucky if they take
you, but what if you are still of use to the madam here? Consumption is
a queer disease, it is not like fever. The patient goes on hoping till
the last minute and says he is all right. He deludes himself And that
just suits your madam. Don't doubt it, that's how it is; you have sold
your soul, and what is more you owe money, so you daren't say a word.
But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will turn away from
you, for then there will be nothing to get from you. What's more, they
will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over
dying. However you beg you won't get a drink of water without abuse:
'Whenever are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won't let us sleep
with your moaning, you make the gentlemen sick.' That's true, I have
heard such things said myself. They will thrust you dying into the
filthiest corner in the cellar--in the damp and darkness; what will
your thoughts be, lying there alone? When you die, strange hands will
lay you out, with grumbling and impatience; no one will bless you, no
one will sigh for you, they only want to get rid of you as soon as may
be; they will buy a coffin, take you to the grave as they did that poor
woman today, and celebrate your memory at the tavern. In the grave,
sleet, filth, wet snow--no need to put themselves out for you--'Let her
down, Vanuha; it's just like her luck--even here, she is head-foremost,
the hussy. Shorten the cord, you rascal.' 'It's all right as it is.'
'All right, is it? Why, she's on her side! She was a fellow-creature,
after all! But, never mind, throw the earth on her.' And they won't
care to waste much time quarrelling over you. They will scatter the
wet blue clay as quick as they can and go off to the tavern ... and
there your memory on earth will end; other women have children to go to
their graves, fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh,
nor remembrance; no one in the whole world will ever come to you, your
name will vanish from the face of the earth--as though you had never
existed, never been born at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however
you knock at your coffin lid at night, when the dead arise, however you
cry: 'Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day! My life
was no life at all; my life has been thrown away like a dish-clout; it
was drunk away in the tavern at the Haymarket; let me out, kind people,
to live in the world again.'"
And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in
my throat myself, and ... and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay
and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.
I had reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and
rending her heart, and--and the more I was convinced of it, the more
eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as
possible. It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it
was not merely sport....
I knew I was speaking stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I
could not speak except "like a book." But that did not trouble me: I
knew, I felt that I should be understood and that this very bookishness
might be an assistance. But now, having attained my effect, I was
suddenly panic-stricken. Never before had I witnessed such despair!
She was lying on her face, thrusting her face into the pillow and
clutching it in both hands. Her heart was being torn. Her youthful
body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions. Suppressed sobs
rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and wailing, then she
pressed closer into the pillow: she did not want anyone here, not a
living soul, to know of her anguish and her tears. She bit the pillow,
bit her hand till it bled (I saw that afterwards), or, thrusting her
fingers into her dishevelled hair, seemed rigid with the effort of
restraint, holding her breath and clenching her teeth. I began saying
something, begging her to calm herself, but felt that I did not dare;
and all at once, in a sort of cold shiver, almost in terror, began
fumbling in the dark, trying hurriedly to get dressed to go. It was
dark; though I tried my best I could not finish dressing quickly.
Suddenly I felt a box of matches and a candlestick with a whole candle
in it. As soon as the room was lighted up, Liza sprang up, sat up in
bed, and with a contorted face, with a half insane smile, looked at me
almost senselessly. I sat down beside her and took her hands; she came
to herself, made an impulsive movement towards me, would have caught
hold of me, but did not dare, and slowly bowed her head before me.
"Liza, my dear, I was wrong ... forgive me, my dear," I began, but she
squeezed my hand in her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the
wrong thing and stopped.
"This is my address, Liza, come to me."
"I will come," she answered resolutely, her head still bowed.
"But now I am going, good-bye ... till we meet again."
I got up; she, too, stood up and suddenly flushed all over, gave a
shudder, snatched up a shawl that was lying on a chair and muffled
herself in it to her chin. As she did this she gave another sickly
smile, blushed and looked at me strangely. I felt wretched; I was in
haste to get away--to disappear.
"Wait a minute," she said suddenly, in the passage just at the doorway,
stopping me with her hand on my overcoat. She put down the candle in
hot haste and ran off; evidently she had thought of something or wanted
to show me something. As she ran away she flushed, her eyes shone, and
there was a smile on her lips--what was the meaning of it? Against my
will I waited: she came back a minute later with an expression that
seemed to ask forgiveness for something. In fact, it was not the same
face, not the same look as the evening before: sullen, mistrustful and
obstinate. Her eyes now were imploring, soft, and at the same time
trustful, caressing, timid. The expression with which children look at
people they are very fond of, of whom they are asking a favour. Her
eyes were a light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life, and
capable of expressing love as well as sullen hatred.
Making no explanation, as though I, as a sort of higher being, must
understand everything without explanations, she held out a piece of
paper to me. Her whole face was positively beaming at that instant
with naive, almost childish, triumph. I unfolded it. It was a letter
to her from a medical student or someone of that sort--a very
high-flown and flowery, but extremely respectful, love-letter. I don't
recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown
phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned.
When I had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and
childishly impatient eyes fixed upon me. She fastened her eyes upon my
face and waited impatiently for what I should say. In a few words,
hurriedly, but with a sort of joy and pride, she explained to me that
she had been to a dance somewhere in a private house, a family of "very
nice people, WHO KNEW NOTHING, absolutely nothing, for she had only
come here so lately and it had all happened ... and she hadn't made up
her mind to stay and was certainly going away as soon as she had paid
her debt..." and at that party there had been the student who had
danced with her all the evening. He had talked to her, and it turned
out that he had known her in old days at Riga when he was a child, they
had played together, but a very long time ago--and he knew her parents,
but ABOUT THIS he knew nothing, nothing whatever, and had no suspicion!
And the day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that
letter through the friend with whom she had gone to the party ... and
... well, that was all.
She dropped her shining eyes with a sort of bashfulness as she finished.
The poor girl was keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure,
and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me
to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely
loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully. No doubt that letter
was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But none the less,
I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious
treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she
had thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise
herself in my eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of
her. I said nothing, pressed her hand and went out. I so longed to
get away ... I walked all the way home, in spite of the fact that the
melting snow was still falling in heavy flakes. I was exhausted,
shattered, in bewilderment. But behind the bewilderment the truth was
already gleaming. The loathsome truth.
----------CHAPTER 10---------
A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in
frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and
peeped through the crack at Liza. She was sitting on the ground with
her head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying. But she
did not go away, and that irritated me. This time she understood it
all. I had insulted her finally, but ... there's no need to describe
it. She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge,
a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred
was added now a PERSONAL HATRED, born of envy.... Though I do not
maintain positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she
certainly did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what
was worse, incapable of loving her.
I know I shall be told that this is incredible--but it is incredible to
be as spiteful and stupid as I was; it may be added that it was strange
I should not love her, or at any rate, appreciate her love. Why is it
strange? In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I
repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral
superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other
sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking
that love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved
object--to tyrannise over her.
Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a
struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral
subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated
object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded
in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life,"
as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to
shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even
guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me,
because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of
ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show
itself in that form.
I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room
and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably
oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted
"peace," to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed
me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.
But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as
though she were unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at
the screen as though to remind her.... She started, sprang up, and
flew to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her
escape from me.... Two minutes later she came from behind the screen
and looked with heavy eyes at me. I gave a spiteful grin, which was
forced, however, to KEEP UP APPEARANCES, and I turned away from her
eyes.
"Good-bye," she said, going towards the door.
I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and
closed it again. Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the
other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway....
I did mean a moment since to tell a lie--to write that I did this
accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through
losing my head. But I don't want to lie, and so I will say straight
out that I opened her hand and put the money in it ... from spite. It
came into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room
and she was sitting behind the screen. But this I can say for certain:
though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the
heart, but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so
purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that
I could not even keep it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid
seeing her, and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza. I opened
the door in the passage and began listening.
"Liza! Liza!" I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.
There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on
the stairs.
"Liza!" I cried, more loudly.
No answer. But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open
heavily with a creak and slam violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.
She had gone. I went back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly
oppressed.
I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and
looked aimlessly before me. A minute passed, suddenly I started;
straight before me on the table I saw.... In short, I saw a crumpled
blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute
before. It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other
in the flat. So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.
Well! I might have expected that she would do that. Might I have
expected it? No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for
my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so. I
could not endure it. A minute later I flew like a madman to dress,
flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her. She
could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the
street.
It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling
almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as
though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to
be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I
ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.
Where had she gone? And why was I running after her?
Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet,
to entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was
being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But--what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate
her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?
Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?
I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.
"And will it not be better?" I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. "Will it
not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for
ever? Resentment--why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and
painful consciousness! Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and
have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never
die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her--the
feeling of insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred ... h'm!
... perhaps, too, by forgiveness.... Will all that make things easier
for her though? ..."
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better--cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is
better?
So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain
in my soul. Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could
there have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that
I should turn back half-way? I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.
* * * * *
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory.
I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes"
here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell
long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally
rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through
divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world,
would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the
traits for an anti-hero are EXPRESSLY gathered together here, and what
matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all
divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for
real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come
almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and
we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we
fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something
else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if
our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for
instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the
spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you
... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know
that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin
shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your
miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of
us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of
us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life
carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and
what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have
found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all,
there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully!
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it
is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in
confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling
to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and
blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive
to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and
that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it.
Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I
don't want to write more from "Underground."
|
Notes from the Undergroun | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 1, chapter 4 based on the provided context. | part 1,chapter 1|part 1, chapter 2|part 1, chapter 3|part 1, chapter 4 | The Underground Man goes back to his technique of filling in our side of this "conversation." He supposes that we might be scoffing at him, asking if he intends to prove there is enjoyment in a toothache, too. Well, now that you mention it...Yes, he does intend as much. There is enjoyment in moaning over a toothache, he says. If moaning weren't enjoyable, than the man with the toothache wouldn't moan. What the moans do is express the purposelessness of the pain. As he discussed at the end of Chapter Three, pain is all the worse when you have no one to blame for it, "no enemy to punish." If we don't believe him, he recommends that we go and listen to a man suffering from a toothache. At about the third day, he's not moaning out of pain, he's "only amusing himself" while making everyone around him miserable. The Underground Man figures that, at this point, we're laughing at him. He resigns himself to this, admitting that his words are in poor taste, jerky, and lacking self-confidence. But that, he says, is because he doesn't respect himself. He ends with the question, "Can a man of perception respect himself at all?" |
----------PART 1,CHAPTER 1---------
I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a
doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and
doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to
respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be
superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a
doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I
understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely
that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well
aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I
know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and
no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite.
My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
I have been going on like that for a long time--twenty years. Now I am
forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I
was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I
did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in
that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote
it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself
that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch
it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I
sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when
I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the
most part they were all timid people--of course, they were petitioners.
But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not
endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a
disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over
that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it.
That happened in my youth, though.
But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?
Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that
continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly
conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an
embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and
amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll
to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should
be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I
should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with
shame for months after. That was my way.
I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was
lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and
with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was
conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely
opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these
opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life
and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not
let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me
till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and--sickened me, at
last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that
I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your
forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ...
However, I assure you I do not care if you are....
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to
become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an
honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life
in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation
that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is
only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth
century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless
creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited
creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old
now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is
extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is
vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely
and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I
tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all
these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that
to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to
sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath
...
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are
mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you
imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble
(and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I
am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the
service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that
reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand
roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled
down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I
have settled down in it. My room is a wretched, horrid one in the
outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured
from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her.
I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my
small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and
monitors.... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away
from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is
absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 2---------
I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not,
why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I
have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to
that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a
real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have
been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated
man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal
ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional
town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and
unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance,
to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is
more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and
even swagger over them?
Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on
their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not
dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded
that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in
fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a
minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the
very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all
that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it
would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do
such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all,
perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was
"sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the
more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was
that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it
were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal
condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last
all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended
by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was
perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what
agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same
with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a
secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the
point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in
returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,
acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action
again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly
gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at
last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness,
and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into
enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep
wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I
will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness
of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had
reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not
be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could
become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you
to change into something different you would most likely not wish to
change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because
perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in
accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness,
and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that
consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely
nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness,
that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any
consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he
actually is a scoundrel. But enough.... Ech, I have talked a lot of
nonsense, but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be
explained? But I will explain it. I will get to the bottom of it!
That is why I have taken up my pen....
I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious
and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I
sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the
face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in
earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that
a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but
in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one
is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And
when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being
rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is,
look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the
most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to
blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of
nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of
the people surrounding me. (I have always considered myself cleverer
than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe
it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my
life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people
straight in the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of
its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do
anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant
would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot
forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to
the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same. Finally, even if I
had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary
to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on
any one for anything because I should certainly never have made up my
mind to do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not have
made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few words.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 3---------
With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for
themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed,
let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is
nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being. Such a
gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull
with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the
way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and
men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an
evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is
not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very
glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they
are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something
tranquillising, morally soothing, final--maybe even something
mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his
tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the
face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal
man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful,
in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can
call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis
of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has
come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this
is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this
retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his
antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely
thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely
conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself,
his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do
so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in
action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and
it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too.
There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME
DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that
spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. For through his innate stupidity
the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in
consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in
the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act
of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless
mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the
form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many
unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of
fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of
the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their
healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss
all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt
in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its
mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our
insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in
cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years
together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most
ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still
more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own
imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it
will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge
itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind
the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to
vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its
efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom
it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself.
On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest
accumulated over all the years and ...
But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for
forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful
hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires
turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined
for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that
strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so
difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even
simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of
it. "Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people
will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the
face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,
perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and
so I speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But
set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the
face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you
may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given
so few slaps in the face during my life. But enough ... not another
word on that subject of such extreme interest to you.
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not
understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain
circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though
this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have
said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The
impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the
laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As
soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a
monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they
prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to
you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this
conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties
and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it,
there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just
try refuting it.
"Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a
case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she
has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or
dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently
all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so
on."
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and
arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact
that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall
by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to
knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because
it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did
contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as
twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How much better
it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all the
impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of
those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be
reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical
combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting
theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame,
though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least,
and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into
luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for
you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never
will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a
bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these
uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the
more you do not know, the worse the ache.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 4---------
"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you
cry, with a laugh.
"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had
toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of
course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not
candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole
point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans;
if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good
example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the
first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating
to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you
spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same
while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no
enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in
spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your
teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and
if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that
finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is
left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your
wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.
Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,
end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree
of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans
of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache,
on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,
not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has
toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by
progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the
soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His
moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days
and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no
sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is
only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows
that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his
whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of
faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,
more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing
himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these
recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.
As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your
hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake
then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a
hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,
an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see
through me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let
it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a
minute...." You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems
our development and our consciousness must go further to understand
all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My
jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect
myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of part 1, chapter 7 using the context provided. | part 1, chapter 5|part 1, chapter 6|part 1, chapter 7 | The Underground Man recalls someone once saying that man only does nasty and wicked things because he doesn't know what's good for him. If he were enlightened, he would only do good things, because he would realize that being good was in his own best interest. The theory, then, is that no man would ever act against his own best interests. BUT - the Underground Man begs to differ. He says that men consciously act against their own best interests and will rush out to meet peril because they dislike the beaten track. And he says it in beautiful, gorgeous language, in one of the most famous passages from this novel. He knows that people will disagree with him, the counter-argument being that man always acts to his advantage. So the Underground Man asks us to define "advantage." In one specific case, he says, an "advantage" is actually harmful to him. Just this one special case. Yes, that's right, one specific, special case. One peculiar instance that will make man act not only in opposition to reason, but in opposition to his own benefit. There is one thing more important to man than all the other advantages in the world. But before he tells us what it is, he takes us on a major digression. The digression begins. The Underground Man thinks that all these systems we have for talking about man's "best interests" are useless. They are merely "logical exercises." The popular argument, he says, is that man does indeed follow his best interests. He goes on to talk about Henry Thomas Buckle, who claimed that as man became more and more civilized, wars would cease, since we'd all realize that war was more about producing dead people than about serving our own advantages. The Underground Man puts forward his argument, using the "take a look around" tactic. . So the Underground Man's argument holds water in mid-1800s Russia, as well as every other decade up to and including the present. He also points to Napoleon's conquests and the U.S. Civil War as further examples.) He concludes that civilization has made mankind more bloodthirsty, not less. It used to be that violence was considered a form of justice, so either we still feel that way today, or we know it is abominable but engage in it anyway. He doesn't know which is worse. And now a historical digression focusing on Cleopatra. The Underground Man talks about how, supposedly, Cleopatra used to stick gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts because she liked to see them writhe in pain. The Underground Man basically argues that we do the same sort of thing now. We're still just as far away from acting as science dictates we should act. The common argument, which he presumes we agree with, is that science will show that man has no special character - that he is little more than a piano key, because he must follow the laws of nature. It follows, then, that if we discover all the rules of nature, all human action can be calculated according to these laws. "There will be no more accidents or adventures in the world." Then, the theory goes, the world will be full of rainbows and bunnies and we can all build our "Palace of Crystal." When that happens, everything will be rational, but terribly boring. This is dangerous, since "it is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people." But at that point, it will be so dull that everyone will be thankful for the gold pins . He wouldn't be surprised if, when this very rational world came about, some gentleman suggested out of the blue something along the lines of, "Hey there chaps, let's throw rationality to the wind so we can actually live again. Whaddya say?" And that is exactly the big example from which we digressed at the beginning of Chapter Seven. This is the one cause for which man will go against his own interest, the one advantage for which man will shatter all reason and law, system and theory: the fact of his own free will. Man has to think that he has the ability to choose independently, and he will do anything to prove it. |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 5---------
Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of
his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? I am
not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse. And, indeed, I
could never endure saying, "Forgive me, Papa, I won't do it again," not
because I am incapable of saying that--on the contrary, perhaps just
because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too. As
though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to
blame in any way. That was the nastiest part of it. At the same time
I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of
course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there
was a sick feeling in my heart at the time.... For that one could not
blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have
continually all my life offended me more than anything. It is
loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then. Of
course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all
a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence,
this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry
myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with
one's hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. That is really
it. Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will
understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up
a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has
happened to me--well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose,
for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at
nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last
to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an
impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it
in myself. Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.
I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart
there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but
yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside
myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI;
inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of
consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious
sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I
repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action
are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that?
I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate
and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade
themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have
found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are
at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you
know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of
doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?
Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my
foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in
reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws
after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That
is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection. It
must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result of it
in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of
vengeance. (I am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man
revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found
a primary cause, that is, justice. And so he is at rest on all sides,
and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully,
being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing. But I see no
justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently
if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve
quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is
not a cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began
with that just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed
laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical
disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your
reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes
not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no
one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up
with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.
And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly,
without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at
least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands
folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin
despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a
soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I
consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have
been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a
babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to
be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is
babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 6---------
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least
have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could
have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how
very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would
mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a
member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in
continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself
all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as
his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply
with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite
right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should
have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That "sublime
and beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for
myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking
to the health of everything "sublime and beautiful." I should have
snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to
drain it to all that is "sublime and beautiful." I should then have
turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest,
unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the
beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An artist,
for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I
love all that is "sublime and beautiful." An author has written AS YOU
WILL: at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love
all that is "sublime and beautiful."
I should claim respect for doing so. I should persecute anyone who
would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with
dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good
round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have
established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset! Here
is something real and solid!" And, say what you like, it is very
agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 7---------
But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first
announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things
because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were
enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man
would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and
noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage,
he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all
know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?
Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place,
when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has
acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions
of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background
and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully,
struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the
darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter
to them than any advantage.... Advantage! What is advantage? And will
you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the
advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's
advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his
desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not
advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole
principle falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases?
You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's
advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some
which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included
under any classification? You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of
my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the
averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your
advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so
on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly
in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine,
too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that
all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon
up human advantages invariably leave out one? They don't even take it
into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the
whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no greater matter, they
would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.
But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any
classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for
instance ... Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend! When he
prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to
you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with
the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with
excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony
he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own
interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter
of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through
something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will
go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to
what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws
of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ... I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to
almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical)
there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which
we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than
all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready
to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason,
honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in opposition to all those
excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental,
most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but
it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll
make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that
it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every
system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In
fact, it upsets everything. But before I mention this advantage to
you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly
declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining
to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably
striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and
noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes,
logical exercises. Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of
mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind
almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle,
that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less
bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to
follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems
and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth
intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring
instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams,
and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole
of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon--the
Great and also the present one. Take North America--the eternal union.
Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that
civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind
is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely
nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man
may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already
happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas
and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so
conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they
are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to
us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more
bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In
old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace
exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy
than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that
Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking
gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from
their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the
comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too,
because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that
though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages,
he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would
dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn
when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a
normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from
INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set
his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say,
science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous
luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own,
and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the
stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws
of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it,
but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have
only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to
answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which
everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will
be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be
established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical
exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the
twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In
fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing
(this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully
dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be
calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be
extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything.
It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that
would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I
dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all
stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like
him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least
surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of
general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a
reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his
arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to
send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more
at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what
is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the
nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one
would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere
and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose
and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may
choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice,
one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at
times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we
have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And
how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally
advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice,
whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And
choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of part 1, chapter 9, utilizing the provided context. | part 1, chapter 8|part 1, chapter 9|part 1, chapter 10|part 1, chapter 11 | The Underground Man starts Chapter Nine by admitting that, actually, he's joking. But then he goes right back to his old argumentative self. This time, he wants to talk about being tormented by profound questions. Here is one such question: most normal people want to reform man to act according to science and good sense. But how do we know that this project will benefit man? How do we know he needs to be reformed at all? It may be that logic dictates such a reforming, but humanity certainly doesn't. He explores this further. Man, he says, is a creative being. He builds roads because it's in his nature to build things. BUT, sometimes, man will swerve off these roads. Why? Because he wants to prove his freedom. The next point is subtler and a bit tricky: man also swerves aside because he knows that the road, no matter where it goes, must go somewhere. And man realizes that his goal isn't to get somewhere, it is to build the road in the first place. This is because everyone's goal in life is to avoid being idle, which is apparently the mother of all vices. The idea is that men swerve off the road because it will keep them busy, keep them building new roads, and keep them from ever getting to the end point and then having nothing to do. Make sense? But besides loving to build roads, man also likes to destroy them. Why? Because, once again, he is afraid of completing whatever he happens to be building. If he ever does finish building, let's say, a house, he will leave it for his pets to live in instead of living in it himself. Ants, he says - boy, they really have it figured out. Ants spend their whole lives building anthills. They never stop to revel in completion, they just keep building. So man is interested in playing the chess game, not in capturing the king piece, to use yet ANOTHER metaphor. The Underground Man makes the point that life is in the striving, the working, the struggling, and not in the attaining. He then admits that this is quite absurd. He adds that, just as man is afraid of the endgame, he is also afraid of mathematical certainty, such certainty as our good old friend 2+2=4. Such certainty is "the beginning of death." So, he says that while 2+2=4 is very nice, 2+2=5 can also be very nice. But now he'd like to get back to this issue of man and well being. How do we know that man loves contentment? Doesn't he equally love suffering? Yes, according to the Underground Man, he does. But he realizes that in many circumstances, suffering has no place. In the Crystal Palace, for example, you could never have suffering. Still, man will never try to get rid of suffering. Suffering, he argues, "is the sole origin of consciousness." And while he started off this whole mess by saying that his hyper-consciousness was the bane of his existence, he admits now that, actually, consciousness is not only a misfortune, but also great and necessary. Man wouldn't give up consciousness for all the cakes and 2+2=4s in the world. Besides, he concludes, mathematical certainty leaves you with nothing to do, and consciousness at least lets you flog yourself once in a while. |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 8---------
"Ha! ha! ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality,
say what you like," you will interpose with a chuckle. "Science has
succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and
what is called freedom of will is nothing else than--"
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was
rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows
what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing,
but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled myself up. And
here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day
discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an
explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they
develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on,
that is a real mathematical formula--then, most likely, man will at
once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who
would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed
from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for
what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if
not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the
chances--can such a thing happen or not?
"H'm!" you decide. "Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view
of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our
foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a
supposed advantage. But when all that is explained and worked out on
paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and
senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never
understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist.
For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then
reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our
reason to be SENSELESS in our desires, and in that way knowingly act
against reason and desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and
reasoning can be really calculated--because there will some day be
discovered the laws of our so-called free will--so, joking apart, there
may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we
really shall choose in accordance with it. If, for instance, some day
they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone
because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to do
it in that particular way, what FREEDOM is left me, especially if I am
a learned man and have taken my degree somewhere? Then I should be
able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short,
if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do;
anyway, we should have to understand that. And, in fact, we ought
unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves that at such and such a time and in
such and such circumstances nature does not ask our leave; that we have
got to take her as she is and not fashion her to suit our fancy, and if
we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and well, even ... to
the chemical retort, there's no help for it, we must accept the retort
too, or else it will be accepted without our consent...."
Yes, but here I come to a stop! Gentlemen, you must excuse me for
being over-philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground!
Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an
excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but
reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will
is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life
including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this
manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply
extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to
live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my
capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my
capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it
has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn;
this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature
acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or
unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect,
gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me
again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the
future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous
to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly
agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time,
there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely,
desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very
stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even
what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only
what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of
ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than
anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular
it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us
obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason
concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us
what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our
individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most
precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in
agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept
within bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But
very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly
opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is
profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy? Gentlemen, let us suppose
that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if
only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is
wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful!
Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition
of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his
worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity,
perpetual--from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period.
Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long
been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than
moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the
history of mankind. What will you see? Is it a grand spectacle?
Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's
worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that
some say that it is the work of man's hands, while others maintain that
it has been created by nature herself. Is it many-coloured? May be it
is many-coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and
civilian, of all peoples in all ages--that alone is worth something,
and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of
it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? May be
it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now,
they fought first and they fought last--you will admit, that it is
almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about the
history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered
imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The
very word sticks in one's throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing
that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life
moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it
their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as
possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in
order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally
in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or
later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a
most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he
is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every
earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but
bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic
prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat
cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even
then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some
nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately
desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply
to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic
element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he
will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though
that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a
piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that
soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that
is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if
this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then
he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something
perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if
he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will
contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will
launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his
privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may
be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince
himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all
this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and
curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand
would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would
purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I
believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems
to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a
man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be
by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to
rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on
something we don't know?
You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one
is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my
will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own
normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.
Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to
tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make
four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant
that!
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 9---------
Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not
brilliant, but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am,
perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by
questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of
their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and
good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also
that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to
the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how
do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to
go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that
not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the
conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous
for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this
is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law
of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to
defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal,
predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in
engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads,
WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go
off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road,
and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may
be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always
does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less
important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to
save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving
way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all
the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact
beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction
and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a
couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and
destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it)
because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and
completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only
loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it
at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want
to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES
ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the
ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of
that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.
With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the
ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to
their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and
incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the
process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no
saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind
is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other
words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must
always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four,
and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of
death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical
certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing
but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices
his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I
assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing
for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at
least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to
the police-station--and there is occupation for a week. But where can
man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when
he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but
does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very
absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind
of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all,
something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a
piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands
with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice
two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything
its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the
normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to
welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as
regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides
well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering
is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes
extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a
fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that;
only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as
my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to
me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very
pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for
well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being
guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in
vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it
is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the
good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it?
And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is,
destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of
consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that
consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes
it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for
instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you
have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to
understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five
senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to
consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at
least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up.
Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 10---------
You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed--a
palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a
long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this
edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one
cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly.
You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into
it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a
palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say
that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion. Yes, I
answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.
But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not
the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live
in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate
it when you have changed my preference. Well, do change it, allure me
with something else, give me another ideal. But meanwhile I will not
take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle
dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and
that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the
old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. But what does it
matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since
it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.
Perhaps you are laughing again? Laugh away; I will put up with any
mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I
know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a
recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature
and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my desires a
block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand
years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out. Destroy
my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will
follow you. You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble;
but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing
things seriously; but if you won't deign to give me your attention, I
will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole.
But while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were
withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Don't remind me
that I have just rejected the palace of crystal for the sole reason
that one cannot put out one's tongue at it. I did not say because I am
so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was,
that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not
put out one's tongue. On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut
off out of gratitude if things could be so arranged that I should lose
all desire to put it out. It is not my fault that things cannot be so
arranged, and that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am
I made with such desires? Can I have been constructed simply in order
to come to the conclusion that all my construction is a cheat? Can
this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it.
But do you know what: I am convinced that we underground folk ought to
be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without
speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we
talk and talk and talk....
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 11---------
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do
nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my
bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now
(though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground
life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can ... Oh, but
even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not
underground that is better, but something different, quite different,
for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I
myself believed in anything of what I have just written. I swear to
you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have
written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at
the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.
"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to
put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then
come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached!
How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?"
"Isn't that shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps,
wagging your heads contemptuously. "You thirst for life and try to
settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how persistent,
how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you
are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent
things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them. You
declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to
ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are
gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to
amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are
evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may, perhaps,
have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering.
You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest
vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You
doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through
fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a
cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure
of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened
and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without
a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace!
Lies, lies, lies!"
Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is
from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through
a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was
nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have learned it by
heart and it has taken a literary form....
But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all
this and give it to you to read too? And another problem: why do I
call you "gentlemen," why do I address you as though you really were my
readers? Such confessions as I intend to make are never printed nor
given to other people to read. Anyway, I am not strong-minded enough
for that, and I don't see why I should be. But you see a fancy has
occurred to me and I want to realise it at all costs. Let me explain.
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but
only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would
not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in
secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even
to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored
away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such
things in his mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember
some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even
with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but
have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the
experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and
not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis,
that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility,
and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau
certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even
intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right;
I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity,
attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well
conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made
their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish
to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing
readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that
form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never have readers. I have
made this plain already ...
I don't wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of
my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things
down as I remember them.
But here, perhaps, someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you
really don't reckon on readers, why do you make such compacts with
yourself--and on paper too--that is, that you won't attempt any system
or method, that you jot things down as you remember them, and so on,
and so on? Why are you explaining? Why do you apologise?
Well, there it is, I answer.
There is a whole psychology in all this, though. Perhaps it is simply
that I am a coward. And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience
before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write. There
are perhaps thousands of reasons. Again, what is my object precisely
in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I
not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them
on paper?
Quite so; but yet it is more imposing on paper. There is something
more impressive in it; I shall be better able to criticise myself and
improve my style. Besides, I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from
writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory
of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and
has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid
of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such
reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and
oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I
should get rid of it. Why not try?
Besides, I am bored, and I never have anything to do. Writing will be
a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest.
Well, here is a chance for me, anyway.
Snow is falling today, yellow and dingy. It fell yesterday, too, and a
few days ago. I fancy it is the wet snow that has reminded me of that
incident which I cannot shake off now. And so let it be a story A
PROPOS of the falling snow.
PART II
A Propos of the Wet Snow
When from dark error's subjugation
My words of passionate exhortation
Had wrenched thy fainting spirit free;
And writhing prone in thine affliction
Thou didst recall with malediction
The vice that had encompassed thee:
And when thy slumbering conscience, fretting
By recollection's torturing flame,
Thou didst reveal the hideous setting
Of thy life's current ere I came:
When suddenly I saw thee sicken,
And weeping, hide thine anguished face,
Revolted, maddened, horror-stricken,
At memories of foul disgrace.
NEKRASSOV
(translated by Juliet Soskice).
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null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of part 2, chapter 2, utilizing the provided context. | part 2, chapter 2|part 2, chapter 5 | So, basically, the Underground Man's life was not fun. Ever. Because interacting with another human was clearly not an option, he took refuge in "the sublime and beautiful." At these moments, he felt that he was a completely different person from the man who borrowed money to buy a beaver collar. At these moments, he was a hero. At these moments, the Underground Man experienced intense feelings of happiness, faith, hope and love. He believed that some vocation - something for him to do in the real world - would suddenly make itself known, and he would be able to come out of his hole. Of course, when he wasn't feeling like Superman, he was feeling like a loser stuck in a hovel of mud. That was his problem, he says: that he was always either a hero or a man degraded. The hero moments only came in spurts, and they weren't strong enough to stop his "dissipation" . He compares these moments to a sauce: they merely spiced up the main dish that was his degradation - they certainly didn't get rid of it. The thing about these dreamlike moments of happiness, he says, is that they were so removed from reality that he couldn't really apply them to the real world. So while he felt love, joy, and hope in these sublime dreams, they didn't enable him to go out and find love or be happy at work, etc. Essentially, he divided his life into two realms: the real world, and the sphere of art in which his "beautiful and sublime" dreams lived. In the sphere of art, he was a master and hero who always had control of the remote. He could fall in love, and even his shameful deeds had something lofty about them. As you'll see in your text, there are some "Shout-Outs" here that might be confusing. "Manfred" is a reference to Lord Byron's poem Manfred, about a romantic, defiant hero. When the Underground Man talks about Austerlitz, he's referring to Napoleon's great victory there in 1805. Pope Pius VII was always at odds with Napoleon, so if the Pope left Rome and went to Brazil, as the Underground Man fantasizes about here, it would signal further victory on Napoleon's part.) He then pauses; he suspects that we, his readers, find it vulgar that he's talking about all this. He agrees that it is indeed vulgar, but it's even more vulgar that he's talking with us about the fact that it's vulgar and trying to justify its vulgarity. But enough, he says - and we agree. He reiterates that these happy dreams always came in phases; three months was pretty much the max, and then he would feel the need to "plunge back into society." That plunging generally meant a visit to Anton, the "immediate superior" and source of cash that we heard about in the previous chapter. Since Anton is only at home on Tuesday, his day-off, the Underground Man always had to schedule his dreaming to end on Monday nights. He then tells us some more about this Anton character: the guy lived with his two daughters and an aunt. Anton often entertained guests, a variety of boring gentlemen who sat around talking about boring things. Every time the Underground Man visited, he was reminded of how much he didn't like people. Then he could go home again and "defer" his desire to embrace humanity. And yet, somehow, amazingly, he had one friend. Well, better call him an "acquaintance." The guy's name is Simonov, and the Underground Man knows him from school. According to our narrator, Simonov is quiet and not completely stupid. The Underground Man claims that he's had "soulful moments" with him, but that Simonov always seemed embarrassed about these moments after they had passed. The Underground Man was fairly sure that Simonov found him to be repulsive, but he still went to visit him anyway. Now that we know who these guys are, the Underground Man launches into yet another story. Here we go. It's Thursday and the Underground Man is struck by one of his sudden urges to be around people. Since it's not Tuesday, Anton is out of the question, so he decides to go see Simonov. At this point, it's been about a year since he's seen the guy. |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 2---------
But the period of my dissipation would end and I always felt very sick
afterwards. It was followed by remorse--I tried to drive it away; I
felt too sick. By degrees, however, I grew used to that too. I grew
used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned myself to enduring
it. But I had a means of escape that reconciled everything--that was
to find refuge in "the sublime and the beautiful," in dreams, of
course. I was a terrible dreamer, I would dream for three months on
end, tucked away in my corner, and you may believe me that at those
moments I had no resemblance to the gentleman who, in the perturbation
of his chicken heart, put a collar of German beaver on his great-coat.
I suddenly became a hero. I would not have admitted my six-foot
lieutenant even if he had called on me. I could not even picture him
before me then. What were my dreams and how I could satisfy myself
with them--it is hard to say now, but at the time I was satisfied with
them. Though, indeed, even now, I am to some extent satisfied with
them. Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a spell of
dissipation; they came with remorse and with tears, with curses and
transports. There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such
happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on
my honour. I had faith, hope, love. I believed blindly at such times
that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would
suddenly open out, expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable
activity--beneficent, good, and, above all, READY MADE (what sort of
activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should be all
ready for me)--would rise up before me--and I should come out into the
light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.
Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and
for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in
reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud--there was
nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I
comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and
the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful
to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and
so he might defile himself. It is worth noting that these attacks of
the "sublime and the beautiful" visited me even during the period of
dissipation and just at the times when I was touching the bottom. They
came in separate spurts, as though reminding me of themselves, but did
not banish the dissipation by their appearance. On the contrary, they
seemed to add a zest to it by contrast, and were only sufficiently
present to serve as an appetising sauce. That sauce was made up of
contradictions and sufferings, of agonising inward analysis, and all
these pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance
to my dissipation--in fact, completely answered the purpose of an
appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I
could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct
debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What
could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the
street? No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all.
And what loving-kindness, oh Lord, what loving-kindness I felt at times
in those dreams of mine! in those "flights into the sublime and the
beautiful"; though it was fantastic love, though it was never applied
to anything human in reality, yet there was so much of this love that
one did not feel afterwards even the impulse to apply it in reality;
that would have been superfluous. Everything, however, passed
satisfactorily by a lazy and fascinating transition into the sphere of
art, that is, into the beautiful forms of life, lying ready, largely
stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs
and uses. I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of
course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to
recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a
grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and
immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed
before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not
merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful"
something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what
idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and
hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against
the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would
be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then
there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on
the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred
to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes,
and so on, and so on--as though you did not know all about it? You
will say that it is vulgar and contemptible to drag all this into
public after all the tears and transports which I have myself
confessed. But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that I am
ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life,
gentlemen? And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no
means badly composed.... It did not all happen on the shores of Lake
Como. And yet you are right--it really is vulgar and contemptible.
And most contemptible of all it is that now I am attempting to justify
myself to you. And even more contemptible than that is my making this
remark now. But that's enough, or there will be no end to it; each
step will be more contemptible than the last....
I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time
without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To
plunge into society meant to visit my superior at the office, Anton
Antonitch Syetotchkin. He was the only permanent acquaintance I have
had in my life, and I wonder at the fact myself now. But I only went
to see him when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached
such a point of bliss that it became essential at once to embrace my
fellows and all mankind; and for that purpose I needed, at least, one
human being, actually existing. I had to call on Anton Antonitch,
however, on Tuesday--his at-home day; so I had always to time my
passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a
Tuesday.
This Anton Antonitch lived on the fourth storey in a house in Five
Corners, in four low-pitched rooms, one smaller than the other, of a
particularly frugal and sallow appearance. He had two daughters and
their aunt, who used to pour out the tea. Of the daughters one was
thirteen and another fourteen, they both had snub noses, and I was
awfully shy of them because they were always whispering and giggling
together. The master of the house usually sat in his study on a
leather couch in front of the table with some grey-headed gentleman,
usually a colleague from our office or some other department. I never
saw more than two or three visitors there, always the same. They
talked about the excise duty; about business in the senate, about
salaries, about promotions, about His Excellency, and the best means of
pleasing him, and so on. I had the patience to sit like a fool beside
these people for four hours at a stretch, listening to them without
knowing what to say to them or venturing to say a word. I became
stupefied, several times I felt myself perspiring, I was overcome by a
sort of paralysis; but this was pleasant and good for me. On returning
home I deferred for a time my desire to embrace all mankind.
I had however one other acquaintance of a sort, Simonov, who was an old
schoolfellow. I had a number of schoolfellows, indeed, in Petersburg,
but I did not associate with them and had even given up nodding to them
in the street. I believe I had transferred into the department I was
in simply to avoid their company and to cut off all connection with my
hateful childhood. Curses on that school and all those terrible years
of penal servitude! In short, I parted from my schoolfellows as soon
as I got out into the world. There were two or three left to whom I
nodded in the street. One of them was Simonov, who had in no way been
distinguished at school, was of a quiet and equable disposition; but I
discovered in him a certain independence of character and even honesty
I don't even suppose that he was particularly stupid. I had at one
time spent some rather soulful moments with him, but these had not
lasted long and had somehow been suddenly clouded over. He was
evidently uncomfortable at these reminiscences, and was, I fancy,
always afraid that I might take up the same tone again. I suspected
that he had an aversion for me, but still I went on going to see him,
not being quite certain of it.
And so on one occasion, unable to endure my solitude and knowing that
as it was Thursday Anton Antonitch's door would be closed, I thought of
Simonov. Climbing up to his fourth storey I was thinking that the man
disliked me and that it was a mistake to go and see him. But as it
always happened that such reflections impelled me, as though purposely,
to put myself into a false position, I went in. It was almost a year
since I had last seen Simonov.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 5---------
"So this is it, this is it at last--contact with real life," I muttered
as I ran headlong downstairs. "This is very different from the Pope's
leaving Rome and going to Brazil, very different from the ball on Lake
Como!"
"You are a scoundrel," a thought flashed through my mind, "if you laugh
at this now."
"No matter!" I cried, answering myself. "Now everything is lost!"
There was no trace to be seen of them, but that made no difference--I
knew where they had gone.
At the steps was standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough
peasant coat, powdered over with the still falling, wet, and as it were
warm, snow. It was hot and steamy. The little shaggy piebald horse
was also covered with snow and coughing, I remember that very well. I
made a rush for the roughly made sledge; but as soon as I raised my
foot to get into it, the recollection of how Simonov had just given me
six roubles seemed to double me up and I tumbled into the sledge like a
sack.
"No, I must do a great deal to make up for all that," I cried. "But I
will make up for it or perish on the spot this very night. Start!"
We set off. There was a perfect whirl in my head.
"They won't go down on their knees to beg for my friendship. That is a
mirage, cheap mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastical--that's
another ball on Lake Como. And so I am bound to slap Zverkov's face!
It is my duty to. And so it is settled; I am flying to give him a slap
in the face. Hurry up!"
The driver tugged at the reins.
"As soon as I go in I'll give it him. Ought I before giving him the
slap to say a few words by way of preface? No. I'll simply go in and
give it him. They will all be sitting in the drawing-room, and he with
Olympia on the sofa. That damned Olympia! She laughed at my looks on
one occasion and refused me. I'll pull Olympia's hair, pull Zverkov's
ears! No, better one ear, and pull him by it round the room. Maybe
they will all begin beating me and will kick me out. That's most
likely, indeed. No matter! Anyway, I shall first slap him; the
initiative will be mine; and by the laws of honour that is everything:
he will be branded and cannot wipe off the slap by any blows, by
nothing but a duel. He will be forced to fight. And let them beat me
now. Let them, the ungrateful wretches! Trudolyubov will beat me
hardest, he is so strong; Ferfitchkin will be sure to catch hold
sideways and tug at my hair. But no matter, no matter! That's what I
am going for. The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy
of it all! When they drag me to the door I shall call out to them that
in reality they are not worth my little finger. Get on, driver, get
on!" I cried to the driver. He started and flicked his whip, I shouted
so savagely.
"We shall fight at daybreak, that's a settled thing. I've done with
the office. Ferfitchkin made a joke about it just now. But where can
I get pistols? Nonsense! I'll get my salary in advance and buy them.
And powder, and bullets? That's the second's business. And how can it
all be done by daybreak? and where am I to get a second? I have no
friends. Nonsense!" I cried, lashing myself up more and more. "It's of
no consequence! The first person I meet in the street is bound to be my
second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of water.
The most eccentric things may happen. Even if I were to ask the
director himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to
consent, if only from a feeling of chivalry, and to keep the secret!
Anton Antonitch...."
The fact is, that at that very minute the disgusting absurdity of my
plan and the other side of the question was clearer and more vivid to
my imagination than it could be to anyone on earth. But ....
"Get on, driver, get on, you rascal, get on!"
"Ugh, sir!" said the son of toil.
Cold shivers suddenly ran down me. Wouldn't it be better ... to go
straight home? My God, my God! Why did I invite myself to this dinner
yesterday? But no, it's impossible. And my walking up and down for
three hours from the table to the stove? No, they, they and no one
else must pay for my walking up and down! They must wipe out this
dishonour! Drive on!
And what if they give me into custody? They won't dare! They'll be
afraid of the scandal. And what if Zverkov is so contemptuous that he
refuses to fight a duel? He is sure to; but in that case I'll show
them ... I will turn up at the posting station when he's setting off
tomorrow, I'll catch him by the leg, I'll pull off his coat when he
gets into the carriage. I'll get my teeth into his hand, I'll bite him.
"See what lengths you can drive a desperate man to!" He may hit me on
the head and they may belabour me from behind. I will shout to the
assembled multitude: "Look at this young puppy who is driving off to
captivate the Circassian girls after letting me spit in his face!"
Of course, after that everything will be over! The office will have
vanished off the face of the earth. I shall be arrested, I shall be
tried, I shall be dismissed from the service, thrown in prison, sent to
Siberia. Never mind! In fifteen years when they let me out of prison I
will trudge off to him, a beggar, in rags. I shall find him in some
provincial town. He will be married and happy. He will have a
grown-up daughter.... I shall say to him: "Look, monster, at my hollow
cheeks and my rags! I've lost everything--my career, my happiness,
art, science, THE WOMAN I LOVED, and all through you. Here are
pistols. I have come to discharge my pistol and ... and I ... forgive
you. Then I shall fire into the air and he will hear nothing more of
me...."
I was actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at
that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's SILVIO and Lermontov's
MASQUERADE. And all at once I felt horribly ashamed, so ashamed that I
stopped the horse, got out of the sledge, and stood still in the snow
in the middle of the street. The driver gazed at me, sighing and
astonished.
What was I to do? I could not go on there--it was evidently stupid,
and I could not leave things as they were, because that would seem as
though ... Heavens, how could I leave things! And after such insults!
"No!" I cried, throwing myself into the sledge again. "It is ordained!
It is fate! Drive on, drive on!"
And in my impatience I punched the sledge-driver on the back of the
neck.
"What are you up to? What are you hitting me for?" the peasant
shouted, but he whipped up his nag so that it began kicking.
The wet snow was falling in big flakes; I unbuttoned myself, regardless
of it. I forgot everything else, for I had finally decided on the
slap, and felt with horror that it was going to happen NOW, AT ONCE,
and that NO FORCE COULD STOP IT. The deserted street lamps gleamed
sullenly in the snowy darkness like torches at a funeral. The snow
drifted under my great-coat, under my coat, under my cravat, and melted
there. I did not wrap myself up--all was lost, anyway.
At last we arrived. I jumped out, almost unconscious, ran up the steps
and began knocking and kicking at the door. I felt fearfully weak,
particularly in my legs and knees. The door was opened quickly as
though they knew I was coming. As a fact, Simonov had warned them that
perhaps another gentleman would arrive, and this was a place in which
one had to give notice and to observe certain precautions. It was one
of those "millinery establishments" which were abolished by the police
a good time ago. By day it really was a shop; but at night, if one had
an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes.
I walked rapidly through the dark shop into the familiar drawing-room,
where there was only one candle burning, and stood still in amazement:
there was no one there. "Where are they?" I asked somebody. But by
now, of course, they had separated. Before me was standing a person
with a stupid smile, the "madam" herself, who had seen me before. A
minute later a door opened and another person came in.
Taking no notice of anything I strode about the room, and, I believe, I
talked to myself. I felt as though I had been saved from death and was
conscious of this, joyfully, all over: I should have given that slap, I
should certainly, certainly have given it! But now they were not here
and ... everything had vanished and changed! I looked round. I could
not realise my condition yet. I looked mechanically at the girl who
had come in: and had a glimpse of a fresh, young, rather pale face,
with straight, dark eyebrows, and with grave, as it were wondering,
eyes that attracted me at once; I should have hated her if she had been
smiling. I began looking at her more intently and, as it were, with
effort. I had not fully collected my thoughts. There was something
simple and good-natured in her face, but something strangely grave. I
am sure that this stood in her way here, and no one of those fools had
noticed her. She could not, however, have been called a beauty, though
she was tall, strong-looking, and well built. She was very simply
dressed. Something loathsome stirred within me. I went straight up to
her.
I chanced to look into the glass. My harassed face struck me as
revolting in the extreme, pale, angry, abject, with dishevelled hair.
"No matter, I am glad of it," I thought; "I am glad that I shall seem
repulsive to her; I like that."
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null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 2, chapter 7 based on the provided context. | part 2, chapter 7|part 2, chapter 10 | The Underground Man launches right back into his "life's a b---h and then you die" speech. He says he's essentially disgusted with Liza's occupation, but if she were something else, he might very well fall in love with her. As such, though, he could never love her, because she's just a slave who has to come when he calls. Even the lowest of workmen, he says, isn't a slave. He adds that Liza isn't selling just her body, she's in fact selling her soul, which she has no right to do. A maiden's treasure, he says, is her love. It's as valuable as a diamond, and a man will do anything to get it. But if she gives away sex without love, why would man strive for her love? In fact, he tells her, not only do men not love her, but they don't respect her, and they laugh at her. If she doesn't believe him, all she has to do is ask one of her clients if he will marry her. When he laughs in her face, it should be proof enough. The Underground Man adds that she can't rely on her youth and good looks, since those will fade fast. He tells her of yet another woman he's seen recently, probably a former prostitute, who was drunk and homeless and kept getting beat up. No, he's not done yet. The Underground Man, after detailing the horrible disease which Liza will probably contract, adds that everyone will yell at her for taking too long to die and for being a burden while she's sick. And after that, when she finally does die, no one will care and no one will come to her funeral, and no one will ever miss her or even remember her name. And then...he stops talking. He's nervous; he knows he is talking "like a book," as she said, but he also realizes that he's had a huge effect on Liza. She's thrust her face into her pillow and is grasping at it with both hands. He feels bad, so he takes her hands and tells her that he's sorry and he didn't mean it. He also gives her his address and tells her to come and see him. She agrees. Then the Underground Man feels awkward and decides he needs to get away. Before he can escape, however, Liza tells him to "wait a minute" while she rushes to another room. She returns with a letter in her hand and shows it to him. It is a love letter, and a very chaste, respectful one at that. Liza explains quickly that she was at a party and met a boy who didn't know she was a prostitute. He fell in love with her there - hence the letter. The Underground Man realizes what's up: she wants him to know that there is a man somewhere who loves her. And even though Liza knows this love will never come to fruition, she can at least keep the letter as "a precious treasure." The Underground Man knows he has to get away immediately, since he has just become aware of a "loathsome truth." |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 7---------
"Oh, hush, Liza! How can you talk about being like a book, when it
makes even me, an outsider, feel sick? Though I don't look at it as an
outsider, for, indeed, it touches me to the heart.... Is it possible,
is it possible that you do not feel sick at being here yourself?
Evidently habit does wonders! God knows what habit can do with anyone.
Can you seriously think that you will never grow old, that you will
always be good-looking, and that they will keep you here for ever and
ever? I say nothing of the loathsomeness of the life here.... Though
let me tell you this about it--about your present life, I mean; here
though you are young now, attractive, nice, with soul and feeling, yet
you know as soon as I came to myself just now I felt at once sick at
being here with you! One can only come here when one is drunk. But if
you were anywhere else, living as good people live, I should perhaps be
more than attracted by you, should fall in love with you, should be
glad of a look from you, let alone a word; I should hang about your
door, should go down on my knees to you, should look upon you as my
betrothed and think it an honour to be allowed to. I should not dare
to have an impure thought about you. But here, you see, I know that I
have only to whistle and you have to come with me whether you like it
or not. I don't consult your wishes, but you mine. The lowest
labourer hires himself as a workman, but he doesn't make a slave of
himself altogether; besides, he knows that he will be free again
presently. But when are you free? Only think what you are giving up
here? What is it you are making a slave of? It is your soul, together
with your body; you are selling your soul which you have no right to
dispose of! You give your love to be outraged by every drunkard!
Love! But that's everything, you know, it's a priceless diamond, it's
a maiden's treasure, love--why, a man would be ready to give his soul,
to face death to gain that love. But how much is your love worth now?
You are sold, all of you, body and soul, and there is no need to strive
for love when you can have everything without love. And you know there
is no greater insult to a girl than that, do you understand? To be
sure, I have heard that they comfort you, poor fools, they let you have
lovers of your own here. But you know that's simply a farce, that's
simply a sham, it's just laughing at you, and you are taken in by it!
Why, do you suppose he really loves you, that lover of yours? I don't
believe it. How can he love you when he knows you may be called away
from him any minute? He would be a low fellow if he did! Will he have
a grain of respect for you? What have you in common with him? He
laughs at you and robs you--that is all his love amounts to! You are
lucky if he does not beat you. Very likely he does beat you, too. Ask
him, if you have got one, whether he will marry you. He will laugh in
your face, if he doesn't spit in it or give you a blow--though maybe he
is not worth a bad halfpenny himself. And for what have you ruined
your life, if you come to think of it? For the coffee they give you to
drink and the plentiful meals? But with what object are they feeding
you up? An honest girl couldn't swallow the food, for she would know
what she was being fed for. You are in debt here, and, of course, you
will always be in debt, and you will go on in debt to the end, till the
visitors here begin to scorn you. And that will soon happen, don't
rely upon your youth--all that flies by express train here, you know.
You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that
she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you
had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth
and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her,
beggared her, robbed her. And don't expect anyone to take your part:
the others, your companions, will attack you, too, win her favour, for
all are in slavery here, and have lost all conscience and pity here
long ago. They have become utterly vile, and nothing on earth is
viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than their abuse. And you
are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth and health and
beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of
five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to
God for that! No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time
and no work to do! Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the
world or ever has been. One would think that the heart alone would be
worn out with tears. And you won't dare to say a word, not half a word
when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were
to blame. You will change to another house, then to a third, then
somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket. There you
will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors
don't know how to be friendly without beating you. You don't believe
that it is so hateful there? Go and look for yourself some time, you
can see with your own eyes. Once, one New Year's Day, I saw a woman at
a door. They had turned her out as a joke, to give her a taste of the
frost because she had been crying so much, and they shut the door
behind her. At nine o'clock in the morning she was already quite
drunk, dishevelled, half-naked, covered with bruises, her face was
powdered, but she had a black-eye, blood was trickling from her nose
and her teeth; some cabman had just given her a drubbing. She was
sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand;
she was crying, wailing something about her luck and beating with the
fish on the steps, and cabmen and drunken soldiers were crowding in the
doorway taunting her. You don't believe that you will ever be like
that? I should be sorry to believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe
ten years, eight years ago that very woman with the salt fish came here
fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil, blushing at every
word. Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready to take offence, not like
the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew what happiness
was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should love.
Do you see how it ended? And what if at that very minute when she was
beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and
dishevelled--what if at that very minute she recalled the pure early
days in her father's house, when she used to go to school and the
neighbour's son watched for her on the way, declaring that he would
love her as long as he lived, that he would devote his life to her, and
when they vowed to love one another for ever and be married as soon as
they were grown up! No, Liza, it would be happy for you if you were to
die soon of consumption in some corner, in some cellar like that woman
just now. In the hospital, do you say? You will be lucky if they take
you, but what if you are still of use to the madam here? Consumption is
a queer disease, it is not like fever. The patient goes on hoping till
the last minute and says he is all right. He deludes himself And that
just suits your madam. Don't doubt it, that's how it is; you have sold
your soul, and what is more you owe money, so you daren't say a word.
But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will turn away from
you, for then there will be nothing to get from you. What's more, they
will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over
dying. However you beg you won't get a drink of water without abuse:
'Whenever are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won't let us sleep
with your moaning, you make the gentlemen sick.' That's true, I have
heard such things said myself. They will thrust you dying into the
filthiest corner in the cellar--in the damp and darkness; what will
your thoughts be, lying there alone? When you die, strange hands will
lay you out, with grumbling and impatience; no one will bless you, no
one will sigh for you, they only want to get rid of you as soon as may
be; they will buy a coffin, take you to the grave as they did that poor
woman today, and celebrate your memory at the tavern. In the grave,
sleet, filth, wet snow--no need to put themselves out for you--'Let her
down, Vanuha; it's just like her luck--even here, she is head-foremost,
the hussy. Shorten the cord, you rascal.' 'It's all right as it is.'
'All right, is it? Why, she's on her side! She was a fellow-creature,
after all! But, never mind, throw the earth on her.' And they won't
care to waste much time quarrelling over you. They will scatter the
wet blue clay as quick as they can and go off to the tavern ... and
there your memory on earth will end; other women have children to go to
their graves, fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh,
nor remembrance; no one in the whole world will ever come to you, your
name will vanish from the face of the earth--as though you had never
existed, never been born at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however
you knock at your coffin lid at night, when the dead arise, however you
cry: 'Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day! My life
was no life at all; my life has been thrown away like a dish-clout; it
was drunk away in the tavern at the Haymarket; let me out, kind people,
to live in the world again.'"
And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in
my throat myself, and ... and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay
and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.
I had reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and
rending her heart, and--and the more I was convinced of it, the more
eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as
possible. It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it
was not merely sport....
I knew I was speaking stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I
could not speak except "like a book." But that did not trouble me: I
knew, I felt that I should be understood and that this very bookishness
might be an assistance. But now, having attained my effect, I was
suddenly panic-stricken. Never before had I witnessed such despair!
She was lying on her face, thrusting her face into the pillow and
clutching it in both hands. Her heart was being torn. Her youthful
body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions. Suppressed sobs
rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and wailing, then she
pressed closer into the pillow: she did not want anyone here, not a
living soul, to know of her anguish and her tears. She bit the pillow,
bit her hand till it bled (I saw that afterwards), or, thrusting her
fingers into her dishevelled hair, seemed rigid with the effort of
restraint, holding her breath and clenching her teeth. I began saying
something, begging her to calm herself, but felt that I did not dare;
and all at once, in a sort of cold shiver, almost in terror, began
fumbling in the dark, trying hurriedly to get dressed to go. It was
dark; though I tried my best I could not finish dressing quickly.
Suddenly I felt a box of matches and a candlestick with a whole candle
in it. As soon as the room was lighted up, Liza sprang up, sat up in
bed, and with a contorted face, with a half insane smile, looked at me
almost senselessly. I sat down beside her and took her hands; she came
to herself, made an impulsive movement towards me, would have caught
hold of me, but did not dare, and slowly bowed her head before me.
"Liza, my dear, I was wrong ... forgive me, my dear," I began, but she
squeezed my hand in her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the
wrong thing and stopped.
"This is my address, Liza, come to me."
"I will come," she answered resolutely, her head still bowed.
"But now I am going, good-bye ... till we meet again."
I got up; she, too, stood up and suddenly flushed all over, gave a
shudder, snatched up a shawl that was lying on a chair and muffled
herself in it to her chin. As she did this she gave another sickly
smile, blushed and looked at me strangely. I felt wretched; I was in
haste to get away--to disappear.
"Wait a minute," she said suddenly, in the passage just at the doorway,
stopping me with her hand on my overcoat. She put down the candle in
hot haste and ran off; evidently she had thought of something or wanted
to show me something. As she ran away she flushed, her eyes shone, and
there was a smile on her lips--what was the meaning of it? Against my
will I waited: she came back a minute later with an expression that
seemed to ask forgiveness for something. In fact, it was not the same
face, not the same look as the evening before: sullen, mistrustful and
obstinate. Her eyes now were imploring, soft, and at the same time
trustful, caressing, timid. The expression with which children look at
people they are very fond of, of whom they are asking a favour. Her
eyes were a light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life, and
capable of expressing love as well as sullen hatred.
Making no explanation, as though I, as a sort of higher being, must
understand everything without explanations, she held out a piece of
paper to me. Her whole face was positively beaming at that instant
with naive, almost childish, triumph. I unfolded it. It was a letter
to her from a medical student or someone of that sort--a very
high-flown and flowery, but extremely respectful, love-letter. I don't
recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown
phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned.
When I had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and
childishly impatient eyes fixed upon me. She fastened her eyes upon my
face and waited impatiently for what I should say. In a few words,
hurriedly, but with a sort of joy and pride, she explained to me that
she had been to a dance somewhere in a private house, a family of "very
nice people, WHO KNEW NOTHING, absolutely nothing, for she had only
come here so lately and it had all happened ... and she hadn't made up
her mind to stay and was certainly going away as soon as she had paid
her debt..." and at that party there had been the student who had
danced with her all the evening. He had talked to her, and it turned
out that he had known her in old days at Riga when he was a child, they
had played together, but a very long time ago--and he knew her parents,
but ABOUT THIS he knew nothing, nothing whatever, and had no suspicion!
And the day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that
letter through the friend with whom she had gone to the party ... and
... well, that was all.
She dropped her shining eyes with a sort of bashfulness as she finished.
The poor girl was keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure,
and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me
to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely
loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully. No doubt that letter
was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But none the less,
I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious
treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she
had thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise
herself in my eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of
her. I said nothing, pressed her hand and went out. I so longed to
get away ... I walked all the way home, in spite of the fact that the
melting snow was still falling in heavy flakes. I was exhausted,
shattered, in bewilderment. But behind the bewilderment the truth was
already gleaming. The loathsome truth.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 10---------
A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in
frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and
peeped through the crack at Liza. She was sitting on the ground with
her head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying. But she
did not go away, and that irritated me. This time she understood it
all. I had insulted her finally, but ... there's no need to describe
it. She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge,
a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred
was added now a PERSONAL HATRED, born of envy.... Though I do not
maintain positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she
certainly did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what
was worse, incapable of loving her.
I know I shall be told that this is incredible--but it is incredible to
be as spiteful and stupid as I was; it may be added that it was strange
I should not love her, or at any rate, appreciate her love. Why is it
strange? In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I
repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral
superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other
sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking
that love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved
object--to tyrannise over her.
Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a
struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral
subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated
object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded
in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life,"
as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to
shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even
guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me,
because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of
ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show
itself in that form.
I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room
and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably
oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted
"peace," to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed
me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.
But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as
though she were unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at
the screen as though to remind her.... She started, sprang up, and
flew to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her
escape from me.... Two minutes later she came from behind the screen
and looked with heavy eyes at me. I gave a spiteful grin, which was
forced, however, to KEEP UP APPEARANCES, and I turned away from her
eyes.
"Good-bye," she said, going towards the door.
I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and
closed it again. Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the
other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway....
I did mean a moment since to tell a lie--to write that I did this
accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through
losing my head. But I don't want to lie, and so I will say straight
out that I opened her hand and put the money in it ... from spite. It
came into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room
and she was sitting behind the screen. But this I can say for certain:
though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the
heart, but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so
purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that
I could not even keep it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid
seeing her, and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza. I opened
the door in the passage and began listening.
"Liza! Liza!" I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.
There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on
the stairs.
"Liza!" I cried, more loudly.
No answer. But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open
heavily with a creak and slam violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.
She had gone. I went back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly
oppressed.
I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and
looked aimlessly before me. A minute passed, suddenly I started;
straight before me on the table I saw.... In short, I saw a crumpled
blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute
before. It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other
in the flat. So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.
Well! I might have expected that she would do that. Might I have
expected it? No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for
my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so. I
could not endure it. A minute later I flew like a madman to dress,
flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her. She
could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the
street.
It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling
almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as
though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to
be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I
ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.
Where had she gone? And why was I running after her?
Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet,
to entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was
being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But--what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate
her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?
Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?
I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.
"And will it not be better?" I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. "Will it
not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for
ever? Resentment--why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and
painful consciousness! Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and
have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never
die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her--the
feeling of insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred ... h'm!
... perhaps, too, by forgiveness.... Will all that make things easier
for her though? ..."
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better--cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is
better?
So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain
in my soul. Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could
there have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that
I should turn back half-way? I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.
* * * * *
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory.
I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes"
here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell
long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally
rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through
divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world,
would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the
traits for an anti-hero are EXPRESSLY gathered together here, and what
matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all
divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for
real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come
almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and
we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we
fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something
else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if
our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for
instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the
spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you
... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know
that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin
shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your
miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of
us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of
us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life
carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and
what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have
found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all,
there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully!
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it
is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in
confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling
to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and
blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive
to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and
that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it.
Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I
don't want to write more from "Underground."
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 1, chapter 1 based on the provided context. | part 1, chapter 1|part 1, chapter 2|part 1, chapter 3|part 1, chapter 4 | Dostoevsky immediately introduces us into the mind of his forty-year-old Underground Man, who describes himself as a "sick", "spiteful", "most unpleasant man" with a liver disease for which he refuses to seek treatment "out of spite. Throughout the man's speech, he addresses a formal audience he calls "distinguished gentleman"-more out of sarcasm than respect. Yet this Underground Man's soliloquy is far from an elegant and polished masterpiece-much of it is confusing and almost incoherent. The UM himself admits that some of this confusion is a result of his life's confusion-a life that swarms with "contradictory elements" that torment him constantly. He is also a man who cannot act as others do. Though he hates this spiteful part of him, this inability to "become anything," he does, however, take some kind of pride in the fact that he is superior in intelligence to those around him. He takes great pains to explain that because he is so intelligent, he is unable to act. He will elaborate on this point in future chapters |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 1---------
I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a
doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and
doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to
respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be
superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a
doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I
understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely
that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well
aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I
know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and
no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite.
My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
I have been going on like that for a long time--twenty years. Now I am
forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I
was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I
did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in
that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote
it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself
that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch
it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I
sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when
I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the
most part they were all timid people--of course, they were petitioners.
But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not
endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a
disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over
that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it.
That happened in my youth, though.
But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?
Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that
continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly
conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an
embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and
amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll
to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should
be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I
should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with
shame for months after. That was my way.
I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was
lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and
with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was
conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely
opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these
opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life
and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not
let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me
till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and--sickened me, at
last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that
I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your
forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ...
However, I assure you I do not care if you are....
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to
become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an
honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life
in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation
that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is
only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth
century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless
creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited
creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old
now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is
extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is
vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely
and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I
tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all
these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that
to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to
sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath
...
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are
mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you
imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble
(and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I
am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the
service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that
reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand
roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled
down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I
have settled down in it. My room is a wretched, horrid one in the
outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured
from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her.
I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my
small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all
that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and
monitors.... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away
from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is
absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 2---------
I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not,
why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I
have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to
that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a
real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have
been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is,
half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated
man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal
ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional
town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and
unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance,
to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is
more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my
officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and
even swagger over them?
Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on
their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not
dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded
that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in
fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a
minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the
very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all
that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it
would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do
such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all,
perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was
"sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the
more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was
that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it
were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal
condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last
all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended
by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was
perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what
agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same
with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a
secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the
point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in
returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,
acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action
again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly
gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at
last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness,
and at last--into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into
enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep
wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I
will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness
of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had
reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not
be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could
become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you
to change into something different you would most likely not wish to
change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because
perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in
accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness,
and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that
consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely
nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness,
that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any
consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he
actually is a scoundrel. But enough.... Ech, I have talked a lot of
nonsense, but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be
explained? But I will explain it. I will get to the bottom of it!
That is why I have taken up my pen....
I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious
and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I
sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the
face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in
earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that
a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but
in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one
is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And
when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being
rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is,
look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the
most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to
blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of
nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of
the people surrounding me. (I have always considered myself cleverer
than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe
it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my
life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people
straight in the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of
its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do
anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my assailant
would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot
forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to
the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same. Finally, even if I
had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary
to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on
any one for anything because I should certainly never have made up my
mind to do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not have
made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few words.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 3---------
With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for
themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed,
let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is
nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being. Such a
gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull
with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the
way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and
men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an
evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is
not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very
glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they
are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something
tranquillising, morally soothing, final--maybe even something
mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his
tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the
face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal
man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful,
in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can
call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis
of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has
come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this
is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this
retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his
antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely
thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely
conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself,
his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do
so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in
action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and
it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too.
There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME
DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that
spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. For through his innate stupidity
the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in
consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in
the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act
of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless
mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the
form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many
unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of
fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of
the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their
healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss
all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt
in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its
mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our
insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in
cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years
together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most
ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still
more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own
imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it
will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will
invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge
itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind
the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to
vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its
efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom
it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself.
On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest
accumulated over all the years and ...
But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for
forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful
hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires
turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined
for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that
strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so
difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even
simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of
it. "Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people
will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the
face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,
perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and
so I speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But
set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the
face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you
may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given
so few slaps in the face during my life. But enough ... not another
word on that subject of such extreme interest to you.
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not
understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain
circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though
this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have
said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The
impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the
laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As
soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a
monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they
prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to
you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this
conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties
and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it,
there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just
try refuting it.
"Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a
case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she
has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or
dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently
all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so
on."
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and
arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact
that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall
by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to
knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because
it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did
contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as
twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How much better
it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all the
impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of
those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be
reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical
combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting
theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame,
though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least,
and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into
luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for
you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never
will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a
bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these
uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the
more you do not know, the worse the ache.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 4---------
"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you
cry, with a laugh.
"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had
toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of
course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not
candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole
point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans;
if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good
example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the
first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating
to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you
spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same
while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no
enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in
spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your
teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and
if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that
finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is
left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your
wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.
Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,
end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree
of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans
of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache,
on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan,
not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has
toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by
progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the
soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His
moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days
and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no
sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is
only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows
that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his
whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of
faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently,
more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing
himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these
recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.
As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your
hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake
then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a
hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person,
an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see
through me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let
it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a
minute...." You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems
our development and our consciousness must go further to understand
all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My
jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect
myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of part 1, chapter 5 using the context provided. | part 1, chapter 5|part 1, chapter 6|part 1, chapter 7 | Here we delve deeper into the mind of this deeply disturbed individual. The UM, explaining what it was like to grow up, says that he could never find any virtue or justice in his world, and therefore could only use spite or conscious deception to find reasons to act |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 5---------
Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of
his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? I am
not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse. And, indeed, I
could never endure saying, "Forgive me, Papa, I won't do it again," not
because I am incapable of saying that--on the contrary, perhaps just
because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too. As
though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to
blame in any way. That was the nastiest part of it. At the same time
I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of
course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there
was a sick feeling in my heart at the time.... For that one could not
blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have
continually all my life offended me more than anything. It is
loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then. Of
course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all
a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence,
this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry
myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with
one's hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. That is really
it. Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will
understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up
a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has
happened to me--well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose,
for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at
nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last
to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an
impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it
in myself. Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love.
I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart
there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but
yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside
myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI;
inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of
consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious
sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I
repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action
are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that?
I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate
and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade
themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have
found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are
at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you
know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of
doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest?
Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my
foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in
reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws
after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That
is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection. It
must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result of it
in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of
vengeance. (I am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man
revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found
a primary cause, that is, justice. And so he is at rest on all sides,
and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully,
being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing. But I see no
justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently
if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of
course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve
quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is
not a cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began
with that just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed
laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical
disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your
reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes
not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no
one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left
again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up
with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause.
And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly,
without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at
least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands
folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin
despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a
soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I
consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have
been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a
babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to
be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is
babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 6---------
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least
have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could
have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how
very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would
mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a
member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in
continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself
all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as
his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply
with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite
right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should
have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That "sublime
and beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for
myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking
to the health of everything "sublime and beautiful." I should have
snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to
drain it to all that is "sublime and beautiful." I should then have
turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest,
unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the
beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An artist,
for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I
love all that is "sublime and beautiful." An author has written AS YOU
WILL: at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love
all that is "sublime and beautiful."
I should claim respect for doing so. I should persecute anyone who
would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with
dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good
round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have
established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset! Here
is something real and solid!" And, say what you like, it is very
agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 7---------
But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first
announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things
because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were
enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man
would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and
noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage,
he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all
know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?
Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place,
when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has
acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions
of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background
and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully,
struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the
darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter
to them than any advantage.... Advantage! What is advantage? And will
you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the
advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's
advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his
desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not
advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole
principle falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases?
You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's
advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some
which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included
under any classification? You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of
my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the
averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your
advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so
on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly
in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine,
too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that
all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon
up human advantages invariably leave out one? They don't even take it
into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the
whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no greater matter, they
would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.
But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any
classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for
instance ... Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend! When he
prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to
you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with
the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with
excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony
he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own
interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter
of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through
something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will
go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to
what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws
of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ... I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to
almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical)
there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which
we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than
all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready
to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason,
honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in opposition to all those
excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental,
most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but
it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll
make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that
it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every
system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In
fact, it upsets everything. But before I mention this advantage to
you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly
declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining
to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably
striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and
noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes,
logical exercises. Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of
mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind
almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle,
that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less
bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does seem to
follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems
and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth
intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring
instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams,
and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole
of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon--the
Great and also the present one. Take North America--the eternal union.
Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that
civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind
is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely
nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man
may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already
happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas
and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so
conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they
are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to
us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more
bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In
old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace
exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy
than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that
Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking
gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from
their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the
comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too,
because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that
though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages,
he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would
dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn
when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a
normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from
INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set
his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say,
science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous
luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own,
and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the
stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws
of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it,
but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have
only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to
answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which
everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will
be no more incidents or adventures in the world.
Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be
established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical
exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the
twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In
fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing
(this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully
dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be
calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be
extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything.
It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that
would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I
dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all
stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like
him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least
surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of
general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a
reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his
arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to
send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more
at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what
is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the
nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one
would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere
and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose
and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may
choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice,
one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at
times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we
have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And
how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally
advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice,
whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And
choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 1, chapter 8 based on the provided context. | part 1, chapter 8|part 1, chapter 9|part 1, chapter 10|chapter 11 | Next, he confronts the counter-argument that man's "free will" is just an illusion-just a scientific formula of biological chemicals. The UM says that if this were ever the case, man would cease being human altogether and become an organ stop. Later, he even suggests that this liberty of choice, this freedom to be stupid, is a right |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 8---------
"Ha! ha! ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality,
say what you like," you will interpose with a chuckle. "Science has
succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and
what is called freedom of will is nothing else than--"
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was
rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows
what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing,
but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled myself up. And
here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day
discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an
explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they
develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on,
that is a real mathematical formula--then, most likely, man will at
once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who
would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed
from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for
what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if
not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the
chances--can such a thing happen or not?
"H'm!" you decide. "Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view
of our advantage. We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our
foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a
supposed advantage. But when all that is explained and worked out on
paper (which is perfectly possible, for it is contemptible and
senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never
understand), then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist.
For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then
reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our
reason to be SENSELESS in our desires, and in that way knowingly act
against reason and desire to injure ourselves. And as all choice and
reasoning can be really calculated--because there will some day be
discovered the laws of our so-called free will--so, joking apart, there
may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we
really shall choose in accordance with it. If, for instance, some day
they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone
because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to do
it in that particular way, what FREEDOM is left me, especially if I am
a learned man and have taken my degree somewhere? Then I should be
able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short,
if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do;
anyway, we should have to understand that. And, in fact, we ought
unwearyingly to repeat to ourselves that at such and such a time and in
such and such circumstances nature does not ask our leave; that we have
got to take her as she is and not fashion her to suit our fancy, and if
we really aspire to formulas and tables of rules, and well, even ... to
the chemical retort, there's no help for it, we must accept the retort
too, or else it will be accepted without our consent...."
Yes, but here I come to a stop! Gentlemen, you must excuse me for
being over-philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground!
Allow me to indulge my fancy. You see, gentlemen, reason is an
excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but
reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will
is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life
including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this
manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply
extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to
live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my
capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my
capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it
has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn;
this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature
acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or
unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect,
gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me
again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the
future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous
to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly
agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time,
there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely,
desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very
stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even
what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only
what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of
ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than
anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular
it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us
obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason
concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us
what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our
individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most
precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in
agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept
within bounds. It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But
very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly
opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is
profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy? Gentlemen, let us suppose
that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if
only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is
wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful!
Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition
of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his
worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity,
perpetual--from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period.
Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long
been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than
moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the
history of mankind. What will you see? Is it a grand spectacle?
Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's
worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that
some say that it is the work of man's hands, while others maintain that
it has been created by nature herself. Is it many-coloured? May be it
is many-coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and
civilian, of all peoples in all ages--that alone is worth something,
and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of
it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? May be
it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now,
they fought first and they fought last--you will admit, that it is
almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about the
history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered
imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The
very word sticks in one's throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing
that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life
moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it
their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as
possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in
order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally
in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or
later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a
most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he
is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every
earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but
bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic
prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat
cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even
then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some
nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately
desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply
to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic
element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he
will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though
that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a
piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that
soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that
is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if
this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then
he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something
perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if
he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will
contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will
launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his
privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may
be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince
himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all
this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and
curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand
would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would
purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I
believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems
to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a
man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be
by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to
rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on
something we don't know?
You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one
is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my
will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own
normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.
Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to
tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make
four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant
that!
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 9---------
Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not
brilliant, but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am,
perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by
questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of
their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and
good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also
that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to
the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how
do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to
go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that
not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the
conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous
for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this
is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law
of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to
defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal,
predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in
engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads,
WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go
off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road,
and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may
be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always
does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less
important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to
save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving
way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all
the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact
beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction
and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a
couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and
destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it)
because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and
completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only
loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it
at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want
to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES
ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the
ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of
that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.
With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the
ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to
their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and
incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the
process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no
saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind
is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other
words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must
always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four,
and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of
death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical
certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing
but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices
his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I
assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing
for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at
least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to
the police-station--and there is occupation for a week. But where can
man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when
he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but
does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very
absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind
of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all,
something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a
piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands
with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice
two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything
its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the
normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to
welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as
regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides
well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering
is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes
extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a
fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that;
only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as
my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to
me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very
pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for
well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being
guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in
vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it
is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the
good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it?
And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is,
destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of
consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that
consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes
it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for
instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you
have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to
understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five
senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to
consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at
least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up.
Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 10---------
You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed--a
palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a
long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this
edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one
cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly.
You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into
it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a
palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say
that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion. Yes, I
answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.
But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not
the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live
in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate
it when you have changed my preference. Well, do change it, allure me
with something else, give me another ideal. But meanwhile I will not
take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle
dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and
that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the
old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. But what does it
matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since
it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.
Perhaps you are laughing again? Laugh away; I will put up with any
mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I
know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a
recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature
and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my desires a
block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand
years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out. Destroy
my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will
follow you. You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble;
but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing
things seriously; but if you won't deign to give me your attention, I
will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole.
But while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were
withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Don't remind me
that I have just rejected the palace of crystal for the sole reason
that one cannot put out one's tongue at it. I did not say because I am
so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was,
that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not
put out one's tongue. On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut
off out of gratitude if things could be so arranged that I should lose
all desire to put it out. It is not my fault that things cannot be so
arranged, and that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am
I made with such desires? Can I have been constructed simply in order
to come to the conclusion that all my construction is a cheat? Can
this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it.
But do you know what: I am convinced that we underground folk ought to
be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without
speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we
talk and talk and talk....
----------CHAPTER 11---------
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do
nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my
bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now
(though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground
life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can ... Oh, but
even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not
underground that is better, but something different, quite different,
for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I
myself believed in anything of what I have just written. I swear to
you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have
written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at
the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler.
"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. "I ought to
put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then
come to you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached!
How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?"
"Isn't that shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps,
wagging your heads contemptuously. "You thirst for life and try to
settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how persistent,
how insolent are your sallies, and at the same time what a scare you
are in! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say impudent
things and are in continual alarm and apologising for them. You
declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to
ingratiate yourself in our good opinion. You declare that you are
gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to
amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are
evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may, perhaps,
have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering.
You may have sincerity, but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest
vanity you expose your sincerity to publicity and ignominy. You
doubtlessly mean to say something, but hide your last word through
fear, because you have not the resolution to utter it, and only have a
cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure
of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened
and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without
a pure heart. And how intrusive you are, how you insist and grimace!
Lies, lies, lies!"
Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is
from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through
a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was
nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have learned it by
heart and it has taken a literary form....
But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all
this and give it to you to read too? And another problem: why do I
call you "gentlemen," why do I address you as though you really were my
readers? Such confessions as I intend to make are never printed nor
given to other people to read. Anyway, I am not strong-minded enough
for that, and I don't see why I should be. But you see a fancy has
occurred to me and I want to realise it at all costs. Let me explain.
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but
only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would
not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in
secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even
to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored
away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such
things in his mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember
some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even
with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but
have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the
experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and
not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis,
that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility,
and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau
certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even
intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right;
I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity,
attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well
conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made
their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish
to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing
readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that
form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never have readers. I have
made this plain already ...
I don't wish to be hampered by any restrictions in the compilation of
my notes. I shall not attempt any system or method. I will jot things
down as I remember them.
But here, perhaps, someone will catch at the word and ask me: if you
really don't reckon on readers, why do you make such compacts with
yourself--and on paper too--that is, that you won't attempt any system
or method, that you jot things down as you remember them, and so on,
and so on? Why are you explaining? Why do you apologise?
Well, there it is, I answer.
There is a whole psychology in all this, though. Perhaps it is simply
that I am a coward. And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience
before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write. There
are perhaps thousands of reasons. Again, what is my object precisely
in writing? If it is not for the benefit of the public why should I
not simply recall these incidents in my own mind without putting them
on paper?
Quite so; but yet it is more imposing on paper. There is something
more impressive in it; I shall be better able to criticise myself and
improve my style. Besides, I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from
writing. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory
of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and
has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid
of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such
reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and
oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I
should get rid of it. Why not try?
Besides, I am bored, and I never have anything to do. Writing will be
a sort of work. They say work makes man kind-hearted and honest.
Well, here is a chance for me, anyway.
Snow is falling today, yellow and dingy. It fell yesterday, too, and a
few days ago. I fancy it is the wet snow that has reminded me of that
incident which I cannot shake off now. And so let it be a story A
PROPOS of the falling snow.
PART II
A Propos of the Wet Snow
When from dark error's subjugation
My words of passionate exhortation
Had wrenched thy fainting spirit free;
And writhing prone in thine affliction
Thou didst recall with malediction
The vice that had encompassed thee:
And when thy slumbering conscience, fretting
By recollection's torturing flame,
Thou didst reveal the hideous setting
Of thy life's current ere I came:
When suddenly I saw thee sicken,
And weeping, hide thine anguished face,
Revolted, maddened, horror-stricken,
At memories of foul disgrace.
NEKRASSOV
(translated by Juliet Soskice).
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 2, chapter 5 based on the provided context. | part 2, chapter 2|part 2, chapter 5 | Entering the establishment, the Underground Man prepares to start another fight, which can only find resolution in a duel. Inside he doesn't rendezvous with his acquaintances, however, but notices a certain woman instead |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 2---------
But the period of my dissipation would end and I always felt very sick
afterwards. It was followed by remorse--I tried to drive it away; I
felt too sick. By degrees, however, I grew used to that too. I grew
used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned myself to enduring
it. But I had a means of escape that reconciled everything--that was
to find refuge in "the sublime and the beautiful," in dreams, of
course. I was a terrible dreamer, I would dream for three months on
end, tucked away in my corner, and you may believe me that at those
moments I had no resemblance to the gentleman who, in the perturbation
of his chicken heart, put a collar of German beaver on his great-coat.
I suddenly became a hero. I would not have admitted my six-foot
lieutenant even if he had called on me. I could not even picture him
before me then. What were my dreams and how I could satisfy myself
with them--it is hard to say now, but at the time I was satisfied with
them. Though, indeed, even now, I am to some extent satisfied with
them. Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a spell of
dissipation; they came with remorse and with tears, with curses and
transports. There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such
happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on
my honour. I had faith, hope, love. I believed blindly at such times
that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would
suddenly open out, expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable
activity--beneficent, good, and, above all, READY MADE (what sort of
activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should be all
ready for me)--would rise up before me--and I should come out into the
light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.
Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and
for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in
reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud--there was
nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I
comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and
the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful
to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and
so he might defile himself. It is worth noting that these attacks of
the "sublime and the beautiful" visited me even during the period of
dissipation and just at the times when I was touching the bottom. They
came in separate spurts, as though reminding me of themselves, but did
not banish the dissipation by their appearance. On the contrary, they
seemed to add a zest to it by contrast, and were only sufficiently
present to serve as an appetising sauce. That sauce was made up of
contradictions and sufferings, of agonising inward analysis, and all
these pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance
to my dissipation--in fact, completely answered the purpose of an
appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I
could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct
debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What
could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the
street? No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all.
And what loving-kindness, oh Lord, what loving-kindness I felt at times
in those dreams of mine! in those "flights into the sublime and the
beautiful"; though it was fantastic love, though it was never applied
to anything human in reality, yet there was so much of this love that
one did not feel afterwards even the impulse to apply it in reality;
that would have been superfluous. Everything, however, passed
satisfactorily by a lazy and fascinating transition into the sphere of
art, that is, into the beautiful forms of life, lying ready, largely
stolen from the poets and novelists and adapted to all sorts of needs
and uses. I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of
course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to
recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a
grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and
immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed
before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not
merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful"
something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what
idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and
hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against
the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would
be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then
there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on
the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred
to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes,
and so on, and so on--as though you did not know all about it? You
will say that it is vulgar and contemptible to drag all this into
public after all the tears and transports which I have myself
confessed. But why is it contemptible? Can you imagine that I am
ashamed of it all, and that it was stupider than anything in your life,
gentlemen? And I can assure you that some of these fancies were by no
means badly composed.... It did not all happen on the shores of Lake
Como. And yet you are right--it really is vulgar and contemptible.
And most contemptible of all it is that now I am attempting to justify
myself to you. And even more contemptible than that is my making this
remark now. But that's enough, or there will be no end to it; each
step will be more contemptible than the last....
I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time
without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To
plunge into society meant to visit my superior at the office, Anton
Antonitch Syetotchkin. He was the only permanent acquaintance I have
had in my life, and I wonder at the fact myself now. But I only went
to see him when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached
such a point of bliss that it became essential at once to embrace my
fellows and all mankind; and for that purpose I needed, at least, one
human being, actually existing. I had to call on Anton Antonitch,
however, on Tuesday--his at-home day; so I had always to time my
passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a
Tuesday.
This Anton Antonitch lived on the fourth storey in a house in Five
Corners, in four low-pitched rooms, one smaller than the other, of a
particularly frugal and sallow appearance. He had two daughters and
their aunt, who used to pour out the tea. Of the daughters one was
thirteen and another fourteen, they both had snub noses, and I was
awfully shy of them because they were always whispering and giggling
together. The master of the house usually sat in his study on a
leather couch in front of the table with some grey-headed gentleman,
usually a colleague from our office or some other department. I never
saw more than two or three visitors there, always the same. They
talked about the excise duty; about business in the senate, about
salaries, about promotions, about His Excellency, and the best means of
pleasing him, and so on. I had the patience to sit like a fool beside
these people for four hours at a stretch, listening to them without
knowing what to say to them or venturing to say a word. I became
stupefied, several times I felt myself perspiring, I was overcome by a
sort of paralysis; but this was pleasant and good for me. On returning
home I deferred for a time my desire to embrace all mankind.
I had however one other acquaintance of a sort, Simonov, who was an old
schoolfellow. I had a number of schoolfellows, indeed, in Petersburg,
but I did not associate with them and had even given up nodding to them
in the street. I believe I had transferred into the department I was
in simply to avoid their company and to cut off all connection with my
hateful childhood. Curses on that school and all those terrible years
of penal servitude! In short, I parted from my schoolfellows as soon
as I got out into the world. There were two or three left to whom I
nodded in the street. One of them was Simonov, who had in no way been
distinguished at school, was of a quiet and equable disposition; but I
discovered in him a certain independence of character and even honesty
I don't even suppose that he was particularly stupid. I had at one
time spent some rather soulful moments with him, but these had not
lasted long and had somehow been suddenly clouded over. He was
evidently uncomfortable at these reminiscences, and was, I fancy,
always afraid that I might take up the same tone again. I suspected
that he had an aversion for me, but still I went on going to see him,
not being quite certain of it.
And so on one occasion, unable to endure my solitude and knowing that
as it was Thursday Anton Antonitch's door would be closed, I thought of
Simonov. Climbing up to his fourth storey I was thinking that the man
disliked me and that it was a mistake to go and see him. But as it
always happened that such reflections impelled me, as though purposely,
to put myself into a false position, I went in. It was almost a year
since I had last seen Simonov.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 5---------
"So this is it, this is it at last--contact with real life," I muttered
as I ran headlong downstairs. "This is very different from the Pope's
leaving Rome and going to Brazil, very different from the ball on Lake
Como!"
"You are a scoundrel," a thought flashed through my mind, "if you laugh
at this now."
"No matter!" I cried, answering myself. "Now everything is lost!"
There was no trace to be seen of them, but that made no difference--I
knew where they had gone.
At the steps was standing a solitary night sledge-driver in a rough
peasant coat, powdered over with the still falling, wet, and as it were
warm, snow. It was hot and steamy. The little shaggy piebald horse
was also covered with snow and coughing, I remember that very well. I
made a rush for the roughly made sledge; but as soon as I raised my
foot to get into it, the recollection of how Simonov had just given me
six roubles seemed to double me up and I tumbled into the sledge like a
sack.
"No, I must do a great deal to make up for all that," I cried. "But I
will make up for it or perish on the spot this very night. Start!"
We set off. There was a perfect whirl in my head.
"They won't go down on their knees to beg for my friendship. That is a
mirage, cheap mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastical--that's
another ball on Lake Como. And so I am bound to slap Zverkov's face!
It is my duty to. And so it is settled; I am flying to give him a slap
in the face. Hurry up!"
The driver tugged at the reins.
"As soon as I go in I'll give it him. Ought I before giving him the
slap to say a few words by way of preface? No. I'll simply go in and
give it him. They will all be sitting in the drawing-room, and he with
Olympia on the sofa. That damned Olympia! She laughed at my looks on
one occasion and refused me. I'll pull Olympia's hair, pull Zverkov's
ears! No, better one ear, and pull him by it round the room. Maybe
they will all begin beating me and will kick me out. That's most
likely, indeed. No matter! Anyway, I shall first slap him; the
initiative will be mine; and by the laws of honour that is everything:
he will be branded and cannot wipe off the slap by any blows, by
nothing but a duel. He will be forced to fight. And let them beat me
now. Let them, the ungrateful wretches! Trudolyubov will beat me
hardest, he is so strong; Ferfitchkin will be sure to catch hold
sideways and tug at my hair. But no matter, no matter! That's what I
am going for. The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy
of it all! When they drag me to the door I shall call out to them that
in reality they are not worth my little finger. Get on, driver, get
on!" I cried to the driver. He started and flicked his whip, I shouted
so savagely.
"We shall fight at daybreak, that's a settled thing. I've done with
the office. Ferfitchkin made a joke about it just now. But where can
I get pistols? Nonsense! I'll get my salary in advance and buy them.
And powder, and bullets? That's the second's business. And how can it
all be done by daybreak? and where am I to get a second? I have no
friends. Nonsense!" I cried, lashing myself up more and more. "It's of
no consequence! The first person I meet in the street is bound to be my
second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of water.
The most eccentric things may happen. Even if I were to ask the
director himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to
consent, if only from a feeling of chivalry, and to keep the secret!
Anton Antonitch...."
The fact is, that at that very minute the disgusting absurdity of my
plan and the other side of the question was clearer and more vivid to
my imagination than it could be to anyone on earth. But ....
"Get on, driver, get on, you rascal, get on!"
"Ugh, sir!" said the son of toil.
Cold shivers suddenly ran down me. Wouldn't it be better ... to go
straight home? My God, my God! Why did I invite myself to this dinner
yesterday? But no, it's impossible. And my walking up and down for
three hours from the table to the stove? No, they, they and no one
else must pay for my walking up and down! They must wipe out this
dishonour! Drive on!
And what if they give me into custody? They won't dare! They'll be
afraid of the scandal. And what if Zverkov is so contemptuous that he
refuses to fight a duel? He is sure to; but in that case I'll show
them ... I will turn up at the posting station when he's setting off
tomorrow, I'll catch him by the leg, I'll pull off his coat when he
gets into the carriage. I'll get my teeth into his hand, I'll bite him.
"See what lengths you can drive a desperate man to!" He may hit me on
the head and they may belabour me from behind. I will shout to the
assembled multitude: "Look at this young puppy who is driving off to
captivate the Circassian girls after letting me spit in his face!"
Of course, after that everything will be over! The office will have
vanished off the face of the earth. I shall be arrested, I shall be
tried, I shall be dismissed from the service, thrown in prison, sent to
Siberia. Never mind! In fifteen years when they let me out of prison I
will trudge off to him, a beggar, in rags. I shall find him in some
provincial town. He will be married and happy. He will have a
grown-up daughter.... I shall say to him: "Look, monster, at my hollow
cheeks and my rags! I've lost everything--my career, my happiness,
art, science, THE WOMAN I LOVED, and all through you. Here are
pistols. I have come to discharge my pistol and ... and I ... forgive
you. Then I shall fire into the air and he will hear nothing more of
me...."
I was actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at
that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's SILVIO and Lermontov's
MASQUERADE. And all at once I felt horribly ashamed, so ashamed that I
stopped the horse, got out of the sledge, and stood still in the snow
in the middle of the street. The driver gazed at me, sighing and
astonished.
What was I to do? I could not go on there--it was evidently stupid,
and I could not leave things as they were, because that would seem as
though ... Heavens, how could I leave things! And after such insults!
"No!" I cried, throwing myself into the sledge again. "It is ordained!
It is fate! Drive on, drive on!"
And in my impatience I punched the sledge-driver on the back of the
neck.
"What are you up to? What are you hitting me for?" the peasant
shouted, but he whipped up his nag so that it began kicking.
The wet snow was falling in big flakes; I unbuttoned myself, regardless
of it. I forgot everything else, for I had finally decided on the
slap, and felt with horror that it was going to happen NOW, AT ONCE,
and that NO FORCE COULD STOP IT. The deserted street lamps gleamed
sullenly in the snowy darkness like torches at a funeral. The snow
drifted under my great-coat, under my coat, under my cravat, and melted
there. I did not wrap myself up--all was lost, anyway.
At last we arrived. I jumped out, almost unconscious, ran up the steps
and began knocking and kicking at the door. I felt fearfully weak,
particularly in my legs and knees. The door was opened quickly as
though they knew I was coming. As a fact, Simonov had warned them that
perhaps another gentleman would arrive, and this was a place in which
one had to give notice and to observe certain precautions. It was one
of those "millinery establishments" which were abolished by the police
a good time ago. By day it really was a shop; but at night, if one had
an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes.
I walked rapidly through the dark shop into the familiar drawing-room,
where there was only one candle burning, and stood still in amazement:
there was no one there. "Where are they?" I asked somebody. But by
now, of course, they had separated. Before me was standing a person
with a stupid smile, the "madam" herself, who had seen me before. A
minute later a door opened and another person came in.
Taking no notice of anything I strode about the room, and, I believe, I
talked to myself. I felt as though I had been saved from death and was
conscious of this, joyfully, all over: I should have given that slap, I
should certainly, certainly have given it! But now they were not here
and ... everything had vanished and changed! I looked round. I could
not realise my condition yet. I looked mechanically at the girl who
had come in: and had a glimpse of a fresh, young, rather pale face,
with straight, dark eyebrows, and with grave, as it were wondering,
eyes that attracted me at once; I should have hated her if she had been
smiling. I began looking at her more intently and, as it were, with
effort. I had not fully collected my thoughts. There was something
simple and good-natured in her face, but something strangely grave. I
am sure that this stood in her way here, and no one of those fools had
noticed her. She could not, however, have been called a beauty, though
she was tall, strong-looking, and well built. She was very simply
dressed. Something loathsome stirred within me. I went straight up to
her.
I chanced to look into the glass. My harassed face struck me as
revolting in the extreme, pale, angry, abject, with dishevelled hair.
"No matter, I am glad of it," I thought; "I am glad that I shall seem
repulsive to her; I like that."
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for part 2 chapter 10 with the given context. | null | The UM realizes that his idea of love is simply "tyrannizing and demonstrating moral superiority." For this reason he tries to give her a five-ruble note; but she doesn't accept it, making him even more miserable. For the UM realizes that his love has been tainted by his books, by his head. Liza, on the other hand, shows him true love, love from the heart-selfless love. Thus, the UM concludes that he has ruined his life "through moral decay in corner." Not living up to his own self-framed image of himself as a hero, he is, indeed, the epitome of an anti-hero. Lastly, he returns to his idea that suffering and anguish can be man's most advantageous advantage. He finds a certain satisfaction and truthfulness in his own suffering, and hopes that Liza will find a similar satisfaction, despite the obvious hardship and grief that the said suffering will entail. |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 7---------
"Oh, hush, Liza! How can you talk about being like a book, when it
makes even me, an outsider, feel sick? Though I don't look at it as an
outsider, for, indeed, it touches me to the heart.... Is it possible,
is it possible that you do not feel sick at being here yourself?
Evidently habit does wonders! God knows what habit can do with anyone.
Can you seriously think that you will never grow old, that you will
always be good-looking, and that they will keep you here for ever and
ever? I say nothing of the loathsomeness of the life here.... Though
let me tell you this about it--about your present life, I mean; here
though you are young now, attractive, nice, with soul and feeling, yet
you know as soon as I came to myself just now I felt at once sick at
being here with you! One can only come here when one is drunk. But if
you were anywhere else, living as good people live, I should perhaps be
more than attracted by you, should fall in love with you, should be
glad of a look from you, let alone a word; I should hang about your
door, should go down on my knees to you, should look upon you as my
betrothed and think it an honour to be allowed to. I should not dare
to have an impure thought about you. But here, you see, I know that I
have only to whistle and you have to come with me whether you like it
or not. I don't consult your wishes, but you mine. The lowest
labourer hires himself as a workman, but he doesn't make a slave of
himself altogether; besides, he knows that he will be free again
presently. But when are you free? Only think what you are giving up
here? What is it you are making a slave of? It is your soul, together
with your body; you are selling your soul which you have no right to
dispose of! You give your love to be outraged by every drunkard!
Love! But that's everything, you know, it's a priceless diamond, it's
a maiden's treasure, love--why, a man would be ready to give his soul,
to face death to gain that love. But how much is your love worth now?
You are sold, all of you, body and soul, and there is no need to strive
for love when you can have everything without love. And you know there
is no greater insult to a girl than that, do you understand? To be
sure, I have heard that they comfort you, poor fools, they let you have
lovers of your own here. But you know that's simply a farce, that's
simply a sham, it's just laughing at you, and you are taken in by it!
Why, do you suppose he really loves you, that lover of yours? I don't
believe it. How can he love you when he knows you may be called away
from him any minute? He would be a low fellow if he did! Will he have
a grain of respect for you? What have you in common with him? He
laughs at you and robs you--that is all his love amounts to! You are
lucky if he does not beat you. Very likely he does beat you, too. Ask
him, if you have got one, whether he will marry you. He will laugh in
your face, if he doesn't spit in it or give you a blow--though maybe he
is not worth a bad halfpenny himself. And for what have you ruined
your life, if you come to think of it? For the coffee they give you to
drink and the plentiful meals? But with what object are they feeding
you up? An honest girl couldn't swallow the food, for she would know
what she was being fed for. You are in debt here, and, of course, you
will always be in debt, and you will go on in debt to the end, till the
visitors here begin to scorn you. And that will soon happen, don't
rely upon your youth--all that flies by express train here, you know.
You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that
she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you
had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth
and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her,
beggared her, robbed her. And don't expect anyone to take your part:
the others, your companions, will attack you, too, win her favour, for
all are in slavery here, and have lost all conscience and pity here
long ago. They have become utterly vile, and nothing on earth is
viler, more loathsome, and more insulting than their abuse. And you
are laying down everything here, unconditionally, youth and health and
beauty and hope, and at twenty-two you will look like a woman of
five-and-thirty, and you will be lucky if you are not diseased, pray to
God for that! No doubt you are thinking now that you have a gay time
and no work to do! Yet there is no work harder or more dreadful in the
world or ever has been. One would think that the heart alone would be
worn out with tears. And you won't dare to say a word, not half a word
when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were
to blame. You will change to another house, then to a third, then
somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket. There you
will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors
don't know how to be friendly without beating you. You don't believe
that it is so hateful there? Go and look for yourself some time, you
can see with your own eyes. Once, one New Year's Day, I saw a woman at
a door. They had turned her out as a joke, to give her a taste of the
frost because she had been crying so much, and they shut the door
behind her. At nine o'clock in the morning she was already quite
drunk, dishevelled, half-naked, covered with bruises, her face was
powdered, but she had a black-eye, blood was trickling from her nose
and her teeth; some cabman had just given her a drubbing. She was
sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand;
she was crying, wailing something about her luck and beating with the
fish on the steps, and cabmen and drunken soldiers were crowding in the
doorway taunting her. You don't believe that you will ever be like
that? I should be sorry to believe it, too, but how do you know; maybe
ten years, eight years ago that very woman with the salt fish came here
fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil, blushing at every
word. Perhaps she was like you, proud, ready to take offence, not like
the others; perhaps she looked like a queen, and knew what happiness
was in store for the man who should love her and whom she should love.
Do you see how it ended? And what if at that very minute when she was
beating on the filthy steps with that fish, drunken and
dishevelled--what if at that very minute she recalled the pure early
days in her father's house, when she used to go to school and the
neighbour's son watched for her on the way, declaring that he would
love her as long as he lived, that he would devote his life to her, and
when they vowed to love one another for ever and be married as soon as
they were grown up! No, Liza, it would be happy for you if you were to
die soon of consumption in some corner, in some cellar like that woman
just now. In the hospital, do you say? You will be lucky if they take
you, but what if you are still of use to the madam here? Consumption is
a queer disease, it is not like fever. The patient goes on hoping till
the last minute and says he is all right. He deludes himself And that
just suits your madam. Don't doubt it, that's how it is; you have sold
your soul, and what is more you owe money, so you daren't say a word.
But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will turn away from
you, for then there will be nothing to get from you. What's more, they
will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over
dying. However you beg you won't get a drink of water without abuse:
'Whenever are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won't let us sleep
with your moaning, you make the gentlemen sick.' That's true, I have
heard such things said myself. They will thrust you dying into the
filthiest corner in the cellar--in the damp and darkness; what will
your thoughts be, lying there alone? When you die, strange hands will
lay you out, with grumbling and impatience; no one will bless you, no
one will sigh for you, they only want to get rid of you as soon as may
be; they will buy a coffin, take you to the grave as they did that poor
woman today, and celebrate your memory at the tavern. In the grave,
sleet, filth, wet snow--no need to put themselves out for you--'Let her
down, Vanuha; it's just like her luck--even here, she is head-foremost,
the hussy. Shorten the cord, you rascal.' 'It's all right as it is.'
'All right, is it? Why, she's on her side! She was a fellow-creature,
after all! But, never mind, throw the earth on her.' And they won't
care to waste much time quarrelling over you. They will scatter the
wet blue clay as quick as they can and go off to the tavern ... and
there your memory on earth will end; other women have children to go to
their graves, fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh,
nor remembrance; no one in the whole world will ever come to you, your
name will vanish from the face of the earth--as though you had never
existed, never been born at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however
you knock at your coffin lid at night, when the dead arise, however you
cry: 'Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day! My life
was no life at all; my life has been thrown away like a dish-clout; it
was drunk away in the tavern at the Haymarket; let me out, kind people,
to live in the world again.'"
And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in
my throat myself, and ... and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay
and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.
I had reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and
rending her heart, and--and the more I was convinced of it, the more
eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as
possible. It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it
was not merely sport....
I knew I was speaking stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I
could not speak except "like a book." But that did not trouble me: I
knew, I felt that I should be understood and that this very bookishness
might be an assistance. But now, having attained my effect, I was
suddenly panic-stricken. Never before had I witnessed such despair!
She was lying on her face, thrusting her face into the pillow and
clutching it in both hands. Her heart was being torn. Her youthful
body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions. Suppressed sobs
rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and wailing, then she
pressed closer into the pillow: she did not want anyone here, not a
living soul, to know of her anguish and her tears. She bit the pillow,
bit her hand till it bled (I saw that afterwards), or, thrusting her
fingers into her dishevelled hair, seemed rigid with the effort of
restraint, holding her breath and clenching her teeth. I began saying
something, begging her to calm herself, but felt that I did not dare;
and all at once, in a sort of cold shiver, almost in terror, began
fumbling in the dark, trying hurriedly to get dressed to go. It was
dark; though I tried my best I could not finish dressing quickly.
Suddenly I felt a box of matches and a candlestick with a whole candle
in it. As soon as the room was lighted up, Liza sprang up, sat up in
bed, and with a contorted face, with a half insane smile, looked at me
almost senselessly. I sat down beside her and took her hands; she came
to herself, made an impulsive movement towards me, would have caught
hold of me, but did not dare, and slowly bowed her head before me.
"Liza, my dear, I was wrong ... forgive me, my dear," I began, but she
squeezed my hand in her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the
wrong thing and stopped.
"This is my address, Liza, come to me."
"I will come," she answered resolutely, her head still bowed.
"But now I am going, good-bye ... till we meet again."
I got up; she, too, stood up and suddenly flushed all over, gave a
shudder, snatched up a shawl that was lying on a chair and muffled
herself in it to her chin. As she did this she gave another sickly
smile, blushed and looked at me strangely. I felt wretched; I was in
haste to get away--to disappear.
"Wait a minute," she said suddenly, in the passage just at the doorway,
stopping me with her hand on my overcoat. She put down the candle in
hot haste and ran off; evidently she had thought of something or wanted
to show me something. As she ran away she flushed, her eyes shone, and
there was a smile on her lips--what was the meaning of it? Against my
will I waited: she came back a minute later with an expression that
seemed to ask forgiveness for something. In fact, it was not the same
face, not the same look as the evening before: sullen, mistrustful and
obstinate. Her eyes now were imploring, soft, and at the same time
trustful, caressing, timid. The expression with which children look at
people they are very fond of, of whom they are asking a favour. Her
eyes were a light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life, and
capable of expressing love as well as sullen hatred.
Making no explanation, as though I, as a sort of higher being, must
understand everything without explanations, she held out a piece of
paper to me. Her whole face was positively beaming at that instant
with naive, almost childish, triumph. I unfolded it. It was a letter
to her from a medical student or someone of that sort--a very
high-flown and flowery, but extremely respectful, love-letter. I don't
recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown
phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned.
When I had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and
childishly impatient eyes fixed upon me. She fastened her eyes upon my
face and waited impatiently for what I should say. In a few words,
hurriedly, but with a sort of joy and pride, she explained to me that
she had been to a dance somewhere in a private house, a family of "very
nice people, WHO KNEW NOTHING, absolutely nothing, for she had only
come here so lately and it had all happened ... and she hadn't made up
her mind to stay and was certainly going away as soon as she had paid
her debt..." and at that party there had been the student who had
danced with her all the evening. He had talked to her, and it turned
out that he had known her in old days at Riga when he was a child, they
had played together, but a very long time ago--and he knew her parents,
but ABOUT THIS he knew nothing, nothing whatever, and had no suspicion!
And the day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that
letter through the friend with whom she had gone to the party ... and
... well, that was all.
She dropped her shining eyes with a sort of bashfulness as she finished.
The poor girl was keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure,
and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me
to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely
loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully. No doubt that letter
was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But none the less,
I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious
treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she
had thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise
herself in my eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of
her. I said nothing, pressed her hand and went out. I so longed to
get away ... I walked all the way home, in spite of the fact that the
melting snow was still falling in heavy flakes. I was exhausted,
shattered, in bewilderment. But behind the bewilderment the truth was
already gleaming. The loathsome truth.
----------PART 2 CHAPTER 10---------
A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in
frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and
peeped through the crack at Liza. She was sitting on the ground with
her head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying. But she
did not go away, and that irritated me. This time she understood it
all. I had insulted her finally, but ... there's no need to describe
it. She realised that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge,
a fresh humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred
was added now a PERSONAL HATRED, born of envy.... Though I do not
maintain positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she
certainly did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what
was worse, incapable of loving her.
I know I shall be told that this is incredible--but it is incredible to
be as spiteful and stupid as I was; it may be added that it was strange
I should not love her, or at any rate, appreciate her love. Why is it
strange? In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I
repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral
superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other
sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking
that love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved
object--to tyrannise over her.
Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a
struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral
subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated
object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded
in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life,"
as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to
shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even
guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me,
because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of
ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show
itself in that form.
I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room
and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably
oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted
"peace," to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed
me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.
But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as
though she were unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at
the screen as though to remind her.... She started, sprang up, and
flew to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her
escape from me.... Two minutes later she came from behind the screen
and looked with heavy eyes at me. I gave a spiteful grin, which was
forced, however, to KEEP UP APPEARANCES, and I turned away from her
eyes.
"Good-bye," she said, going towards the door.
I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and
closed it again. Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the
other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway....
I did mean a moment since to tell a lie--to write that I did this
accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through
losing my head. But I don't want to lie, and so I will say straight
out that I opened her hand and put the money in it ... from spite. It
came into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room
and she was sitting behind the screen. But this I can say for certain:
though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the
heart, but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so
purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that
I could not even keep it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid
seeing her, and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza. I opened
the door in the passage and began listening.
"Liza! Liza!" I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.
There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on
the stairs.
"Liza!" I cried, more loudly.
No answer. But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open
heavily with a creak and slam violently; the sound echoed up the stairs.
She had gone. I went back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly
oppressed.
I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and
looked aimlessly before me. A minute passed, suddenly I started;
straight before me on the table I saw.... In short, I saw a crumpled
blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute
before. It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other
in the flat. So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.
Well! I might have expected that she would do that. Might I have
expected it? No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for
my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so. I
could not endure it. A minute later I flew like a madman to dress,
flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her. She
could not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the
street.
It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling
almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as
though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to
be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I
ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.
Where had she gone? And why was I running after her?
Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet,
to entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was
being rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But--what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate
her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?
Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?
I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.
"And will it not be better?" I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. "Will it
not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for
ever? Resentment--why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and
painful consciousness! Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and
have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never
die in her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her--the
feeling of insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred ... h'm!
... perhaps, too, by forgiveness.... Will all that make things easier
for her though? ..."
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better--cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is
better?
So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain
in my soul. Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could
there have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that
I should turn back half-way? I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.
* * * * *
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory.
I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes"
here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell
long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally
rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through
divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world,
would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the
traits for an anti-hero are EXPRESSLY gathered together here, and what
matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all
divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for
real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come
almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and
we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we
fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something
else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if
our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for
instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the
spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you
... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know
that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin
shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your
miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of
us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of
us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life
carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and
what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have
found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all,
there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully!
Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it
is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in
confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling
to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and
blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive
to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and
for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and
that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it.
Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I
don't want to write more from "Underground."
|
O Pioneers!.part 1.chapte | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for part 1, chapter 2 with the given context. | The narrator tells us some more about the Bergson homestead. Not exactly home sweet home, here--John Bergson, the father of Alexandra andEmil, has been toiling away in this wasteland for 11 years, without much to show for it. Plain and simple, the prairie land is "unfriendly to man" . Old man Bergson is on his deathbed, recounting all the hardships he's experienced in Nebraska. Only 46 years old and having just recently paid off his debts, his life is about to end. Like the rest of the farmers on the prairie, John's not a farmer by trade, but had a different job back in the Old World. He used to work in a shipyard. These aren't people who know a whole lot about farming, and let's face it: the prairie is no place for amateurs. John thinks about his daughter, Alexandra, and his two older sons, Lou and Oscar. Alexandra is the one who knows what's up on the farm, the one he's always been able to count on; she's smart. His two boys are hardworking, but dim-witted. Alexandra reminds him of his own father, a shipbuilder in Stockholm. He was a smart man who amassed a fortune in his lifetime, before squandering it all on his much younger, second wife. Then again, John would prefer to have a son who reflected some of his father's qualities. But he is happy to know that Alexandra will continue his hard work. John calls for his daughter in Swedish. He tells her in so many words that all the responsibility for the farm will fall on her when he's gone. He tells her never to abandon the land, no matter how bad things get. Lou and Oscar come in to see their father, too. John tells them to avoid fighting with each other and to listen to their sister, the eldest child. He tells them that the land will be divided fairly, according to the law, when they decide to marry. Finally, he tells them to hire a man to work the fields, so Alexandra can tend to her butter and eggs. And he tells them not to begrudge their mother her garden and fruit trees, which she plants to remind herself of the old country. The narrator turns to John Bergson's wife. Mrs. Bergson is lower class than her husband, John. She's a "corpulent woman, heavy and placid," who longs for Sweden, having never forgiven her husband for bringing her all the way to Nebraska. She insisted on living in a log house, instead of the sod houses most of their neighbors built. She tends to look down on other women, while they think she's proud. When she's not thinking about the homeland, she's preserving and pickling everything she can find. |
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 2---------
On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house
in which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier
to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a
shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood
still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides
overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek
gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all
the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human
landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The
houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away
in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon
them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only
the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint
tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The
record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on
stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may,
after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of
human strivings.
In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression
upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing
that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to
come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly
to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of
the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following
Alexandra's trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same
land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and draw
and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed
fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the
pond,--and then the grass.
Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back.
One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer
one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had
to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and
a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again
his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came
between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and
death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was
going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course,
counted upon more time.
Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into
debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages
and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned
exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his
door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three
hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the
homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone
back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself
in a Swedish athletic club. So far John had not attempted to
cultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land,
and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.
John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is
desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that
no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks
things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to
farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their
neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did.
Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their
homesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS at home; tailors, locksmiths,
joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a
shipyard.
For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things. His
bed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through the
day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the
father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had
hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle
over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight
each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called
his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was
twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew
older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness
and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when
he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra
who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by
the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always
tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could
guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could
never teach them to use their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her
grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.
John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable
force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time,
a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder's
part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of
a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years his
unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated,
lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring
men, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing. But when all
was said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proud
little business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, and
had proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognized
the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things
out, that had characterized his father in his better days. He
would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of
his sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay there
day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be
thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could
entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his
hard-won land.
The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike
a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through
the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away.
He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with
all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt.
He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to
go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find
him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the
tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.
"DOTTER," he called feebly, "DOTTER!" He heard her quick step and
saw her tall figure appear in the doorway, with the light of the
lamp behind her. He felt her youth and strength, how easily she
moved and stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it again
if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin
again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.
His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She called
him by an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she was
little and took his dinner to him in the shipyard.
"Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I want to speak to them."
"They are feeding the horses, father. They have just come back
from the Blue. Shall I call them?"
He sighed. "No, no. Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you will
have to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything will
come on you."
"I will do all I can, father."
"Don't let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto. I want
them to keep the land."
"We will, father. We will never lose the land."
There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen. Alexandra went
to the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of
seventeen and nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of the
bed. Their father looked at them searchingly, though it was too
dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told
himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and
heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was
quicker, but vacillating.
"Boys," said the father wearily, "I want you to keep the land
together and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her
since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no
quarrels among my children, and so long as there is one house there
must be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.
She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not
make so many as I have made. When you marry, and want a house of
your own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts.
But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must all
keep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can."
Oscar, who was usually the last to speak, replied because he
was the older, "Yes, father. It would be so anyway, without your
speaking. We will all work the place together."
"And you will be guided by your sister, boys, and be good brothers
to her, and good sons to your mother? That is good. And Alexandra
must not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now.
Hire a man when you need help. She can make much more with her
eggs and butter than the wages of a man. It was one of my mistakes
that I did not find that out sooner. Try to break a little more
land every year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning the
land, and always put up more hay than you need. Don't grudge your
mother a little time for plowing her garden and setting out fruit
trees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has been a good
mother to you, and she has always missed the old country."
When they went back to the kitchen the boys sat down silently at
the table. Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates
and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although
they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit
stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies.
John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a good
housewife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable
about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household
order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit
was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to
repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done
a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and
getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for
instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.
She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer
she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to
fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to
load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing
herself.
Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert
island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden,
and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with
Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of
Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild
creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid
ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon
peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She
had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could
not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and
murmuring, "What a pity!" When there was nothing more to preserve,
she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes
was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She was
a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough
not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven
John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now
that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her
old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some
comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on
the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all her
neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women
thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to
Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in
the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot."
----------PART 1, CHAPTER 5---------
Alexandra and Emil spent five days down among the river farms,
driving up and down the valley. Alexandra talked to the men about
their crops and to the women about their poultry. She spent a
whole day with one young farmer who had been away at school, and
who was experimenting with a new kind of clover hay. She learned
a great deal. As they drove along, she and Emil talked and planned.
At last, on the sixth day, Alexandra turned Brigham's head northward
and left the river behind.
"There's nothing in it for us down there, Emil. There are a few
fine farms, but they are owned by the rich men in town, and couldn't
be bought. Most of the land is rough and hilly. They can always
scrape along down there, but they can never do anything big. Down
there they have a little certainty, but up with us there is a big
chance. We must have faith in the high land, Emil. I want to hold
on harder than ever, and when you're a man you'll thank me." She
urged Brigham forward.
When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide,
Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his
sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy
about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land
emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward
it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and
strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until
her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great,
free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than
it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country
begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Alexandra reached home in the afternoon. That evening she held
a family council and told her brothers all that she had seen and
heard.
"I want you boys to go down yourselves and look it over. Nothing
will convince you like seeing with your own eyes. The river land
was settled before this, and so they are a few years ahead of us,
and have learned more about farming. The land sells for three
times as much as this, but in five years we will double it. The
rich men down there own all the best land, and they are buying
all they can get. The thing to do is to sell our cattle and what
little old corn we have, and buy the Linstrum place. Then the next
thing to do is to take out two loans on our half-sections, and buy
Peter Crow's place; raise every dollar we can, and buy every acre
we can."
"Mortgage the homestead again?" Lou cried. He sprang up and began
to wind the clock furiously. "I won't slave to pay off another
mortgage. I'll never do it. You'd just as soon kill us all,
Alexandra, to carry out some scheme!"
Oscar rubbed his high, pale forehead. "How do you propose to pay
off your mortgages?"
Alexandra looked from one to the other and bit her lip. They had
never seen her so nervous. "See here," she brought out at last.
"We borrow the money for six years. Well, with the money we buy
a half-section from Linstrum and a half from Crow, and a quarter
from Struble, maybe. That will give us upwards of fourteen hundred
acres, won't it? You won't have to pay off your mortgages for six
years. By that time, any of this land will be worth thirty dollars
an acre--it will be worth fifty, but we'll say thirty; then you
can sell a garden patch anywhere, and pay off a debt of sixteen
hundred dollars. It's not the principal I'm worried about, it's
the interest and taxes. We'll have to strain to meet the payments.
But as sure as we are sitting here to-night, we can sit down here
ten years from now independent landowners, not struggling farmers
any longer. The chance that father was always looking for has
come."
Lou was pacing the floor. "But how do you KNOW that land is going
to go up enough to pay the mortgages and--"
"And make us rich besides?" Alexandra put in firmly. "I can't
explain that, Lou. You'll have to take my word for it. I KNOW,
that's all. When you drive about over the country you can feel it
coming."
Oscar had been sitting with his head lowered, his hands hanging
between his knees. "But we can't work so much land," he said
dully, as if he were talking to himself. "We can't even try. It
would just lie there and we'd work ourselves to death." He sighed,
and laid his calloused fist on the table.
Alexandra's eyes filled with tears. She put her hand on his
shoulder. "You poor boy, you won't have to work it. The men in
town who are buying up other people's land don't try to farm it.
They are the men to watch, in a new country. Let's try to do
like the shrewd ones, and not like these stupid fellows. I don't
want you boys always to have to work like this. I want you to be
independent, and Emil to go to school."
Lou held his head as if it were splitting. "Everybody will say we
are crazy. It must be crazy, or everybody would be doing it."
"If they were, we wouldn't have much chance. No, Lou, I was talking
about that with the smart young man who is raising the new kind
of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody
don't do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because
father had more brains. Our people were better people than these
in the old country. We OUGHT to do more than they do, and see
further ahead. Yes, mother, I'm going to clear the table now."
Alexandra rose. The boys went to the stable to see to the stock,
and they were gone a long while. When they came back Lou played on
his DRAGHARMONIKA and Oscar sat figuring at his father's secretary
all evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra's project,
but she felt sure now that they would consent to it. Just before
bedtime Oscar went out for a pail of water. When he did not come
back, Alexandra threw a shawl over her head and ran down the path
to the windmill. She found him sitting there with his head in his
hands, and she sat down beside him.
"Don't do anything you don't want to do, Oscar," she whispered.
She waited a moment, but he did not stir. "I won't say any more
about it, if you'd rather not. What makes you so discouraged?"
"I dread signing my name to them pieces of paper," he said slowly.
"All the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us."
"Then don't sign one. I don't want you to, if you feel that way."
Oscar shook his head. "No, I can see there's a chance that way.
I've thought a good while there might be. We're in so deep now, we
might as well go deeper. But it's hard work pulling out of debt.
Like pulling a threshing-machine out of the mud; breaks your back.
Me and Lou's worked hard, and I can't see it's got us ahead much."
"Nobody knows about that as well as I do, Oscar. That's why I want
to try an easier way. I don't want you to have to grub for every
dollar."
"Yes, I know what you mean. Maybe it'll come out right. But signing
papers is signing papers. There ain't no maybe about that." He
took his pail and trudged up the path to the house.
Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against
the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so
keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch
them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered
march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations
of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them,
she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new
consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it.
Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had
overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon.
She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The
chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the
sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down
there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little
wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long
shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.
PART II. Neighboring Fields
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|
O Pioneers!.part 2.chapte | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of part 2, chapter 1, utilizing the provided context. | part 2, chapter 1|part 2, chapter 2 | Let's move right along to Part 2, shall we? This one's called "Neighboring Fields." It's been sixteen years since John Bergson died. In the meantime, Mrs. Bergson has also passed away. And neither of them would be able to recognize the Divide now. Instead of the punishing landscape we got to know in Part I, the Divide is flourishing, the fields are brimming with lush rows of wheat and corn, and the population is booming. The chapter begins on a summery day in June. A tall, athletic young man, who turns out to be Emil, is using a scythe to cut the grass growing in the Norwegian graveyard. As he cuts the grass, he whistles a tune to himself. He can hardly remember the old days, when his sister struggled to make it while all the others chose to abandon the land. Though he seems happy and carefree, occasionally he pauses, with a frown on his face, which seems to indicate that something is weighing on his mind. A cart rolls up and a voice calls out to Emil. It's Marie Tovesky, now Marie Shabata, the little girl Emil meets in Chapter 1. She offers to give him a lift, but she sees he hasn't finished up mowing yet. They strike up a conversation as Emil mows. They talk about the freethinking Bohemians who, despite being from a Catholic country, are buried in the Norwegian graveyard and the upcoming marriage of their friend Amedee Chevalier. Marie asks Emil to come mow her orchard, and reminds him to dance with the French girls at the wedding, so they don't get their feelings hurt. It sounds like he spends most of the time dancing with Marie. In the course of the conversation, we find out that Emil is studying at the university, and that Marie is married to a man named Frank. Marie mentions that her husband's mad at her for lending their saddle to another man. Talk about tension. Marie appears openly flirtatious, while Emil seems to be ignoring it. Emil finishes and they ride together toward a large white house that belongs to Alexandra, now a wealthy farmer. The narrator clues us in that this is one of the richest farms on the Divide. We also get some details on the house: though stately, the house is only partially finished, with some rooms with wallpaper and filled with furniture, while others are still bare. The kitchen is the nicest room, where three Swedish girls work for Alexandra, and where many of the original things from the Bergson homestead remain. The garden around the house is orderly and productive, unlike the unevenly furnished home. As the narrator says, we get the feeling that "it is in the soil that expresses herself best" . |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 1---------
IT is sixteen years since John Bergson died. His wife now lies
beside him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams
across the wheat-fields. Could he rise from beneath it, he would
not know the country under which he has been asleep. The shaggy coat
of the prairie, which they lifted to make him a bed, has vanished
forever. From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a vast
checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and
dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads,
which always run at right angles. From the graveyard gate one can
count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses; the gilded weather-vanes
on the big red barns wink at each other across the green and brown
and yellow fields. The light steel windmills tremble throughout
their frames and tug at their moorings, as they vibrate in the wind
that often blows from one week's end to another across that high,
active, resolute stretch of country.
The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy
harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land
make labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more
gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows
of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth,
with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and
fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away
from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with
a soft, deep sigh of happiness. The wheat-cutting sometimes goes
on all night as well as all day, and in good seasons there are
scarcely men and horses enough to do the harvesting. The grain is
so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet.
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face
of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the
season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it
seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are
curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath
of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant
quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.
One June morning a young man stood at the gate of the Norwegian
graveyard, sharpening his scythe in strokes unconsciously timed to
the tune he was whistling. He wore a flannel cap and duck trousers,
and the sleeves of his white flannel shirt were rolled back to
the elbow. When he was satisfied with the edge of his blade, he
slipped the whetstone into his hip pocket and began to swing his
scythe, still whistling, but softly, out of respect to the quiet
folk about him. Unconscious respect, probably, for he seemed
intent upon his own thoughts, and, like the Gladiator's, they were
far away. He was a splendid figure of a boy, tall and straight
as a young pine tree, with a handsome head, and stormy gray eyes,
deeply set under a serious brow. The space between his two front
teeth, which were unusually far apart, gave him the proficiency
in whistling for which he was distinguished at college. (He also
played the cornet in the University band.)
When the grass required his close attention, or when he had to
stoop to cut about a head-stone, he paused in his lively air,--the
"Jewel" song,--taking it up where he had left it when his scythe
swung free again. He was not thinking about the tired pioneers
over whom his blade glittered. The old wild country, the struggle
in which his sister was destined to succeed while so many men broke
their hearts and died, he can scarcely remember. That is all among
the dim things of childhood and has been forgotten in the brighter
pattern life weaves to-day, in the bright facts of being captain
of the track team, and holding the interstate record for the high
jump, in the all-suffusing brightness of being twenty-one. Yet
sometimes, in the pauses of his work, the young man frowned and
looked at the ground with an intentness which suggested that even
twenty-one might have its problems.
When he had been mowing the better part of an hour, he heard the
rattle of a light cart on the road behind him. Supposing that it
was his sister coming back from one of her farms, he kept on with
his work. The cart stopped at the gate and a merry contralto voice
called, "Almost through, Emil?" He dropped his scythe and went
toward the fence, wiping his face and neck with his handkerchief.
In the cart sat a young woman who wore driving gauntlets and a wide
shade hat, trimmed with red poppies. Her face, too, was rather
like a poppy, round and brown, with rich color in her cheeks and
lips, and her dancing yellow-brown eyes bubbled with gayety. The
wind was flapping her big hat and teasing a curl of her chestnut-colored
hair. She shook her head at the tall youth.
"What time did you get over here? That's not much of a job for
an athlete. Here I've been to town and back. Alexandra lets you
sleep late. Oh, I know! Lou's wife was telling me about the way
she spoils you. I was going to give you a lift, if you were done."
She gathered up her reins.
"But I will be, in a minute. Please wait for me, Marie," Emil
coaxed. "Alexandra sent me to mow our lot, but I've done half a
dozen others, you see. Just wait till I finish off the Kourdnas'.
By the way, they were Bohemians. Why aren't they up in the Catholic
graveyard?"
"Free-thinkers," replied the young woman laconically.
"Lots of the Bohemian boys at the University are," said Emil, taking
up his scythe again. "What did you ever burn John Huss for, anyway?
It's made an awful row. They still jaw about it in history classes."
"We'd do it right over again, most of us," said the young woman
hotly. "Don't they ever teach you in your history classes that
you'd all be heathen Turks if it hadn't been for the Bohemians?"
Emil had fallen to mowing. "Oh, there's no denying you're a spunky
little bunch, you Czechs," he called back over his shoulder.
Marie Shabata settled herself in her seat and watched the rhythmical
movement of the young man's long arms, swinging her foot as if
in time to some air that was going through her mind. The minutes
passed. Emil mowed vigorously and Marie sat sunning herself and
watching the long grass fall. She sat with the ease that belongs
to persons of an essentially happy nature, who can find a comfortable
spot almost anywhere; who are supple, and quick in adapting themselves
to circumstances. After a final swish, Emil snapped the gate and
sprang into the cart, holding his scythe well out over the wheel.
"There," he sighed. "I gave old man Lee a cut or so, too. Lou's
wife needn't talk. I never see Lou's scythe over here."
Marie clucked to her horse. "Oh, you know Annie!" She looked at
the young man's bare arms. "How brown you've got since you came
home. I wish I had an athlete to mow my orchard. I get wet to my
knees when I go down to pick cherries."
"You can have one, any time you want him. Better wait until after
it rains." Emil squinted off at the horizon as if he were looking
for clouds.
"Will you? Oh, there's a good boy!" She turned her head to him
with a quick, bright smile. He felt it rather than saw it. Indeed,
he had looked away with the purpose of not seeing it. "I've been
up looking at Angelique's wedding clothes," Marie went on, "and
I'm so excited I can hardly wait until Sunday. Amedee will be
a handsome bridegroom. Is anybody but you going to stand up with
him? Well, then it will be a handsome wedding party." She made a
droll face at Emil, who flushed. "Frank," Marie continued, flicking
her horse, "is cranky at me because I loaned his saddle to Jan
Smirka, and I'm terribly afraid he won't take me to the dance in
the evening. Maybe the supper will tempt him. All Angelique's
folks are baking for it, and all Amedee's twenty cousins. There
will be barrels of beer. If once I get Frank to the supper, I'll
see that I stay for the dance. And by the way, Emil, you mustn't
dance with me but once or twice. You must dance with all the French
girls. It hurts their feelings if you don't. They think you're
proud because you've been away to school or something."
Emil sniffed. "How do you know they think that?"
"Well, you didn't dance with them much at Raoul Marcel's party, and
I could tell how they took it by the way they looked at you--and
at me."
"All right," said Emil shortly, studying the glittering blade of
his scythe.
They drove westward toward Norway Creek, and toward a big white
house that stood on a hill, several miles across the fields. There
were so many sheds and outbuildings grouped about it that the
place looked not unlike a tiny village. A stranger, approaching
it, could not help noticing the beauty and fruitfulness of the
outlying fields. There was something individual about the great
farm, a most unusual trimness and care for detail. On either side
of the road, for a mile before you reached the foot of the hill,
stood tall osage orange hedges, their glossy green marking off
the yellow fields. South of the hill, in a low, sheltered swale,
surrounded by a mulberry hedge, was the orchard, its fruit trees
knee-deep in timothy grass. Any one thereabouts would have told
you that this was one of the richest farms on the Divide, and that
the farmer was a woman, Alexandra Bergson.
If you go up the hill and enter Alexandra's big house, you will
find that it is curiously unfinished and uneven in comfort. One
room is papered, carpeted, over-furnished; the next is almost
bare. The pleasantest rooms in the house are the kitchen--where
Alexandra's three young Swedish girls chatter and cook and pickle
and preserve all summer long--and the sitting-room, in which
Alexandra has brought together the old homely furniture that the
Bergsons used in their first log house, the family portraits, and
the few things her mother brought from Sweden.
When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel
again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great
farm; in the fencing and hedging, in the windbreaks and sheds, in
the symmetrical pasture ponds, planted with scrub willows to give
shade to the cattle in fly-time. There is even a white row of
beehives in the orchard, under the walnut trees. You feel that,
properly, Alexandra's house is the big out-of-doors, and that it
is in the soil that she expresses herself best.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 2---------
Emil reached home a little past noon, and when he went into the
kitchen Alexandra was already seated at the head of the long table,
having dinner with her men, as she always did unless there were
visitors. He slipped into his empty place at his sister's right.
The three pretty young Swedish girls who did Alexandra's housework
were cutting pies, refilling coffeecups, placing platters of bread
and meat and potatoes upon the red tablecloth, and continually
getting in each other's way between the table and the stove. To be
sure they always wasted a good deal of time getting in each other's
way and giggling at each other's mistakes. But, as Alexandra had
pointedly told her sisters-in-law, it was to hear them giggle that
she kept three young things in her kitchen; the work she could
do herself, if it were necessary. These girls, with their long
letters from home, their finery, and their love-affairs, afforded
her a great deal of entertainment, and they were company for her
when Emil was away at school.
Of the youngest girl, Signa, who has a pretty figure, mottled pink
cheeks, and yellow hair, Alexandra is very fond, though she keeps
a sharp eye upon her. Signa is apt to be skittish at mealtime, when
the men are about, and to spill the coffee or upset the cream. It
is supposed that Nelse Jensen, one of the six men at the dinner-table,
is courting Signa, though he has been so careful not to commit
himself that no one in the house, least of all Signa, can tell
just how far the matter has progressed. Nelse watches her glumly
as she waits upon the table, and in the evening he sits on a bench
behind the stove with his DRAGHARMONIKA, playing mournful airs
and watching her as she goes about her work. When Alexandra asked
Signa whether she thought Nelse was in earnest, the poor child hid
her hands under her apron and murmured, "I don't know, ma'm. But
he scolds me about everything, like as if he wanted to have me!"
At Alexandra's left sat a very old man, barefoot and wearing a long
blue blouse, open at the neck. His shaggy head is scarcely whiter
than it was sixteen years ago, but his little blue eyes have become
pale and watery, and his ruddy face is withered, like an apple that
has clung all winter to the tree. When Ivar lost his land through
mismanagement a dozen years ago, Alexandra took him in, and he has
been a member of her household ever since. He is too old to work
in the fields, but he hitches and unhitches the work-teams and
looks after the health of the stock. Sometimes of a winter evening
Alexandra calls him into the sitting-room to read the Bible aloud
to her, for he still reads very well. He dislikes human habitations,
so Alexandra has fitted him up a room in the barn, where he is very
comfortable, being near the horses and, as he says, further from
temptations. No one has ever found out what his temptations are.
In cold weather he sits by the kitchen fire and makes hammocks
or mends harness until it is time to go to bed. Then he says his
prayers at great length behind the stove, puts on his buffalo-skin
coat and goes out to his room in the barn.
Alexandra herself has changed very little. Her figure is fuller,
and she has more color. She seems sunnier and more vigorous than
she did as a young girl. But she still has the same calmness and
deliberation of manner, the same clear eyes, and she still wears
her hair in two braids wound round her head. It is so curly that
fiery ends escape from the braids and make her head look like one
of the big double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden.
Her face is always tanned in summer, for her sunbonnet is oftener
on her arm than on her head. But where her collar falls away from
her neck, or where her sleeves are pushed back from her wrist, the
skin is of such smoothness and whiteness as none but Swedish women
ever possess; skin with the freshness of the snow itself.
Alexandra did not talk much at the table, but she encouraged her
men to talk, and she always listened attentively, even when they
seemed to be talking foolishly.
To-day Barney Flinn, the big red-headed Irishman who had been with
Alexandra for five years and who was actually her foreman, though
he had no such title, was grumbling about the new silo she had put
up that spring. It happened to be the first silo on the Divide,
and Alexandra's neighbors and her men were skeptical about it. "To
be sure, if the thing don't work, we'll have plenty of feed without
it, indeed," Barney conceded.
Nelse Jensen, Signa's gloomy suitor, had his word. "Lou, he says
he wouldn't have no silo on his place if you'd give it to him.
He says the feed outen it gives the stock the bloat. He heard of
somebody lost four head of horses, feedin' 'em that stuff."
Alexandra looked down the table from one to another. "Well,
the only way we can find out is to try. Lou and I have different
notions about feeding stock, and that's a good thing. It's bad if
all the members of a family think alike. They never get anywhere.
Lou can learn by my mistakes and I can learn by his. Isn't that
fair, Barney?"
The Irishman laughed. He had no love for Lou, who was always uppish
with him and who said that Alexandra paid her hands too much. "I've
no thought but to give the thing an honest try, mum. 'T would be
only right, after puttin' so much expense into it. Maybe Emil will
come out an' have a look at it wid me." He pushed back his chair,
took his hat from the nail, and marched out with Emil, who, with
his university ideas, was supposed to have instigated the silo.
The other hands followed them, all except old Ivar. He had been
depressed throughout the meal and had paid no heed to the talk of
the men, even when they mentioned cornstalk bloat, upon which he
was sure to have opinions.
"Did you want to speak to me, Ivar?" Alexandra asked as she rose
from the table. "Come into the sitting-room."
The old man followed Alexandra, but when she motioned him to a chair
he shook his head. She took up her workbasket and waited for him
to speak. He stood looking at the carpet, his bushy head bowed,
his hands clasped in front of him. Ivar's bandy legs seemed to
have grown shorter with years, and they were completely misfitted
to his broad, thick body and heavy shoulders.
"Well, Ivar, what is it?" Alexandra asked after she had waited
longer than usual.
Ivar had never learned to speak English and his Norwegian was quaint
and grave, like the speech of the more old-fashioned people. He
always addressed Alexandra in terms of the deepest respect, hoping
to set a good example to the kitchen girls, whom he thought too
familiar in their manners.
"Mistress," he began faintly, without raising his eyes, "the folk
have been looking coldly at me of late. You know there has been
talk."
"Talk about what, Ivar?"
"About sending me away; to the asylum."
Alexandra put down her sewing-basket. "Nobody has come to me with
such talk," she said decidedly. "Why need you listen? You know
I would never consent to such a thing."
Ivar lifted his shaggy head and looked at her out of his little
eyes. "They say that you cannot prevent it if the folk complain of
me, if your brothers complain to the authorities. They say that
your brothers are afraid--God forbid!--that I may do you some
injury when my spells are on me. Mistress, how can any one think
that?--that I could bite the hand that fed me!" The tears trickled
down on the old man's beard.
Alexandra frowned. "Ivar, I wonder at you, that you should come
bothering me with such nonsense. I am still running my own house,
and other people have nothing to do with either you or me. So long
as I am suited with you, there is nothing to be said."
Ivar pulled a red handkerchief out of the breast of his blouse and
wiped his eyes and beard. "But I should not wish you to keep me
if, as they say, it is against your interests, and if it is hard
for you to get hands because I am here."
Alexandra made an impatient gesture, but the old man put out his
hand and went on earnestly:--
"Listen, mistress, it is right that you should take these things
into account. You know that my spells come from God, and that
I would not harm any living creature. You believe that every one
should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not
the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike. I
am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my
hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country,
there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had
seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward.
We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man
is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum.
Look at Peter Kralik; when he was a boy, drinking out of a creek,
he swallowed a snake, and always after that he could eat only
such food as the creature liked, for when he ate anything else, it
became enraged and gnawed him. When he felt it whipping about in
him, he drank alcohol to stupefy it and get some ease for himself.
He could work as good as any man, and his head was clear, but they
locked him up for being different in his stomach. That is the way;
they have built the asylum for people who are different, and they
will not even let us live in the holes with the badgers. Only
your great prosperity has protected me so far. If you had had
ill-fortune, they would have taken me to Hastings long ago."
As Ivar talked, his gloom lifted. Alexandra had found that she
could often break his fasts and long penances by talking to him
and letting him pour out the thoughts that troubled him. Sympathy
always cleared his mind, and ridicule was poison to him.
"There is a great deal in what you say, Ivar. Like as not they
will be wanting to take me to Hastings because I have built a silo;
and then I may take you with me. But at present I need you here.
Only don't come to me again telling me what people say. Let people
go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think
best. You have been with me now for twelve years, and I have gone
to you for advice oftener than I have ever gone to any one. That
ought to satisfy you."
Ivar bowed humbly. "Yes, mistress, I shall not trouble you with
their talk again. And as for my feet, I have observed your wishes
all these years, though you have never questioned me; washing them
every night, even in winter."
Alexandra laughed. "Oh, never mind about your feet, Ivar. We can
remember when half our neighbors went barefoot in summer. I expect
old Mrs. Lee would love to slip her shoes off now sometimes, if
she dared. I'm glad I'm not Lou's mother-in-law."
Ivar looked about mysteriously and lowered his voice almost to a
whisper. "You know what they have over at Lou's house? A great
white tub, like the stone water-troughs in the old country, to wash
themselves in. When you sent me over with the strawberries, they
were all in town but the old woman Lee and the baby. She took me
in and showed me the thing, and she told me it was impossible to
wash yourself clean in it, because, in so much water, you could
not make a strong suds. So when they fill it up and send her in
there, she pretends, and makes a splashing noise. Then, when they
are all asleep, she washes herself in a little wooden tub she keeps
under her bed."
Alexandra shook with laughter. "Poor old Mrs. Lee! They won't let
her wear nightcaps, either. Never mind; when she comes to visit
me, she can do all the old things in the old way, and have as much
beer as she wants. We'll start an asylum for old-time people,
Ivar."
Ivar folded his big handkerchief carefully and thrust it back into
his blouse. "This is always the way, mistress. I come to you
sorrowing, and you send me away with a light heart. And will you
be so good as to tell the Irishman that he is not to work the brown
gelding until the sore on its shoulder is healed?"
"That I will. Now go and put Emil's mare to the cart. I am going
to drive up to the north quarter to meet the man from town who is
to buy my alfalfa hay."
|
null | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for part 2, chapter 4 with the given context. | part 2, chapter 4|part 2, chapter 5|part 2, chapter 6 | The chapter opens with Alexandra's observations on Carl. He doesn't seemed to have changed as much as you would expect; his clothes are still a little odd, and he still seems withdrawn, sensitive and unhappy. Later on the same evening of his arrival, Carl and Alexandra are chatting out in the flower garden. He asks her how she's managed to be so successful. Alexandra tells him that the land did it all; it played its own "joke" on them by being poor, and then turned around and made her rich . All she had to do was borrow and save until she had bought up all this land. Eventually, she decided to build her house, but really, she says, she built it for Emil. Alexandra goes on to say how different Emil is from the rest of the family. In some ways, he's just like any American boy, who went to an American university. In other ways, though, he is like her father, very Swedish, very "violent in his feelings" . Carl asks whether Emil will stay and help her farm, and Alexandra proclaims that Emil will do whatever he wishes. He's been talking about law, or buying up his own land. And what about Lou and Oscar? Well, Alexandra tells him, they have their own land and they're doing well, though they don't approve of Alexandra's ways. They think she's too independent, she figures. But she's not likely to change, since she's been thinking for herself all these years. The conversation turns to the old country, before farming really took hold in the Divide. Carl admits that he prefers the "wild old beast," the country that gave everyone so much grief and which has been haunting him since he left . Alexandra agrees. She still remembers when the graveyard was just another part of the prairie, but now, as Carl says, the stories have started to repeat themselves again among the young people. Alexandra is reminded of young Marie Tovesky, who ran away from the convent school at 18 and married Frank Shabata. She's glad they moved to the Linstrums' old farm. Alexandra is happy to have her near. She admits that she envies young people, like Marie. Carl asks about Frank. Alexandra calls him "one of these wild fellows," who is jealous about everything, especially his wife. Marie is outgoing and everyone likes her, which makes life difficult for Frank. Alexandra says she tries to help by making Frank feel like he's really important. Carl finds it hard to believe that she's all that good at it. She admits that she only does it for Marie's sake. Alexandra only has good things to say about Marie; the girl can work all day and still have energy to go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night. Alexandra never had that kind of fire. Carl wants to see his old place, after all. He's scared to see it, to see something that reminds him of himself. He tells Alexandra that he wouldn't have come at all if he didn't really want to see her. She asks him why he's so unhappy with himself. He breaks it down for her--he hates his job. There's no future in engraving. He planned the whole way to try and convince her that he's a big shot, but he can't help telling her the truth. He's a failure, he says. He's worked all these years but couldn't even buy a cornfield on the Divide. Alexandra doesn't agree. Carl has had his freedom, and Alexandra would have rather had that than all her land. Freedom, Carl says, often means not being needed, being an anonymous member of the masses, making money just to survive and pay a rent that's way too high. She would never want that. But their situation isn't all that much better, Alexandra replies. People out on the Divide become stagnant, "hard and heavy," and they lose the ability to think about higher things . She wishes that Emil could have some of the freedom that Carl has had, to go to the world beyond the cornfields. And, she adds, if that world out there didn't exist, she wouldn't see a point in going on. When Carl wonders aloud why it is that she feels that way, Alexandra tells the story of Carrie Jensen, the daughter of one of her farmhands, who got tired of the cornfields, grew unhappy, and tried to kill herself. Her parents sent her to Iowa to visit some family, and she returned more cheerful than ever before. Just seeing the world beyond Hanover gave her a sense that there was something to live for. Alexandra feels the same way. |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 4---------
Carl had changed, Alexandra felt, much less than one might have
expected. He had not become a trim, self-satisfied city man. There
was still something homely and wayward and definitely personal
about him. Even his clothes, his Norfolk coat and his very high
collars, were a little unconventional. He seemed to shrink into
himself as he used to do; to hold himself away from things, as if
he were afraid of being hurt. In short, he was more self-conscious
than a man of thirty-five is expected to be. He looked older than
his years and not very strong. His black hair, which still hung
in a triangle over his pale forehead, was thin at the crown, and
there were fine, relentless lines about his eyes. His back, with
its high, sharp shoulders, looked like the back of an over-worked
German professor off on his holiday. His face was intelligent,
sensitive, unhappy.
That evening after supper, Carl and Alexandra were sitting by the
clump of castor beans in the middle of the flower garden. The
gravel paths glittered in the moonlight, and below them the fields
lay white and still.
"Do you know, Alexandra," he was saying, "I've been thinking how
strangely things work out. I've been away engraving other men's
pictures, and you've stayed at home and made your own." He pointed
with his cigar toward the sleeping landscape. "How in the world
have you done it? How have your neighbors done it?"
"We hadn't any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it.
It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody
knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself.
It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big,
so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting
still. As for me, you remember when I began to buy land. For
years after that I was always squeezing and borrowing until I was
ashamed to show my face in the banks. And then, all at once, men
began to come to me offering to lend me money--and I didn't need
it! Then I went ahead and built this house. I really built it
for Emil. I want you to see Emil, Carl. He is so different from
the rest of us!"
"How different?"
"Oh, you'll see! I'm sure it was to have sons like Emil, and to
give them a chance, that father left the old country. It's curious,
too; on the outside Emil is just like an American boy,--he graduated
from the State University in June, you know,--but underneath he is
more Swedish than any of us. Sometimes he is so like father that
he frightens me; he is so violent in his feelings like that."
"Is he going to farm here with you?"
"He shall do whatever he wants to," Alexandra declared warmly. "He
is going to have a chance, a whole chance; that's what I've worked
for. Sometimes he talks about studying law, and sometimes, just
lately, he's been talking about going out into the sand hills and
taking up more land. He has his sad times, like father. But I
hope he won't do that. We have land enough, at last!" Alexandra
laughed.
"How about Lou and Oscar? They've done well, haven't they?"
"Yes, very well; but they are different, and now that they have
farms of their own I do not see so much of them. We divided the
land equally when Lou married. They have their own way of doing
things, and they do not altogether like my way, I am afraid. Perhaps
they think me too independent. But I have had to think for myself
a good many years and am not likely to change. On the whole,
though, we take as much comfort in each other as most brothers and
sisters do. And I am very fond of Lou's oldest daughter."
"I think I liked the old Lou and Oscar better, and they probably
feel the same about me. I even, if you can keep a secret,"--Carl
leaned forward and touched her arm, smiling,--"I even think I liked
the old country better. This is all very splendid in its way,
but there was something about this country when it was a wild old
beast that has haunted me all these years. Now, when I come back
to all this milk and honey, I feel like the old German song, 'Wo
bist du, wo bist du, mein geliebtest Land?'--Do you ever feel like
that, I wonder?"
"Yes, sometimes, when I think about father and mother and those
who are gone; so many of our old neighbors." Alexandra paused and
looked up thoughtfully at the stars. "We can remember the graveyard
when it was wild prairie, Carl, and now--"
"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said
Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human
stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they
had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that
have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years."
"Oh, yes! The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes
envy them. There is my little neighbor, now; the people who bought
your old place. I wouldn't have sold it to any one else, but I
was always fond of that girl. You must remember her, little Marie
Tovesky, from Omaha, who used to visit here? When she was eighteen
she ran away from the convent school and got married, crazy child!
She came out here a bride, with her father and husband. He had
nothing, and the old man was willing to buy them a place and set
them up. Your farm took her fancy, and I was glad to have her so
near me. I've never been sorry, either. I even try to get along
with Frank on her account."
"Is Frank her husband?"
"Yes. He's one of these wild fellows. Most Bohemians are
good-natured, but Frank thinks we don't appreciate him here, I
guess. He's jealous about everything, his farm and his horses and
his pretty wife. Everybody likes her, just the same as when she
was little. Sometimes I go up to the Catholic church with Emil,
and it's funny to see Marie standing there laughing and shaking
hands with people, looking so excited and gay, with Frank sulking
behind her as if he could eat everybody alive. Frank's not a bad
neighbor, but to get on with him you've got to make a fuss over
him and act as if you thought he was a very important person all
the time, and different from other people. I find it hard to keep
that up from one year's end to another."
"I shouldn't think you'd be very successful at that kind of thing,
Alexandra." Carl seemed to find the idea amusing.
"Well," said Alexandra firmly, "I do the best I can, on Marie's
account. She has it hard enough, anyway. She's too young and
pretty for this sort of life. We're all ever so much older and
slower. But she's the kind that won't be downed easily. She'll
work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and
drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning. I could stay by
a job, but I never had the go in me that she has, when I was going
my best. I'll have to take you over to see her to-morrow."
Carl dropped the end of his cigar softly among the castor beans and
sighed. "Yes, I suppose I must see the old place. I'm cowardly
about things that remind me of myself. It took courage to come
at all, Alexandra. I wouldn't have, if I hadn't wanted to see you
very, very much."
Alexandra looked at him with her calm, deliberate eyes. "Why do
you dread things like that, Carl?" she asked earnestly. "Why are
you dissatisfied with yourself?"
Her visitor winced. "How direct you are, Alexandra! Just like
you used to be. Do I give myself away so quickly? Well, you see,
for one thing, there's nothing to look forward to in my profession.
Wood-engraving is the only thing I care about, and that had gone out
before I began. Everything's cheap metal work nowadays, touching
up miserable photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good
ones. I'm absolutely sick of it all." Carl frowned. "Alexandra,
all the way out from New York I've been planning how I could
deceive you and make you think me a very enviable fellow, and here
I am telling you the truth the first night. I waste a lot of time
pretending to people, and the joke of it is, I don't think I ever
deceive any one. There are too many of my kind; people know us on
sight."
Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a
puzzled, thoughtful gesture. "You see," he went on calmly, "measured
by your standards here, I'm a failure. I couldn't buy even one of
your cornfields. I've enjoyed a great many things, but I've got
nothing to show for it all."
"But you show for it yourself, Carl. I'd rather have had your
freedom than my land."
Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one
isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a
background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the
cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all
alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one
of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and
the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind
us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or
whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to
do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for
a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no
house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets,
in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert
halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon
made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that
she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, "And yet I
would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers.
We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard
and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as you do, and
our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields,
if there were not something beside this, I wouldn't feel that it
was much worth while to work. No, I would rather have Emil like
you than like them. I felt that as soon as you came."
"I wonder why you feel like that?" Carl mused.
"I don't know. Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one
of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a
few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same
thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she
had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and
sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's
come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented
to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She
said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the
Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that
reconciles me."
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 5---------
Alexandra did not find time to go to her neighbor's the next day, nor
the next. It was a busy season on the farm, with the corn-plowing
going on, and even Emil was in the field with a team and cultivator.
Carl went about over the farms with Alexandra in the morning, and
in the afternoon and evening they found a great deal to talk about.
Emil, for all his track practice, did not stand up under farmwork
very well, and by night he was too tired to talk or even to practise
on his cornet.
On Wednesday morning Carl got up before it was light, and stole
downstairs and out of the kitchen door just as old Ivar was making
his morning ablutions at the pump. Carl nodded to him and hurried
up the draw, past the garden, and into the pasture where the milking
cows used to be kept.
The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that
was burning under the edge of the world. The color was reflected
in the globules of dew that sheathed the short gray pasture grass.
Carl walked rapidly until he came to the crest of the second hill,
where the Bergson pasture joined the one that had belonged to his
father. There he sat down and waited for the sun to rise. It was
just there that he and Alexandra used to do their milking together, he
on his side of the fence, she on hers. He could remember exactly
how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass, her
skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand,
and the milky light of the early morning all about her. Even as
a boy he used to feel, when he saw her coming with her free step,
her upright head and calm shoulders, that she looked as if she had
walked straight out of the morning itself. Since then, when he had
happened to see the sun come up in the country or on the water, he
had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.
Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the
grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their
tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp,
to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill
noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed
and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light
seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing
in.
He crossed the fence into the pasture that was now the Shabatas' and
continued his walk toward the pond. He had not gone far, however,
when he discovered that he was not the only person abroad. In the
draw below, his gun in his hands, was Emil, advancing cautiously,
with a young woman beside him. They were moving softly, keeping
close together, and Carl knew that they expected to find ducks on
the pond. At the moment when they came in sight of the bright spot
of water, he heard a whirr of wings and the ducks shot up into the
air. There was a sharp crack from the gun, and five of the birds
fell to the ground. Emil and his companion laughed delightedly,
and Emil ran to pick them up. When he came back, dangling the
ducks by their feet, Marie held her apron and he dropped them into
it. As she stood looking down at them, her face changed. She
took up one of the birds, a rumpled ball of feathers with the blood
dripping slowly from its mouth, and looked at the live color that
still burned on its plumage.
As she let it fall, she cried in distress, "Oh, Emil, why did you?"
"I like that!" the boy exclaimed indignantly. "Why, Marie, you
asked me to come yourself."
"Yes, yes, I know," she said tearfully, "but I didn't think. I
hate to see them when they are first shot. They were having such
a good time, and we've spoiled it all for them."
Emil gave a rather sore laugh. "I should say we had! I'm not going
hunting with you any more. You're as bad as Ivar. Here, let me
take them." He snatched the ducks out of her apron.
"Don't be cross, Emil. Only--Ivar's right about wild things. They're
too happy to kill. You can tell just how they felt when they flew
up. They were scared, but they didn't really think anything could
hurt them. No, we won't do that any more."
"All right," Emil assented. "I'm sorry I made you feel bad." As
he looked down into her tearful eyes, there was a curious, sharp
young bitterness in his own.
Carl watched them as they moved slowly down the draw. They had
not seen him at all. He had not overheard much of their dialogue,
but he felt the import of it. It made him, somehow, unreasonably
mournful to find two young things abroad in the pasture in the
early morning. He decided that he needed his breakfast.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 6---------
At dinner that day Alexandra said she thought they must really
manage to go over to the Shabatas' that afternoon. "It's not often
I let three days go by without seeing Marie. She will think I have
forsaken her, now that my old friend has come back."
After the men had gone back to work, Alexandra put on a white dress
and her sun-hat, and she and Carl set forth across the fields.
"You see we have kept up the old path, Carl. It has been so nice
for me to feel that there was a friend at the other end of it
again."
Carl smiled a little ruefully. "All the same, I hope it hasn't
been QUITE the same."
Alexandra looked at him with surprise. "Why, no, of course not.
Not the same. She could not very well take your place, if that's
what you mean. I'm friendly with all my neighbors, I hope. But
Marie is really a companion, some one I can talk to quite frankly.
You wouldn't want me to be more lonely than I have been, would
you?"
Carl laughed and pushed back the triangular lock of hair with the
edge of his hat. "Of course I don't. I ought to be thankful that
this path hasn't been worn by--well, by friends with more pressing
errands than your little Bohemian is likely to have." He paused
to give Alexandra his hand as she stepped over the stile. "Are
you the least bit disappointed in our coming together again?" he
asked abruptly. "Is it the way you hoped it would be?"
Alexandra smiled at this. "Only better. When I've thought about
your coming, I've sometimes been a little afraid of it. You have
lived where things move so fast, and everything is slow here; the
people slowest of all. Our lives are like the years, all made up
of weather and crops and cows. How you hated cows!" She shook her
head and laughed to herself.
"I didn't when we milked together. I walked up to the pasture
corners this morning. I wonder whether I shall ever be able to
tell you all that I was thinking about up there. It's a strange
thing, Alexandra; I find it easy to be frank with you about everything
under the sun except--yourself!"
"You are afraid of hurting my feelings, perhaps." Alexandra looked
at him thoughtfully.
"No, I'm afraid of giving you a shock. You've seen yourself for
so long in the dull minds of the people about you, that if I were
to tell you how you seem to me, it would startle you. But you must
see that you astonish me. You must feel when people admire you."
Alexandra blushed and laughed with some confusion. "I felt that
you were pleased with me, if you mean that."
"And you've felt when other people were pleased with you?" he
insisted.
"Well, sometimes. The men in town, at the banks and the county
offices, seem glad to see me. I think, myself, it is more pleasant
to do business with people who are clean and healthy-looking," she
admitted blandly.
Carl gave a little chuckle as he opened the Shabatas' gate for her.
"Oh, do you?" he asked dryly.
There was no sign of life about the Shabatas' house except a big
yellow cat, sunning itself on the kitchen doorstep.
Alexandra took the path that led to the orchard. "She often sits
there and sews. I didn't telephone her we were coming, because I
didn't want her to go to work and bake cake and freeze ice-cream.
She'll always make a party if you give her the least excuse. Do
you recognize the apple trees, Carl?"
Linstrum looked about him. "I wish I had a dollar for every bucket
of water I've carried for those trees. Poor father, he was an
easy man, but he was perfectly merciless when it came to watering
the orchard."
"That's one thing I like about Germans; they make an orchard grow
if they can't make anything else. I'm so glad these trees belong
to some one who takes comfort in them. When I rented this place,
the tenants never kept the orchard up, and Emil and I used to come
over and take care of it ourselves. It needs mowing now. There
she is, down in the corner. Maria-a-a!" she called.
A recumbent figure started up from the grass and came running toward
them through the flickering screen of light and shade.
"Look at her! Isn't she like a little brown rabbit?" Alexandra
laughed.
Maria ran up panting and threw her arms about Alexandra. "Oh, I
had begun to think you were not coming at all, maybe. I knew you
were so busy. Yes, Emil told me about Mr. Linstrum being here.
Won't you come up to the house?"
"Why not sit down there in your corner? Carl wants to see the
orchard. He kept all these trees alive for years, watering them
with his own back."
Marie turned to Carl. "Then I'm thankful to you, Mr. Linstrum. We'd
never have bought the place if it hadn't been for this orchard, and
then I wouldn't have had Alexandra, either." She gave Alexandra's
arm a little squeeze as she walked beside her. "How nice your dress
smells, Alexandra; you put rosemary leaves in your chest, like I
told you."
She led them to the northwest corner of the orchard, sheltered on
one side by a thick mulberry hedge and bordered on the other by a
wheatfield, just beginning to yellow. In this corner the ground
dipped a little, and the blue-grass, which the weeds had driven out
in the upper part of the orchard, grew thick and luxuriant. Wild
roses were flaming in the tufts of bunchgrass along the fence.
Under a white mulberry tree there was an old wagon-seat. Beside
it lay a book and a workbasket.
"You must have the seat, Alexandra. The grass would stain your
dress," the hostess insisted. She dropped down on the ground
at Alexandra's side and tucked her feet under her. Carl sat at
a little distance from the two women, his back to the wheatfield,
and watched them. Alexandra took off her shade-hat and threw it on
the ground. Marie picked it up and played with the white ribbons,
twisting them about her brown fingers as she talked. They made a
pretty picture in the strong sunlight, the leafy pattern surrounding
them like a net; the Swedish woman so white and gold, kindly and
amused, but armored in calm, and the alert brown one, her full lips
parted, points of yellow light dancing in her eyes as she laughed
and chattered. Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky's
eyes, and he was glad to have an opportunity to study them. The
brown iris, he found, was curiously slashed with yellow, the color
of sunflower honey, or of old amber. In each eye one of these
streaks must have been larger than the others, for the effect was
that of two dancing points of light, two little yellow bubbles,
such as rise in a glass of champagne. Sometimes they seemed like
the sparks from a forge. She seemed so easily excited, to kindle
with a fierce little flame if one but breathed upon her. "What
a waste," Carl reflected. "She ought to be doing all that for a
sweetheart. How awkwardly things come about!"
It was not very long before Marie sprang up out of the grass again.
"Wait a moment. I want to show you something." She ran away and
disappeared behind the low-growing apple trees.
"What a charming creature," Carl murmured. "I don't wonder that
her husband is jealous. But can't she walk? does she always run?"
Alexandra nodded. "Always. I don't see many people, but I don't
believe there are many like her, anywhere."
Marie came back with a branch she had broken from an apricot tree,
laden with pale yellow, pink-cheeked fruit. She dropped it beside
Carl. "Did you plant those, too? They are such beautiful little
trees."
Carl fingered the blue-green leaves, porous like blotting-paper and
shaped like birch leaves, hung on waxen red stems. "Yes, I think
I did. Are these the circus trees, Alexandra?"
"Shall I tell her about them?" Alexandra asked. "Sit down like
a good girl, Marie, and don't ruin my poor hat, and I'll tell you
a story. A long time ago, when Carl and I were, say, sixteen and
twelve, a circus came to Hanover and we went to town in our wagon,
with Lou and Oscar, to see the parade. We hadn't money enough to
go to the circus. We followed the parade out to the circus grounds
and hung around until the show began and the crowd went inside the
tent. Then Lou was afraid we looked foolish standing outside in
the pasture, so we went back to Hanover feeling very sad. There
was a man in the streets selling apricots, and we had never seen
any before. He had driven down from somewhere up in the French
country, and he was selling them twenty-five cents a peck. We had
a little money our fathers had given us for candy, and I bought
two pecks and Carl bought one. They cheered us a good deal, and
we saved all the seeds and planted them. Up to the time Carl went
away, they hadn't borne at all."
"And now he's come back to eat them," cried Marie, nodding at Carl.
"That IS a good story. I can remember you a little, Mr. Linstrum.
I used to see you in Hanover sometimes, when Uncle Joe took me to
town. I remember you because you were always buying pencils and
tubes of paint at the drug store. Once, when my uncle left me at
the store, you drew a lot of little birds and flowers for me on a
piece of wrapping-paper. I kept them for a long while. I thought
you were very romantic because you could draw and had such black
eyes."
Carl smiled. "Yes, I remember that time. Your uncle bought you
some kind of a mechanical toy, a Turkish lady sitting on an ottoman
and smoking a hookah, wasn't it? And she turned her head backwards
and forwards."
"Oh, yes! Wasn't she splendid! I knew well enough I ought not
to tell Uncle Joe I wanted it, for he had just come back from the
saloon and was feeling good. You remember how he laughed? She
tickled him, too. But when we got home, my aunt scolded him for
buying toys when she needed so many things. We wound our lady up
every night, and when she began to move her head my aunt used to
laugh as hard as any of us. It was a music-box, you know, and the
Turkish lady played a tune while she smoked. That was how she made
you feel so jolly. As I remember her, she was lovely, and had a
gold crescent on her turban."
Half an hour later, as they were leaving the house, Carl and Alexandra
were met in the path by a strapping fellow in overalls and a blue
shirt. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and was
muttering to himself.
Marie ran forward, and, taking him by the arm, gave him a little
push toward her guests. "Frank, this is Mr. Linstrum."
Frank took off his broad straw hat and nodded to Alexandra. When
he spoke to Carl, he showed a fine set of white teeth. He was burned
a dull red down to his neckband, and there was a heavy three-days'
stubble on his face. Even in his agitation he was handsome, but
he looked a rash and violent man.
Barely saluting the callers, he turned at once to his wife and
began, in an outraged tone, "I have to leave my team to drive the
old woman Hiller's hogs out-a my wheat. I go to take dat old woman
to de court if she ain't careful, I tell you!"
His wife spoke soothingly. "But, Frank, she has only her lame boy
to help her. She does the best she can."
Alexandra looked at the excited man and offered a suggestion. "Why
don't you go over there some afternoon and hog-tight her fences?
You'd save time for yourself in the end."
Frank's neck stiffened. "Not-a-much, I won't. I keep my hogs
home. Other peoples can do like me. See? If that Louis can mend
shoes, he can mend fence."
"Maybe," said Alexandra placidly; "but I've found it sometimes pays
to mend other people's fences. Good-bye, Marie. Come to see me
soon."
Alexandra walked firmly down the path and Carl followed her.
Frank went into the house and threw himself on the sofa, his face
to the wall, his clenched fist on his hip. Marie, having seen her
guests off, came in and put her hand coaxingly on his shoulder.
"Poor Frank! You've run until you've made your head ache, now
haven't you? Let me make you some coffee."
"What else am I to do?" he cried hotly in Bohemian. "Am I to let
any old woman's hogs root up my wheat? Is that what I work myself
to death for?"
"Don't worry about it, Frank. I'll speak to Mrs. Hiller again.
But, really, she almost cried last time they got out, she was so
sorry."
Frank bounced over on his other side. "That's it; you always side
with them against me. They all know it. Anybody here feels free
to borrow the mower and break it, or turn their hogs in on me.
They know you won't care!"
Marie hurried away to make his coffee. When she came back, he was
fast asleep. She sat down and looked at him for a long while, very
thoughtfully. When the kitchen clock struck six she went out to
get supper, closing the door gently behind her. She was always
sorry for Frank when he worked himself into one of these rages, and
she was sorry to have him rough and quarrelsome with his neighbors.
She was perfectly aware that the neighbors had a good deal to put
up with, and that they bore with Frank for her sake.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of part 2, chapter 10 using the context provided. | part 2, chapter 7|part 2, chapter 8|part 2, chapter 9|part 2, chapter 10 | Meanwhile, Alexandra is back at home, doing her accounting, when Lou and Oscar show up at her door. They want to speak with her about Carl. They ask her when he'll be leaving, because people have started to "talk" and they feel she's making them all look ridiculous by keeping him around . If he stays longer, people will start thinking she wants to marry him. They tell her that Carl is just after her money and property, and that he just wants to be taken care of. Well, Alexandra wants to know what's so wrong with that. Maybe she wants to marry him. And if she does, it's her business. Lou is furious that she would give him their property and homestead. Alexandra reminds him that when he and Oscar got married, they divided up the land, and that she has a right to do with her land whatever she chooses. Even if they work the land for all those years and help pay the interest on their loans, the law is the law, and the land belongs to her. Plus, she adds, she's made more from her land since they divided everything up. Lou says to Oscar that this is what happens when a woman runs a business. They should have taken things into their own hands years ago. Alexandra remains cool and collected as she reminds him, again, that she's made most of her fortune since they divided up the land. So he's had no part in it. Oscar speaks up, saying that the property really belongs to the men, since they're the ones who are responsible for it, no matter what the property title says. Lou agrees. The men are the true owners because they are responsibly and because they do the work. Now, this is where Alexandra starts to lose her temper. What about all the work she's done? Her advice is good, Lou says, but good advice is not enough to get the fields weeded. Alexandra retorts that good advice is what keeps the fields around for corn to be planted. She reminds him that it was Lou and Oscar who wanted to sell the farm all those years ago. They thought she was crazy when she wanted plant alfalfa, just because she heard of it from the man in the river country who had been to the university. Lou even cried the first time she wanted to try planting wheat. Lou complains that giving orders is not the same as doing the work yourself. He thinks she was too hard on them, all while she babies Emil. She wasn't hard on them, Alexandra corrects, the conditions were hard on them all. She didn't choose this life for herself. As the men get ready to leave, Oscar tells her that everyone is laughing at her, a forty-year-old woman taking in a man who is five years younger than her. Alexandra tells them again to mind their own business; if they have any concerns, they should talk to their lawyer and see what rights they have to her property. In other words: back off. As they leave, they commiserate, complaining that, "you can't do business with women" . At the same time, Lou is worried that Oscar offended him with his comment about her age. Oscar says he only meant that she is old enough to know better. But, as Lou reminds himself and Oscar, Alexandra isn't like other women, and maybe she isn't as concerned as they are about their age. |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 7---------
Marie's father, Albert Tovesky, was one of the more intelligent
Bohemians who came West in the early seventies. He settled in Omaha
and became a leader and adviser among his people there. Marie was
his youngest child, by a second wife, and was the apple of his eye.
She was barely sixteen, and was in the graduating class of the
Omaha High School, when Frank Shabata arrived from the old country
and set all the Bohemian girls in a flutter. He was easily the
buck of the beer-gardens, and on Sunday he was a sight to see, with
his silk hat and tucked shirt and blue frock-coat, wearing gloves
and carrying a little wisp of a yellow cane. He was tall and fair,
with splendid teeth and close-cropped yellow curls, and he wore a
slightly disdainful expression, proper for a young man with high
connections, whose mother had a big farm in the Elbe valley. There
was often an interesting discontent in his blue eyes, and every
Bohemian girl he met imagined herself the cause of that unsatisfied
expression. He had a way of drawing out his cambric handkerchief
slowly, by one corner, from his breast-pocket, that was melancholy
and romantic in the extreme. He took a little flight with each
of the more eligible Bohemian girls, but it was when he was with
little Marie Tovesky that he drew his handkerchief out most slowly,
and, after he had lit a fresh cigar, dropped the match most
despairingly. Any one could see, with half an eye, that his proud
heart was bleeding for somebody.
One Sunday, late in the summer after Marie's graduation, she met
Frank at a Bohemian picnic down the river and went rowing with him
all the afternoon. When she got home that evening she went straight
to her father's room and told him that she was engaged to Shabata.
Old Tovesky was having a comfortable pipe before he went to bed.
When he heard his daughter's announcement, he first prudently
corked his beer bottle and then leaped to his feet and had a turn
of temper. He characterized Frank Shabata by a Bohemian expression
which is the equivalent of stuffed shirt.
"Why don't he go to work like the rest of us did? His farm in the
Elbe valley, indeed! Ain't he got plenty brothers and sisters?
It's his mother's farm, and why don't he stay at home and help her?
Haven't I seen his mother out in the morning at five o'clock with
her ladle and her big bucket on wheels, putting liquid manure on
the cabbages? Don't I know the look of old Eva Shabata's hands?
Like an old horse's hoofs they are--and this fellow wearing gloves
and rings! Engaged, indeed! You aren't fit to be out of school,
and that's what's the matter with you. I will send you off to the
Sisters of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis, and they will teach you
some sense, _I_ guess!"
Accordingly, the very next week, Albert Tovesky took his daughter,
pale and tearful, down the river to the convent. But the way to
make Frank want anything was to tell him he couldn't have it. He
managed to have an interview with Marie before she went away,
and whereas he had been only half in love with her before, he now
persuaded himself that he would not stop at anything. Marie took
with her to the convent, under the canvas lining of her trunk, the
results of a laborious and satisfying morning on Frank's part; no
less than a dozen photographs of himself, taken in a dozen different
love-lorn attitudes. There was a little round photograph for her
watch-case, photographs for her wall and dresser, and even long
narrow ones to be used as bookmarks. More than once the handsome
gentleman was torn to pieces before the French class by an indignant
nun.
Marie pined in the convent for a year, until her eighteenth birthday
was passed. Then she met Frank Shabata in the Union Station in
St. Louis and ran away with him. Old Tovesky forgave his daughter
because there was nothing else to do, and bought her a farm in
the country that she had loved so well as a child. Since then her
story had been a part of the history of the Divide. She and Frank
had been living there for five years when Carl Linstrum came back
to pay his long deferred visit to Alexandra. Frank had, on the
whole, done better than one might have expected. He had flung
himself at the soil with savage energy. Once a year he went to
Hastings or to Omaha, on a spree. He stayed away for a week or
two, and then came home and worked like a demon. He did work; if
he felt sorry for himself, that was his own affair.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 8---------
On the evening of the day of Alexandra's call at the Shabatas',
a heavy rain set in. Frank sat up until a late hour reading the
Sunday newspapers. One of the Goulds was getting a divorce, and
Frank took it as a personal affront. In printing the story of the
young man's marital troubles, the knowing editor gave a sufficiently
colored account of his career, stating the amount of his income
and the manner in which he was supposed to spend it. Frank read
English slowly, and the more he read about this divorce case, the
angrier he grew. At last he threw down the page with a snort. He
turned to his farm-hand who was reading the other half of the paper.
"By God! if I have that young feller in de hayfield once, I show
him someting. Listen here what he do wit his money." And Frank
began the catalogue of the young man's reputed extravagances.
Marie sighed. She thought it hard that the Goulds, for whom she
had nothing but good will, should make her so much trouble. She
hated to see the Sunday newspapers come into the house. Frank was
always reading about the doings of rich people and feeling outraged.
He had an inexhaustible stock of stories about their crimes and
follies, how they bribed the courts and shot down their butlers
with impunity whenever they chose. Frank and Lou Bergson had very
similar ideas, and they were two of the political agitators of the
county.
The next morning broke clear and brilliant, but Frank said the
ground was too wet to plough, so he took the cart and drove over to
Sainte-Agnes to spend the day at Moses Marcel's saloon. After he
was gone, Marie went out to the back porch to begin her butter-making.
A brisk wind had come up and was driving puffy white clouds across
the sky. The orchard was sparkling and rippling in the sun. Marie
stood looking toward it wistfully, her hand on the lid of the
churn, when she heard a sharp ring in the air, the merry sound of
the whetstone on the scythe. That invitation decided her. She ran
into the house, put on a short skirt and a pair of her husband's
boots, caught up a tin pail and started for the orchard. Emil
had already begun work and was mowing vigorously. When he saw her
coming, he stopped and wiped his brow. His yellow canvas leggings
and khaki trousers were splashed to the knees.
"Don't let me disturb you, Emil. I'm going to pick cherries.
Isn't everything beautiful after the rain? Oh, but I'm glad to get
this place mowed! When I heard it raining in the night, I thought
maybe you would come and do it for me to-day. The wind wakened
me. Didn't it blow dreadfully? Just smell the wild roses! They
are always so spicy after a rain. We never had so many of them
in here before. I suppose it's the wet season. Will you have to
cut them, too?"
"If I cut the grass, I will," Emil said teasingly. "What's the
matter with you? What makes you so flighty?"
"Am I flighty? I suppose that's the wet season, too, then. It's
exciting to see everything growing so fast,--and to get the grass
cut! Please leave the roses till last, if you must cut them. Oh,
I don't mean all of them, I mean that low place down by my tree, where
there are so many. Aren't you splashed! Look at the spider-webs
all over the grass. Good-bye. I'll call you if I see a snake."
She tripped away and Emil stood looking after her. In a few moments
he heard the cherries dropping smartly into the pail, and he began
to swing his scythe with that long, even stroke that few American
boys ever learn. Marie picked cherries and sang softly to herself,
stripping one glittering branch after another, shivering when she
caught a shower of raindrops on her neck and hair. And Emil mowed
his way slowly down toward the cherry trees.
That summer the rains had been so many and opportune that it was
almost more than Shabata and his man could do to keep up with the
corn; the orchard was a neglected wilderness. All sorts of weeds and
herbs and flowers had grown up there; splotches of wild larkspur,
pale green-and-white spikes of hoarhound, plantations of wild
cotton, tangles of foxtail and wild wheat. South of the apricot
trees, cornering on the wheatfield, was Frank's alfalfa, where
myriads of white and yellow butterflies were always fluttering
above the purple blossoms. When Emil reached the lower corner by
the hedge, Marie was sitting under her white mulberry tree, the
pailful of cherries beside her, looking off at the gentle, tireless
swelling of the wheat.
"Emil," she said suddenly--he was mowing quietly about under the
tree so as not to disturb her--"what religion did the Swedes have
away back, before they were Christians?"
Emil paused and straightened his back. "I don't know. About like
the Germans', wasn't it?"
Marie went on as if she had not heard him. "The Bohemians, you
know, were tree worshipers before the missionaries came. Father says
the people in the mountains still do queer things, sometimes,--they
believe that trees bring good or bad luck."
Emil looked superior. "Do they? Well, which are the lucky trees?
I'd like to know."
"I don't know all of them, but I know lindens are. The old people
in the mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away
with the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted
from heathen times. I'm a good Catholic, but I think I could get
along with caring for trees, if I hadn't anything else."
"That's a poor saying," said Emil, stooping over to wipe his hands
in the wet grass.
"Why is it? If I feel that way, I feel that way. I like trees
because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than
other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever
think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to
remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off."
Emil had nothing to say to this. He reached up among the branches
and began to pick the sweet, insipid fruit,--long ivory-colored
berries, tipped with faint pink, like white coral, that fall to
the ground unheeded all summer through. He dropped a handful into
her lap.
"Do you like Mr. Linstrum?" Marie asked suddenly.
"Yes. Don't you?"
"Oh, ever so much; only he seems kind of staid and school-teachery.
But, of course, he is older than Frank, even. I'm sure I don't
want to live to be more than thirty, do you? Do you think Alexandra
likes him very much?"
"I suppose so. They were old friends."
"Oh, Emil, you know what I mean!" Marie tossed her head impatiently.
"Does she really care about him? When she used to tell me about
him, I always wondered whether she wasn't a little in love with
him."
"Who, Alexandra?" Emil laughed and thrust his hands into his
trousers pockets. "Alexandra's never been in love, you crazy!" He
laughed again. "She wouldn't know how to go about it. The idea!"
Marie shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, you don't know Alexandra as well
as you think you do! If you had any eyes, you would see that she
is very fond of him. It would serve you all right if she walked
off with Carl. I like him because he appreciates her more than
you do."
Emil frowned. "What are you talking about, Marie? Alexandra's
all right. She and I have always been good friends. What more do
you want? I like to talk to Carl about New York and what a fellow
can do there."
"Oh, Emil! Surely you are not thinking of going off there?"
"Why not? I must go somewhere, mustn't I?" The young man took up
his scythe and leaned on it. "Would you rather I went off in the
sand hills and lived like Ivar?"
Marie's face fell under his brooding gaze. She looked down at his
wet leggings. "I'm sure Alexandra hopes you will stay on here,"
she murmured.
"Then Alexandra will be disappointed," the young man said roughly.
"What do I want to hang around here for? Alexandra can run the
farm all right, without me. I don't want to stand around and look
on. I want to be doing something on my own account."
"That's so," Marie sighed. "There are so many, many things you
can do. Almost anything you choose."
"And there are so many, many things I can't do." Emil echoed her
tone sarcastically. "Sometimes I don't want to do anything at
all, and sometimes I want to pull the four corners of the Divide
together,"--he threw out his arm and brought it back with a jerk,--"so,
like a table-cloth. I get tired of seeing men and horses going up
and down, up and down."
Marie looked up at his defiant figure and her face clouded. "I wish
you weren't so restless, and didn't get so worked up over things,"
she said sadly.
"Thank you," he returned shortly.
She sighed despondently. "Everything I say makes you cross, don't
it? And you never used to be cross to me."
Emil took a step nearer and stood frowning down at her bent head.
He stood in an attitude of self-defense, his feet well apart, his
hands clenched and drawn up at his sides, so that the cords stood
out on his bare arms. "I can't play with you like a little boy
any more," he said slowly. "That's what you miss, Marie. You'll
have to get some other little boy to play with." He stopped and took
a deep breath. Then he went on in a low tone, so intense that it
was almost threatening: "Sometimes you seem to understand perfectly,
and then sometimes you pretend you don't. You don't help things
any by pretending. It's then that I want to pull the corners of
the Divide together. If you WON'T understand, you know, I could
make you!"
Marie clasped her hands and started up from her seat. She had grown
very pale and her eyes were shining with excitement and distress.
"But, Emil, if I understand, then all our good times are over, we
can never do nice things together any more. We shall have to behave
like Mr. Linstrum. And, anyhow, there's nothing to understand!"
She struck the ground with her little foot fiercely. "That won't
last. It will go away, and things will be just as they used to.
I wish you were a Catholic. The Church helps people, indeed it
does. I pray for you, but that's not the same as if you prayed
yourself."
She spoke rapidly and pleadingly, looked entreatingly into his
face. Emil stood defiant, gazing down at her.
"I can't pray to have the things I want," he said slowly, "and I
won't pray not to have them, not if I'm damned for it."
Marie turned away, wringing her hands. "Oh, Emil, you won't try!
Then all our good times are over."
"Yes; over. I never expect to have any more."
Emil gripped the hand-holds of his scythe and began to mow. Marie
took up her cherries and went slowly toward the house, crying
bitterly.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 9---------
On Sunday afternoon, a month after Carl Linstrum's arrival, he rode
with Emil up into the French country to attend a Catholic fair. He
sat for most of the afternoon in the basement of the church, where
the fair was held, talking to Marie Shabata, or strolled about the
gravel terrace, thrown up on the hillside in front of the basement
doors, where the French boys were jumping and wrestling and throwing
the discus. Some of the boys were in their white baseball suits;
they had just come up from a Sunday practice game down in the
ballgrounds. Amedee, the newly married, Emil's best friend, was
their pitcher, renowned among the country towns for his dash and
skill. Amedee was a little fellow, a year younger than Emil and
much more boyish in appearance; very lithe and active and neatly
made, with a clear brown and white skin, and flashing white teeth.
The Sainte-Agnes boys were to play the Hastings nine in a fortnight,
and Amedee's lightning balls were the hope of his team. The little
Frenchman seemed to get every ounce there was in him behind the
ball as it left his hand.
"You'd have made the battery at the University for sure, 'Medee,"
Emil said as they were walking from the ball-grounds back to the
church on the hill. "You're pitching better than you did in the
spring."
Amedee grinned. "Sure! A married man don't lose his head no more."
He slapped Emil on the back as he caught step with him. "Oh, Emil,
you wanna get married right off quick! It's the greatest thing
ever!"
Emil laughed. "How am I going to get married without any girl?"
Amedee took his arm. "Pooh! There are plenty girls will have
you. You wanna get some nice French girl, now. She treat you well;
always be jolly. See,"--he began checking off on his fingers,--"there
is Severine, and Alphosen, and Josephine, and Hectorine, and Louise,
and Malvina--why, I could love any of them girls! Why don't you
get after them? Are you stuck up, Emil, or is anything the matter
with you? I never did know a boy twenty-two years old before that
didn't have no girl. You wanna be a priest, maybe? Not-a for me!"
Amedee swaggered. "I bring many good Catholics into this world,
I hope, and that's a way I help the Church."
Emil looked down and patted him on the shoulder. "Now you're windy,
'Medee. You Frenchies like to brag."
But Amedee had the zeal of the newly married, and he was not
to be lightly shaken off. "Honest and true, Emil, don't you want
ANY girl? Maybe there's some young lady in Lincoln, now, very
grand,"--Amedee waved his hand languidly before his face to denote
the fan of heartless beauty,--"and you lost your heart up there.
Is that it?"
"Maybe," said Emil.
But Amedee saw no appropriate glow in his friend's face. "Bah!"
he exclaimed in disgust. "I tell all the French girls to keep 'way
from you. You gotta rock in there," thumping Emil on the ribs.
When they reached the terrace at the side of the church, Amedee,
who was excited by his success on the ball-grounds, challenged
Emil to a jumping-match, though he knew he would be beaten. They
belted themselves up, and Raoul Marcel, the choir tenor and Father
Duchesne's pet, and Jean Bordelau, held the string over which they
vaulted. All the French boys stood round, cheering and humping
themselves up when Emil or Amedee went over the wire, as if they
were helping in the lift. Emil stopped at five-feet-five, declaring
that he would spoil his appetite for supper if he jumped any more.
Angelique, Amedee's pretty bride, as blonde and fair as her name,
who had come out to watch the match, tossed her head at Emil and
said:--
"'Medee could jump much higher than you if he were as tall. And
anyhow, he is much more graceful. He goes over like a bird, and
you have to hump yourself all up."
"Oh, I do, do I?" Emil caught her and kissed her saucy mouth squarely,
while she laughed and struggled and called, "'Medee! 'Medee!"
"There, you see your 'Medee isn't even big enough to get you away
from me. I could run away with you right now and he could only
sit down and cry about it. I'll show you whether I have to hump
myself!" Laughing and panting, he picked Angelique up in his arms
and began running about the rectangle with her. Not until he saw
Marie Shabata's tiger eyes flashing from the gloom of the basement
doorway did he hand the disheveled bride over to her husband.
"There, go to your graceful; I haven't the heart to take you away
from him."
Angelique clung to her husband and made faces at Emil over the
white shoulder of Amedee's ball-shirt. Emil was greatly amused at
her air of proprietorship and at Amedee's shameless submission to
it. He was delighted with his friend's good fortune. He liked to
see and to think about Amedee's sunny, natural, happy love.
He and Amedee had ridden and wrestled and larked together since
they were lads of twelve. On Sundays and holidays they were always
arm in arm. It seemed strange that now he should have to hide the
thing that Amedee was so proud of, that the feeling which gave one
of them such happiness should bring the other such despair. It
was like that when Alexandra tested her seed-corn in the spring,
he mused. From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains
of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into
the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth
and rotted; and nobody knew why.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 10---------
While Emil and Carl were amusing themselves at the fair, Alexandra
was at home, busy with her account-books, which had been neglected
of late. She was almost through with her figures when she heard
a cart drive up to the gate, and looking out of the window she saw
her two older brothers. They had seemed to avoid her ever since
Carl Linstrum's arrival, four weeks ago that day, and she hurried
to the door to welcome them. She saw at once that they had come
with some very definite purpose. They followed her stiffly into
the sitting-room. Oscar sat down, but Lou walked over to the window
and remained standing, his hands behind him.
"You are by yourself?" he asked, looking toward the doorway into
the parlor.
"Yes. Carl and Emil went up to the Catholic fair."
For a few moments neither of the men spoke.
Then Lou came out sharply. "How soon does he intend to go away
from here?"
"I don't know, Lou. Not for some time, I hope." Alexandra spoke
in an even, quiet tone that often exasperated her brothers. They
felt that she was trying to be superior with them.
Oscar spoke up grimly. "We thought we ought to tell you that people
have begun to talk," he said meaningly.
Alexandra looked at him. "What about?"
Oscar met her eyes blankly. "About you, keeping him here so long.
It looks bad for him to be hanging on to a woman this way. People
think you're getting taken in."
Alexandra shut her account-book firmly. "Boys," she said seriously,
"don't let's go on with this. We won't come out anywhere. I can't
take advice on such a matter. I know you mean well, but you must
not feel responsible for me in things of this sort. If we go on
with this talk it will only make hard feeling."
Lou whipped about from the window. "You ought to think a little
about your family. You're making us all ridiculous."
"How am I?"
"People are beginning to say you want to marry the fellow."
"Well, and what is ridiculous about that?"
Lou and Oscar exchanged outraged looks. "Alexandra! Can't you
see he's just a tramp and he's after your money? He wants to be
taken care of, he does!"
"Well, suppose I want to take care of him? Whose business is it
but my own?"
"Don't you know he'd get hold of your property?"
"He'd get hold of what I wished to give him, certainly."
Oscar sat up suddenly and Lou clutched at his bristly hair.
"Give him?" Lou shouted. "Our property, our homestead?"
"I don't know about the homestead," said Alexandra quietly. "I
know you and Oscar have always expected that it would be left to
your children, and I'm not sure but what you're right. But I'll
do exactly as I please with the rest of my land, boys."
"The rest of your land!" cried Lou, growing more excited every
minute. "Didn't all the land come out of the homestead? It was
bought with money borrowed on the homestead, and Oscar and me worked
ourselves to the bone paying interest on it."
"Yes, you paid the interest. But when you married we made a division
of the land, and you were satisfied. I've made more on my farms
since I've been alone than when we all worked together."
"Everything you've made has come out of the original land that us
boys worked for, hasn't it? The farms and all that comes out of
them belongs to us as a family."
Alexandra waved her hand impatiently. "Come now, Lou. Stick to
the facts. You are talking nonsense. Go to the county clerk and
ask him who owns my land, and whether my titles are good."
Lou turned to his brother. "This is what comes of letting a woman
meddle in business," he said bitterly. "We ought to have taken
things in our own hands years ago. But she liked to run things,
and we humored her. We thought you had good sense, Alexandra. We
never thought you'd do anything foolish."
Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles.
"Listen, Lou. Don't talk wild. You say you ought to have taken
things into your own hands years ago. I suppose you mean before
you left home. But how could you take hold of what wasn't there?
I've got most of what I have now since we divided the property;
I've built it up myself, and it has nothing to do with you."
Oscar spoke up solemnly. "The property of a family really belongs
to the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything
goes wrong, it's the men that are held responsible."
"Yes, of course," Lou broke in. "Everybody knows that. Oscar and
me have always been easy-going and we've never made any fuss. We
were willing you should hold the land and have the good of it, but
you got no right to part with any of it. We worked in the fields
to pay for the first land you bought, and whatever's come out of
it has got to be kept in the family."
Oscar reinforced his brother, his mind fixed on the one point he
could see. "The property of a family belongs to the men of the
family, because they are held responsible, and because they do the
work."
Alexandra looked from one to the other, her eyes full of indignation.
She had been impatient before, but now she was beginning to feel
angry. "And what about my work?" she asked in an unsteady voice.
Lou looked at the carpet. "Oh, now, Alexandra, you always took
it pretty easy! Of course we wanted you to. You liked to manage
round, and we always humored you. We realize you were a great
deal of help to us. There's no woman anywhere around that knows
as much about business as you do, and we've always been proud of
that, and thought you were pretty smart. But, of course, the real
work always fell on us. Good advice is all right, but it don't
get the weeds out of the corn."
"Maybe not, but it sometimes puts in the crop, and it sometimes
keeps the fields for corn to grow in," said Alexandra dryly. "Why,
Lou, I can remember when you and Oscar wanted to sell this homestead
and all the improvements to old preacher Ericson for two thousand
dollars. If I'd consented, you'd have gone down to the river and
scraped along on poor farms for the rest of your lives. When I put
in our first field of alfalfa you both opposed me, just because I
first heard about it from a young man who had been to the University.
You said I was being taken in then, and all the neighbors said
so. You know as well as I do that alfalfa has been the salvation
of this country. You all laughed at me when I said our land here
was about ready for wheat, and I had to raise three big wheat crops
before the neighbors quit putting all their land in corn. Why, I
remember you cried, Lou, when we put in the first big wheat-planting,
and said everybody was laughing at us."
Lou turned to Oscar. "That's the woman of it; if she tells you to
put in a crop, she thinks she's put it in. It makes women conceited
to meddle in business. I shouldn't think you'd want to remind us
how hard you were on us, Alexandra, after the way you baby Emil."
"Hard on you? I never meant to be hard. Conditions were hard.
Maybe I would never have been very soft, anyhow; but I certainly
didn't choose to be the kind of girl I was. If you take even a
vine and cut it back again and again, it grows hard, like a tree."
Lou felt that they were wandering from the point, and that
in digression Alexandra might unnerve him. He wiped his forehead
with a jerk of his handkerchief. "We never doubted you, Alexandra.
We never questioned anything you did. You've always had your own
way. But you can't expect us to sit like stumps and see you done
out of the property by any loafer who happens along, and making
yourself ridiculous into the bargain."
Oscar rose. "Yes," he broke in, "everybody's laughing to see you
get took in; at your age, too. Everybody knows he's nearly five
years younger than you, and is after your money. Why, Alexandra,
you are forty years old!"
"All that doesn't concern anybody but Carl and me. Go to town and
ask your lawyers what you can do to restrain me from disposing of
my own property. And I advise you to do what they tell you; for
the authority you can exert by law is the only influence you will
ever have over me again." Alexandra rose. "I think I would rather
not have lived to find out what I have to-day," she said quietly,
closing her desk.
Lou and Oscar looked at each other questioningly. There seemed to
be nothing to do but to go, and they walked out.
"You can't do business with women," Oscar said heavily as he
clambered into the cart. "But anyhow, we've had our say, at last."
Lou scratched his head. "Talk of that kind might come too high, you
know; but she's apt to be sensible. You hadn't ought to said that
about her age, though, Oscar. I'm afraid that hurt her feelings;
and the worst thing we can do is to make her sore at us. She'd
marry him out of contrariness."
"I only meant," said Oscar, "that she is old enough to know better,
and she is. If she was going to marry, she ought to done it long
ago, and not go making a fool of herself now."
Lou looked anxious, nevertheless. "Of course," he reflected hopefully
and inconsistently, "Alexandra ain't much like other women-folks.
Maybe it won't make her sore. Maybe she'd as soon be forty as
not!"
|
null | cliffnotes | Produce a brief summary for part 2, chapter 12 based on the provided context. | null | Carl returns from his chat with Lou and Oscar. He avoids making eye contact with Alexandra, and she assumes that he's decided to takeoff. Carl confirms. He's sad that she's surrounded by such "little men," including himself . He's heading off tomorrow. He says he can't promise that he'll return with something more to offer. But, Alexandra responds, money is not something she needs. She's loaded. What she needs is him. She doesn't even know why she has all her money, if she has no one to be with. Carl says it's not just that he can't give her anything. It's that he can't live with himself as a man with no means of his own. He needs to go make his own money. Alexandra has a feeling he won't come back if they don't act now. Something could happen to them in the meantime. Carl refuses. He has to go up North. He asks Alexandra to wait for him for a year. They both look at the portrait of John Bergson. Alexandra says she's glad she can't see him now, when she has become prosperous but is losing the people who matter to her, first Emil, and now Carl. |
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 11---------
Emil came home at about half-past seven o'clock that evening. Old
Ivar met him at the windmill and took his horse, and the young
man went directly into the house. He called to his sister and she
answered from her bedroom, behind the sitting-room, saying that
she was lying down.
Emil went to her door.
"Can I see you for a minute?" he asked. "I want to talk to you
about something before Carl comes."
Alexandra rose quickly and came to the door. "Where is Carl?"
"Lou and Oscar met us and said they wanted to talk to him, so he
rode over to Oscar's with them. Are you coming out?" Emil asked
impatiently.
"Yes, sit down. I'll be dressed in a moment."
Alexandra closed her door, and Emil sank down on the old slat lounge
and sat with his head in his hands. When his sister came out, he
looked up, not knowing whether the interval had been short or long,
and he was surprised to see that the room had grown quite dark.
That was just as well; it would be easier to talk if he were not
under the gaze of those clear, deliberate eyes, that saw so far in
some directions and were so blind in others. Alexandra, too, was
glad of the dusk. Her face was swollen from crying.
Emil started up and then sat down again. "Alexandra," he said
slowly, in his deep young baritone, "I don't want to go away to
law school this fall. Let me put it off another year. I want to
take a year off and look around. It's awfully easy to rush into
a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of
it. Linstrum and I have been talking about that."
"Very well, Emil. Only don't go off looking for land." She came
up and put her hand on his shoulder. "I've been wishing you could
stay with me this winter."
"That's just what I don't want to do, Alexandra. I'm restless.
I want to go to a new place. I want to go down to the City of
Mexico to join one of the University fellows who's at the head of
an electrical plant. He wrote me he could give me a little job,
enough to pay my way, and I could look around and see what I want
to do. I want to go as soon as harvest is over. I guess Lou and
Oscar will be sore about it."
"I suppose they will." Alexandra sat down on the lounge beside
him. "They are very angry with me, Emil. We have had a quarrel.
They will not come here again."
Emil scarcely heard what she was saying; he did not notice the
sadness of her tone. He was thinking about the reckless life he
meant to live in Mexico.
"What about?" he asked absently.
"About Carl Linstrum. They are afraid I am going to marry him,
and that some of my property will get away from them."
Emil shrugged his shoulders. "What nonsense!" he murmured. "Just
like them."
Alexandra drew back. "Why nonsense, Emil?"
"Why, you've never thought of such a thing, have you? They always
have to have something to fuss about."
"Emil," said his sister slowly, "you ought not to take things for
granted. Do you agree with them that I have no right to change my
way of living?"
Emil looked at the outline of his sister's head in the dim light.
They were sitting close together and he somehow felt that she
could hear his thoughts. He was silent for a moment, and then said
in an embarrassed tone, "Why, no, certainly not. You ought to do
whatever you want to. I'll always back you."
"But it would seem a little bit ridiculous to you if I married
Carl?"
Emil fidgeted. The issue seemed to him too far-fetched to warrant
discussion. "Why, no. I should be surprised if you wanted to. I
can't see exactly why. But that's none of my business. You ought
to do as you please. Certainly you ought not to pay any attention
to what the boys say."
Alexandra sighed. "I had hoped you might understand, a little,
why I do want to. But I suppose that's too much to expect. I've
had a pretty lonely life, Emil. Besides Marie, Carl is the only
friend I have ever had."
Emil was awake now; a name in her last sentence roused him. He
put out his hand and took his sister's awkwardly. "You ought to
do just as you wish, and I think Carl's a fine fellow. He and I
would always get on. I don't believe any of the things the boys
say about him, honest I don't. They are suspicious of him because
he's intelligent. You know their way. They've been sore at me
ever since you let me go away to college. They're always trying to
catch me up. If I were you, I wouldn't pay any attention to them.
There's nothing to get upset about. Carl's a sensible fellow. He
won't mind them."
"I don't know. If they talk to him the way they did to me, I think
he'll go away."
Emil grew more and more uneasy. "Think so? Well, Marie said it
would serve us all right if you walked off with him."
"Did she? Bless her little heart! SHE would." Alexandra's voice
broke.
Emil began unlacing his leggings. "Why don't you talk to her about
it? There's Carl, I hear his horse. I guess I'll go upstairs and
get my boots off. No, I don't want any supper. We had supper at
five o'clock, at the fair."
Emil was glad to escape and get to his own room. He was a little
ashamed for his sister, though he had tried not to show it. He
felt that there was something indecorous in her proposal, and she
did seem to him somewhat ridiculous. There was trouble enough in
the world, he reflected, as he threw himself upon his bed, without
people who were forty years old imagining they wanted to get
married. In the darkness and silence Emil was not likely to think
long about Alexandra. Every image slipped away but one. He had
seen Marie in the crowd that afternoon. She sold candy at the
fair. WHY had she ever run away with Frank Shabata, and how could
she go on laughing and working and taking an interest in things?
Why did she like so many people, and why had she seemed pleased when
all the French and Bohemian boys, and the priest himself, crowded
round her candy stand? Why did she care about any one but him? Why
could he never, never find the thing he looked for in her playful,
affectionate eyes?
Then he fell to imagining that he looked once more and found it
there, and what it would be like if she loved him,--she who, as
Alexandra said, could give her whole heart. In that dream he could
lie for hours, as if in a trance. His spirit went out of his body
and crossed the fields to Marie Shabata.
At the University dances the girls had often looked wonderingly
at the tall young Swede with the fine head, leaning against the
wall and frowning, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on the ceiling
or the floor. All the girls were a little afraid of him. He was
distinguished-looking, and not the jollying kind. They felt that
he was too intense and preoccupied. There was something queer about
him. Emil's fraternity rather prided itself upon its dances, and
sometimes he did his duty and danced every dance. But whether he
was on the floor or brooding in a corner, he was always thinking
about Marie Shabata. For two years the storm had been gathering
in him.
----------PART 2, CHAPTER 12---------
Carl came into the sitting-room while Alexandra was lighting the
lamp. She looked up at him as she adjusted the shade. His sharp
shoulders stooped as if he were very tired, his face was pale,
and there were bluish shadows under his dark eyes. His anger had
burned itself out and left him sick and disgusted.
"You have seen Lou and Oscar?" Alexandra asked.
"Yes." His eyes avoided hers.
Alexandra took a deep breath. "And now you are going away. I
thought so."
Carl threw himself into a chair and pushed the dark lock back
from his forehead with his white, nervous hand. "What a hopeless
position you are in, Alexandra!" he exclaimed feverishly. "It is
your fate to be always surrounded by little men. And I am no better
than the rest. I am too little to face the criticism of even such
men as Lou and Oscar. Yes, I am going away; to-morrow. I cannot
even ask you to give me a promise until I have something to offer
you. I thought, perhaps, I could do that; but I find I can't."
"What good comes of offering people things they don't need?"
Alexandra asked sadly. "I don't need money. But I have needed
you for a great many years. I wonder why I have been permitted to
prosper, if it is only to take my friends away from me."
"I don't deceive myself," Carl said frankly. "I know that I am
going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I
must have something to show for myself. To take what you would
give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very
small one, and I am only in the middle class."
Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will
not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both.
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world.
It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours,
if you care enough about me to take it."
Carl rose and looked up at the picture of John Bergson. "But I
can't, my dear, I can't! I will go North at once. Instead of idling
about in California all winter, I shall be getting my bearings up
there. I won't waste another week. Be patient with me, Alexandra.
Give me a year!"
"As you will," said Alexandra wearily. "All at once, in a single
day, I lose everything; and I do not know why. Emil, too, is going
away." Carl was still studying John Bergson's face and Alexandra's
eyes followed his. "Yes," she said, "if he could have seen all
that would come of the task he gave me, he would have been sorry.
I hope he does not see me now. I hope that he is among the old
people of his blood and country, and that tidings do not reach him
from the New World."
PART III. Winter Memories
|
O Pioneers!.part 4.chapte | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of part 4, chapter 4 using the context provided. | part 4, chapter 2|part 4, chapter 3|part 4, chapter 4|part 4, chapter 5 | On the next morning, Emil rides over to visit his friend Amedee. He finds Angelique, his wife, baking pies in the kitchen with old Mrs.Chevalier, Amedee's mother, and the baby boy, Hector Baptiste. She tells Emil that Amedee is out working in the fields. He's driving a new wheat header, a machine to harvest wheat. She also tells him that Amedee was up all night with stomach pains and should be in bed. Still, she doesn't sound at all worried. As the narrator tells us, she couldn't be more confident in the youth and strength of her husband and her baby boy. Emil plays for a bit with the baby, and remarks jokingly that he looks like a little Indian. His grandmother is not pleased. Emil rides out to the fields. He's really impressed by his friend and his new machine, but it quickly becomes clear that his friend is really sick. He doubles over with stomach pain and appears to have a fever. When Emil tells him to get some rest, Amedee seems anxious about harvesting all the wheat on time. Emil can see that he's too busy to talk, so he heads over to the French church to say goodbye to another friend. When he passes by the field again, he helps some men carry Amedee off and put him to bed. |
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 2---------
Signa's wedding supper was over. The guests, and the tiresome
little Norwegian preacher who had performed the marriage ceremony,
were saying good-night. Old Ivar was hitching the horses to the
wagon to take the wedding presents and the bride and groom up to
their new home, on Alexandra's north quarter. When Ivar drove up
to the gate, Emil and Marie Shabata began to carry out the presents,
and Alexandra went into her bedroom to bid Signa good-bye and to
give her a few words of good counsel. She was surprised to find
that the bride had changed her slippers for heavy shoes and was
pinning up her skirts. At that moment Nelse appeared at the gate
with the two milk cows that Alexandra had given Signa for a wedding
present.
Alexandra began to laugh. "Why, Signa, you and Nelse are to ride
home. I'll send Ivar over with the cows in the morning."
Signa hesitated and looked perplexed. When her husband called her,
she pinned her hat on resolutely. "I ta-ank I better do yust like
he say," she murmured in confusion.
Alexandra and Marie accompanied Signa to the gate and saw the
party set off, old Ivar driving ahead in the wagon and the bride
and groom following on foot, each leading a cow. Emil burst into
a laugh before they were out of hearing.
"Those two will get on," said Alexandra as they turned back to the
house. "They are not going to take any chances. They will feel
safer with those cows in their own stable. Marie, I am going to
send for an old woman next. As soon as I get the girls broken in,
I marry them off."
"I've no patience with Signa, marrying that grumpy fellow!" Marie
declared. "I wanted her to marry that nice Smirka boy who worked
for us last winter. I think she liked him, too."
"Yes, I think she did," Alexandra assented, "but I suppose she was
too much afraid of Nelse to marry any one else. Now that I think
of it, most of my girls have married men they were afraid of. I
believe there is a good deal of the cow in most Swedish girls.
You high-strung Bohemian can't understand us. We're a terribly
practical people, and I guess we think a cross man makes a good
manager."
Marie shrugged her shoulders and turned to pin up a lock of hair
that had fallen on her neck. Somehow Alexandra had irritated her
of late. Everybody irritated her. She was tired of everybody. "I'm
going home alone, Emil, so you needn't get your hat," she said as
she wound her scarf quickly about her head. "Good-night, Alexandra,"
she called back in a strained voice, running down the gravel walk.
Emil followed with long strides until he overtook her. Then she began
to walk slowly. It was a night of warm wind and faint starlight,
and the fireflies were glimmering over the wheat.
"Marie," said Emil after they had walked for a while, "I wonder if
you know how unhappy I am?"
Marie did not answer him. Her head, in its white scarf, drooped
forward a little.
Emil kicked a clod from the path and went on:--
"I wonder whether you are really shallow-hearted, like you seem?
Sometimes I think one boy does just as well as another for you.
It never seems to make much difference whether it is me or Raoul
Marcel or Jan Smirka. Are you really like that?"
"Perhaps I am. What do you want me to do? Sit round and cry all
day? When I've cried until I can't cry any more, then--then I must
do something else."
"Are you sorry for me?" he persisted.
"No, I'm not. If I were big and free like you, I wouldn't let
anything make me unhappy. As old Napoleon Brunot said at the fair,
I wouldn't go lovering after no woman. I'd take the first train
and go off and have all the fun there is."
"I tried that, but it didn't do any good. Everything reminded me.
The nicer the place was, the more I wanted you." They had come to
the stile and Emil pointed to it persuasively. "Sit down a moment,
I want to ask you something." Marie sat down on the top step and
Emil drew nearer. "Would you tell me something that's none of my
business if you thought it would help me out? Well, then, tell
me, PLEASE tell me, why you ran away with Frank Shabata!"
Marie drew back. "Because I was in love with him," she said firmly.
"Really?" he asked incredulously.
"Yes, indeed. Very much in love with him. I think I was the one
who suggested our running away. From the first it was more my
fault than his."
Emil turned away his face.
"And now," Marie went on, "I've got to remember that. Frank is
just the same now as he was then, only then I would see him as I
wanted him to be. I would have my own way. And now I pay for it."
"You don't do all the paying."
"That's it. When one makes a mistake, there's no telling where
it will stop. But you can go away; you can leave all this behind
you."
"Not everything. I can't leave you behind. Will you go away with
me, Marie?"
Marie started up and stepped across the stile. "Emil! How wickedly
you talk! I am not that kind of a girl, and you know it. But what
am I going to do if you keep tormenting me like this!" she added
plaintively.
"Marie, I won't bother you any more if you will tell me just
one thing. Stop a minute and look at me. No, nobody can see us.
Everybody's asleep. That was only a firefly. Marie, STOP and tell
me!"
Emil overtook her and catching her by the shoulders shook her
gently, as if he were trying to awaken a sleepwalker.
Marie hid her face on his arm. "Don't ask me anything more. I
don't know anything except how miserable I am. And I thought it
would be all right when you came back. Oh, Emil," she clutched his
sleeve and began to cry, "what am I to do if you don't go away? I
can't go, and one of us must. Can't you see?"
Emil stood looking down at her, holding his shoulders stiff and
stiffening the arm to which she clung. Her white dress looked
gray in the darkness. She seemed like a troubled spirit, like some
shadow out of the earth, clinging to him and entreating him to give
her peace. Behind her the fireflies were weaving in and out over
the wheat. He put his hand on her bent head. "On my honor, Marie,
if you will say you love me, I will go away."
She lifted her face to his. "How could I help it? Didn't you
know?"
Emil was the one who trembled, through all his frame. After he
left Marie at her gate, he wandered about the fields all night,
till morning put out the fireflies and the stars.
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 3---------
One evening, a week after Signa's wedding, Emil was kneeling before
a box in the sitting-room, packing his books. From time to time
he rose and wandered about the house, picking up stray volumes and
bringing them listlessly back to his box. He was packing without
enthusiasm. He was not very sanguine about his future. Alexandra
sat sewing by the table. She had helped him pack his trunk in
the afternoon. As Emil came and went by her chair with his books,
he thought to himself that it had not been so hard to leave his
sister since he first went away to school. He was going directly
to Omaha, to read law in the office of a Swedish lawyer until
October, when he would enter the law school at Ann Arbor. They
had planned that Alexandra was to come to Michigan--a long journey
for her--at Christmas time, and spend several weeks with him.
Nevertheless, he felt that this leave-taking would be more final
than his earlier ones had been; that it meant a definite break with
his old home and the beginning of something new--he did not know
what. His ideas about the future would not crystallize; the more
he tried to think about it, the vaguer his conception of it became.
But one thing was clear, he told himself; it was high time that he
made good to Alexandra, and that ought to be incentive enough to
begin with.
As he went about gathering up his books he felt as if he were
uprooting things. At last he threw himself down on the old slat
lounge where he had slept when he was little, and lay looking up
at the familiar cracks in the ceiling.
"Tired, Emil?" his sister asked.
"Lazy," he murmured, turning on his side and looking at her. He
studied Alexandra's face for a long time in the lamplight. It had
never occurred to him that his sister was a handsome woman until
Marie Shabata had told him so. Indeed, he had never thought of
her as being a woman at all, only a sister. As he studied her bent
head, he looked up at the picture of John Bergson above the lamp.
"No," he thought to himself, "she didn't get it there. I suppose
I am more like that."
"Alexandra," he said suddenly, "that old walnut secretary you use
for a desk was father's, wasn't it?"
Alexandra went on stitching. "Yes. It was one of the first things
he bought for the old log house. It was a great extravagance
in those days. But he wrote a great many letters back to the old
country. He had many friends there, and they wrote to him up to the
time he died. No one ever blamed him for grandfather's disgrace.
I can see him now, sitting there on Sundays, in his white shirt,
writing pages and pages, so carefully. He wrote a fine, regular
hand, almost like engraving. Yours is something like his, when
you take pains."
"Grandfather was really crooked, was he?"
"He married an unscrupulous woman, and then--then I'm afraid he
was really crooked. When we first came here father used to have
dreams about making a great fortune and going back to Sweden to
pay back to the poor sailors the money grandfather had lost."
Emil stirred on the lounge. "I say, that would have been worth
while, wouldn't it? Father wasn't a bit like Lou or Oscar, was
he? I can't remember much about him before he got sick."
"Oh, not at all!" Alexandra dropped her sewing on her knee. "He
had better opportunities; not to make money, but to make something
of himself. He was a quiet man, but he was very intelligent. You
would have been proud of him, Emil."
Alexandra felt that he would like to know there had been a man of
his kin whom he could admire. She knew that Emil was ashamed of
Lou and Oscar, because they were bigoted and self-satisfied. He
never said much about them, but she could feel his disgust. His
brothers had shown their disapproval of him ever since he first
went away to school. The only thing that would have satisfied them
would have been his failure at the University. As it was, they
resented every change in his speech, in his dress, in his point of
view; though the latter they had to conjecture, for Emil avoided
talking to them about any but family matters. All his interests
they treated as affectations.
Alexandra took up her sewing again. "I can remember father when
he was quite a young man. He belonged to some kind of a musical
society, a male chorus, in Stockholm. I can remember going with
mother to hear them sing. There must have been a hundred of them,
and they all wore long black coats and white neckties. I was
used to seeing father in a blue coat, a sort of jacket, and when I
recognized him on the platform, I was very proud. Do you remember
that Swedish song he taught you, about the ship boy?"
"Yes. I used to sing it to the Mexicans. They like anything
different." Emil paused. "Father had a hard fight here, didn't
he?" he added thoughtfully.
"Yes, and he died in a dark time. Still, he had hope. He believed
in the land."
"And in you, I guess," Emil said to himself. There was another
period of silence; that warm, friendly silence, full of perfect
understanding, in which Emil and Alexandra had spent many of their
happiest half-hours.
At last Emil said abruptly, "Lou and Oscar would be better off if
they were poor, wouldn't they?"
Alexandra smiled. "Maybe. But their children wouldn't. I have
great hopes of Milly."
Emil shivered. "I don't know. Seems to me it gets worse as it
goes on. The worst of the Swedes is that they're never willing
to find out how much they don't know. It was like that at the
University. Always so pleased with themselves! There's no getting
behind that conceited Swedish grin. The Bohemians and Germans were
so different."
"Come, Emil, don't go back on your own people. Father wasn't
conceited, Uncle Otto wasn't. Even Lou and Oscar weren't when they
were boys."
Emil looked incredulous, but he did not dispute the point. He
turned on his back and lay still for a long time, his hands locked
under his head, looking up at the ceiling. Alexandra knew that he
was thinking of many things. She felt no anxiety about Emil. She
had always believed in him, as she had believed in the land. He
had been more like himself since he got back from Mexico; seemed
glad to be at home, and talked to her as he used to do. She had
no doubt that his wandering fit was over, and that he would soon
be settled in life.
"Alexandra," said Emil suddenly, "do you remember the wild duck we
saw down on the river that time?"
His sister looked up. "I often think of her. It always seems to
me she's there still, just like we saw her."
"I know. It's queer what things one remembers and what things one
forgets." Emil yawned and sat up. "Well, it's time to turn in."
He rose, and going over to Alexandra stooped down and kissed her
lightly on the cheek. "Good-night, sister. I think you did pretty
well by us."
Emil took up his lamp and went upstairs. Alexandra sat finishing
his new nightshirt, that must go in the top tray of his trunk.
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 4---------
The next morning Angelique, Amedee's wife, was in the kitchen baking
pies, assisted by old Mrs. Chevalier. Between the mixing-board
and the stove stood the old cradle that had been Amedee's, and in
it was his black-eyed son. As Angelique, flushed and excited, with
flour on her hands, stopped to smile at the baby, Emil Bergson rode
up to the kitchen door on his mare and dismounted.
"'Medee is out in the field, Emil," Angelique called as she ran
across the kitchen to the oven. "He begins to cut his wheat to-day;
the first wheat ready to cut anywhere about here. He bought a new
header, you know, because all the wheat's so short this year. I
hope he can rent it to the neighbors, it cost so much. He and his
cousins bought a steam thresher on shares. You ought to go out and
see that header work. I watched it an hour this morning, busy as
I am with all the men to feed. He has a lot of hands, but he's
the only one that knows how to drive the header or how to run the
engine, so he has to be everywhere at once. He's sick, too, and
ought to be in his bed."
Emil bent over Hector Baptiste, trying to make him blink his round,
bead-like black eyes. "Sick? What's the matter with your daddy,
kid? Been making him walk the floor with you?"
Angelique sniffed. "Not much! We don't have that kind of babies.
It was his father that kept Baptiste awake. All night I had to be
getting up and making mustard plasters to put on his stomach. He
had an awful colic. He said he felt better this morning, but I
don't think he ought to be out in the field, overheating himself."
Angelique did not speak with much anxiety, not because she was
indifferent, but because she felt so secure in their good fortune.
Only good things could happen to a rich, energetic, handsome young
man like Amedee, with a new baby in the cradle and a new header in
the field.
Emil stroked the black fuzz on Baptiste's head. "I say, Angelique,
one of 'Medee's grandmothers, 'way back, must have been a squaw.
This kid looks exactly like the Indian babies."
Angelique made a face at him, but old Mrs. Chevalier had been
touched on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery
PATOIS that Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare.
Opening the pasture gate from the saddle, Emil rode across the field
to the clearing where the thresher stood, driven by a stationary
engine and fed from the header boxes. As Amedee was not on the
engine, Emil rode on to the wheatfield, where he recognized, on
the header, the slight, wiry figure of his friend, coatless, his
white shirt puffed out by the wind, his straw hat stuck jauntily
on the side of his head. The six big work-horses that drew, or
rather pushed, the header, went abreast at a rapid walk, and as they
were still green at the work they required a good deal of management
on Amedee's part; especially when they turned the corners, where
they divided, three and three, and then swung round into line again
with a movement that looked as complicated as a wheel of artillery.
Emil felt a new thrill of admiration for his friend, and with it
the old pang of envy at the way in which Amedee could do with his
might what his hand found to do, and feel that, whatever it was,
it was the most important thing in the world. "I'll have to bring
Alexandra up to see this thing work," Emil thought; "it's splendid!"
When he saw Emil, Amedee waved to him and called to one of his
twenty cousins to take the reins. Stepping off the header without
stopping it, he ran up to Emil who had dismounted. "Come along,"
he called. "I have to go over to the engine for a minute. I gotta
green man running it, and I gotta to keep an eye on him."
Emil thought the lad was unnaturally flushed and more excited than
even the cares of managing a big farm at a critical time warranted.
As they passed behind a last year's stack, Amedee clutched at his
right side and sank down for a moment on the straw.
"Ouch! I got an awful pain in me, Emil. Something's the matter
with my insides, for sure."
Emil felt his fiery cheek. "You ought to go straight to bed,
'Medee, and telephone for the doctor; that's what you ought to do."
Amedee staggered up with a gesture of despair. "How can I? I got
no time to be sick. Three thousand dollars' worth of new machinery
to manage, and the wheat so ripe it will begin to shatter next
week. My wheat's short, but it's gotta grand full berries. What's
he slowing down for? We haven't got header boxes enough to feed
the thresher, I guess."
Amedee started hot-foot across the stubble, leaning a little to the
right as he ran, and waved to the engineer not to stop the engine.
Emil saw that this was no time to talk about his own affairs. He
mounted his mare and rode on to Sainte-Agnes, to bid his friends
there good-bye. He went first to see Raoul Marcel, and found him
innocently practising the "Gloria" for the big confirmation service
on Sunday while he polished the mirrors of his father's saloon.
As Emil rode homewards at three o'clock in the afternoon, he saw
Amedee staggering out of the wheatfield, supported by two of his
cousins. Emil stopped and helped them put the boy to bed.
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 5---------
When Frank Shabata came in from work at five o'clock that evening,
old Moses Marcel, Raoul's father, telephoned him that Amedee had
had a seizure in the wheatfield, and that Doctor Paradis was going
to operate on him as soon as the Hanover doctor got there to help.
Frank dropped a word of this at the table, bolted his supper, and
rode off to Sainte-Agnes, where there would be sympathetic discussion
of Amedee's case at Marcel's saloon.
As soon as Frank was gone, Marie telephoned Alexandra. It was a
comfort to hear her friend's voice. Yes, Alexandra knew what there
was to be known about Amedee. Emil had been there when they carried
him out of the field, and had stayed with him until the doctors
operated for appendicitis at five o'clock. They were afraid it
was too late to do much good; it should have been done three days
ago. Amedee was in a very bad way. Emil had just come home, worn
out and sick himself. She had given him some brandy and put him
to bed.
Marie hung up the receiver. Poor Amedee's illness had taken on a
new meaning to her, now that she knew Emil had been with him. And
it might so easily have been the other way--Emil who was ill and
Amedee who was sad! Marie looked about the dusky sitting-room.
She had seldom felt so utterly lonely. If Emil was asleep, there
was not even a chance of his coming; and she could not go to
Alexandra for sympathy. She meant to tell Alexandra everything,
as soon as Emil went away. Then whatever was left between them
would be honest.
But she could not stay in the house this evening. Where should she
go? She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening
air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent
of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume
of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their
milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath.
The sky was still red in the west and the evening star hung
directly over the Bergsons' wind-mill. Marie crossed the fence at
the wheatfield corner, and walked slowly along the path that led
to Alexandra's. She could not help feeling hurt that Emil had not
come to tell her about Amedee. It seemed to her most unnatural
that he should not have come. If she were in trouble, certainly
he was the one person in the world she would want to see. Perhaps
he wished her to understand that for her he was as good as gone
already.
Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white
night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before
her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always
the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives;
always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain--until the
instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last
time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously
be released. Marie walked on, her face lifted toward the remote,
inaccessible evening star.
When she reached the stile she sat down and waited. How terrible
it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Yes, in so far as she was concerned, Emil was already gone. They
couldn't meet any more. There was nothing for them to say. They
had spent the last penny of their small change; there was nothing
left but gold. The day of love-tokens was past. They had now
only their hearts to give each other. And Emil being gone, what
was her life to be like? In some ways, it would be easier. She
would not, at least, live in perpetual fear. If Emil were once
away and settled at work, she would not have the feeling that she
was spoiling his life. With the memory he left her, she could be
as rash as she chose. Nobody could be the worse for it but herself;
and that, surely, did not matter. Her own case was clear. When a
girl had loved one man, and then loved another while that man was
still alive, everybody knew what to think of her. What happened
to her was of little consequence, so long as she did not drag other
people down with her. Emil once away, she could let everything
else go and live a new life of perfect love.
Marie left the stile reluctantly. She had, after all, thought he
might come. And how glad she ought to be, she told herself, that
he was asleep. She left the path and went across the pasture. The
moon was almost full. An owl was hooting somewhere in the fields.
She had scarcely thought about where she was going when the pond
glittered before her, where Emil had shot the ducks. She stopped
and looked at it. Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if
one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to
live and dream--a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness
welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this
treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the
moon like that; when it encircled and swelled with that image of
gold.
In the morning, when Emil came down-stairs, Alexandra met him
in the sitting-room and put her hands on his shoulders. "Emil, I
went to your room as soon as it was light, but you were sleeping
so sound I hated to wake you. There was nothing you could do, so
I let you sleep. They telephoned from Sainte-Agnes that Amedee
died at three o'clock this morning."
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of part 4, chapter 7, utilizing the provided context. | null | Frank gets home that night and finds Emil's horse in the stable. He goes through the house, but finds no one. Becoming more and more angry, he gets his shotgun, a Winchester 405. As he leaves the house, the narrator notes, he has no intention of using his weapon at all. He doesn't really believe he has any reason to do so. He only wants to feel "like a desperate man" . Frank stops before going into the orchard, and then decides to go back to the road, where a dense hedge conceals the orchard. As he goes there, he wonders to himself why Emil would have left his horse in the stable. At the corner where the hedge ends and the wheat field begins, Frank stops again. He hears some noise, a murmuring noise, like "water coming from a spring" . He parts the leaves of the hedge and peers through. There, he sees Emil lying in the grass with a woman, whom, for a second, he thinks might be one of Alexandra's farm girls. But it's only a second. He hears a second murmuring, more distinct than the first, and he acts mechanically. He grabs his shotgun and fires three times without stopping. The two fall away from each other, and Emil lies completely still, except for spasms in his hand. But Marie is still alive, crying and trying to crawl toward the hedge. Frank drops his gun and runs, hearing the cries fade, as it sounds like Marie begins to choke. He drops to his knees, and hears a moan from behind the hedge. Groaning and praying himself, he runs into the house, where he's used to being comforted when he's angry or in a "frenzy" . That's when he realizes that he's killed someone, that a woman is bleeding to death in the orchard, and... that the woman is his wife. Frank often gets himself worked up by imagining himself in desperate situations. But this is the real deal. He runs about, unable to figure out what to do. Finally, he untethers Emil's horse, saddles it, and decides to ride to Hanover, where he hopes to catch the night train to Omaha. As he rides, he can't forget Marie's cries. He's terrified most of having to go back, that she might still be alive, mutilated and suffering. How could she let this happen? he thinks. He remembers the times when he got worked up into a frenzy and grabbed his shotgun, and she struggled to take it away from him. Once it fired in the process. Why did she have to take this chance with Emil? he thinks. He imagines her taking other men down into the orchard. But that would have been fine, he tells himself, as long as this had never happened. Frank stops his horse. She's not to blame, he thinks. He's the one who's been trying to break her, he wanted his wife to be as bitter as he is. He refused to share in any of the pleasures she made for herself. Why had she made him do this? he thinks furiously. Then he remembers her cries, and he sobs, "Maria!" Halfway to Hanover, Frank stops to vomit. All he wants is to be able to go back home, to his own bed, and be comforted by his wife. |
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 6---------
The Church has always held that life is for the living. On Saturday,
while half the village of Sainte-Agnes was mourning for Amedee and
preparing the funeral black for his burial on Monday, the other
half was busy with white dresses and white veils for the great
confirmation service to-morrow, when the bishop was to confirm a
class of one hundred boys and girls. Father Duchesne divided his
time between the living and the dead. All day Saturday the church
was a scene of bustling activity, a little hushed by the thought
of Amedee. The choir were busy rehearsing a mass of Rossini, which
they had studied and practised for this occasion. The women were
trimming the altar, the boys and girls were bringing flowers.
On Sunday morning the bishop was to drive overland to Sainte-Agnes
from Hanover, and Emil Bergson had been asked to take the place of
one of Amedee's cousins in the cavalcade of forty French boys who
were to ride across country to meet the bishop's carriage. At
six o'clock on Sunday morning the boys met at the church. As they
stood holding their horses by the bridle, they talked in low tones
of their dead comrade. They kept repeating that Amedee had always
been a good boy, glancing toward the red brick church which had
played so large a part in Amedee's life, had been the scene of his
most serious moments and of his happiest hours. He had played and
wrestled and sung and courted under its shadow. Only three weeks
ago he had proudly carried his baby there to be christened. They
could not doubt that that invisible arm was still about Amedee; that
through the church on earth he had passed to the church triumphant,
the goal of the hopes and faith of so many hundred years.
When the word was given to mount, the young men rode at a walk out
of the village; but once out among the wheatfields in the morning
sun, their horses and their own youth got the better of them. A
wave of zeal and fiery enthusiasm swept over them. They longed
for a Jerusalem to deliver. The thud of their galloping hoofs
interrupted many a country breakfast and brought many a woman and
child to the door of the farmhouses as they passed. Five miles east
of Sainte-Agnes they met the bishop in his open carriage, attended
by two priests. Like one man the boys swung off their hats in a
broad salute, and bowed their heads as the handsome old man lifted
his two fingers in the episcopal blessing. The horsemen closed
about the carriage like a guard, and whenever a restless horse broke
from control and shot down the road ahead of the body, the bishop
laughed and rubbed his plump hands together. "What fine boys!" he
said to his priests. "The Church still has her cavalry."
As the troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the
town,--the first frame church of the parish had stood there,--old
Pierre Seguin was already out with his pick and spade, digging
Amedee's grave. He knelt and uncovered as the bishop passed. The
boys with one accord looked away from old Pierre to the red church
on the hill, with the gold cross flaming on its steeple.
Mass was at eleven. While the church was filling, Emil Bergson waited
outside, watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill. After
the bell began to ring, he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback
and tie his horse to the hitch-bar. Marie, then, was not coming.
Emil turned and went into the church. Amedee's was the only empty
pew, and he sat down in it. Some of Amedee's cousins were there,
dressed in black and weeping. When all the pews were full, the
old men and boys packed the open space at the back of the church,
kneeling on the floor. There was scarcely a family in town that was
not represented in the confirmation class, by a cousin, at least.
The new communicants, with their clear, reverent faces, were beautiful
to look upon as they entered in a body and took the front benches
reserved for them. Even before the Mass began, the air was charged
with feeling. The choir had never sung so well and Raoul Marcel,
in the "Gloria," drew even the bishop's eyes to the organ loft.
For the offertory he sang Gounod's "Ave Maria,"--always spoken of
in Sainte-Agnes as "the Ave Maria."
Emil began to torture himself with questions about Marie. Was she
ill? Had she quarreled with her husband? Was she too unhappy to
find comfort even here? Had she, perhaps, thought that he would
come to her? Was she waiting for him? Overtaxed by excitement
and sorrow as he was, the rapture of the service took hold upon his
body and mind. As he listened to Raoul, he seemed to emerge from
the conflicting emotions which had been whirling him about and
sucking him under. He felt as if a clear light broke upon his
mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger
than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover
that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever
without faltering and without sin. He looked across the heads of
the people at Frank Shabata with calmness. That rapture was for those
who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent.
He coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata's. The spirit he had
met in music was his own. Frank Shabata had never found it; would
never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years; would have
destroyed it if he had found it, as Herod slew the innocents, as
Rome slew the martyrs.
SAN--CTA MARI-I-I-A,
wailed Raoul from the organ loft;
O--RA PRO NO-O-BIS!
And it did not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus
before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal
revelation.
The confirmation service followed the Mass. When it was over, the
congregation thronged about the newly confirmed. The girls, and
even the boys, were kissed and embraced and wept over. All the
aunts and grandmothers wept with joy. The housewives had much ado
to tear themselves away from the general rejoicing and hurry back
to their kitchens. The country parishioners were staying in town
for dinner, and nearly every house in Sainte-Agnes entertained
visitors that day. Father Duchesne, the bishop, and the visiting
priests dined with Fabien Sauvage, the banker. Emil and Frank
Shabata were both guests of old Moise Marcel. After dinner Frank
and old Moise retired to the rear room of the saloon to play
California Jack and drink their cognac, and Emil went over to the
banker's with Raoul, who had been asked to sing for the bishop.
At three o'clock, Emil felt that he could stand it no longer. He
slipped out under cover of "The Holy City," followed by Malvina's
wistful eye, and went to the stable for his mare. He was at that
height of excitement from which everything is foreshortened, from
which life seems short and simple, death very near, and the soul
seems to soar like an eagle. As he rode past the graveyard he looked
at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was to lie, and felt
no horror. That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into
forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for
that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old
and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its
wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted.
It was not until he had passed the graveyard that Emil realized
where he was going. It was the hour for saying good-bye. It might
be the last time that he would see her alone, and today he could
leave her without rancor, without bitterness.
Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of
the smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an
oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like
pleasant things in a dream. He could feel nothing but the sense of
diminishing distance. It seemed to him that his mare was flying,
or running on wheels, like a railway train. The sunlight, flashing
on the window-glass of the big red barns, drove him wild with joy.
He was like an arrow shot from the bow. His life poured itself
out along the road before him as he rode to the Shabata farm.
When Emil alighted at the Shabatas' gate, his horse was in a lather.
He tied her in the stable and hurried to the house. It was empty.
She might be at Mrs. Hiller's or with Alexandra. But anything
that reminded him of her would be enough, the orchard, the mulberry
tree... When he reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over
the wheatfield. Long fingers of light reached through the apple
branches as through a net; the orchard was riddled and shot with
gold; light was the reality, the trees were merely interferences
that reflected and refracted light. Emil went softly down between
the cherry trees toward the wheatfield. When he came to the corner,
he stopped short and put his hand over his mouth. Marie was lying
on her side under the white mulberry tree, her face half hidden in
the grass, her eyes closed, her hands lying limply where they had
happened to fall. She had lived a day of her new life of perfect
love, and it had left her like this. Her breast rose and fell
faintly, as if she were asleep. Emil threw himself down beside
her and took her in his arms. The blood came back to her cheeks,
her amber eyes opened slowly, and in them Emil saw his own face
and the orchard and the sun. "I was dreaming this," she whispered,
hiding her face against him, "don't take my dream away!"
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 7---------
When Frank Shabata got home that night, he found Emil's mare in
his stable. Such an impertinence amazed him. Like everybody else,
Frank had had an exciting day. Since noon he had been drinking too
much, and he was in a bad temper. He talked bitterly to himself
while he put his own horse away, and as he went up the path and
saw that the house was dark he felt an added sense of injury. He
approached quietly and listened on the doorstep. Hearing nothing,
he opened the kitchen door and went softly from one room to another.
Then he went through the house again, upstairs and down, with no
better result. He sat down on the bottom step of the box stairway
and tried to get his wits together. In that unnatural quiet there
was no sound but his own heavy breathing. Suddenly an owl began
to hoot out in the fields. Frank lifted his head. An idea flashed
into his mind, and his sense of injury and outrage grew. He went
into his bedroom and took his murderous 405 Winchester from the
closet.
When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house, he had not
the faintest purpose of doing anything with it. He did not believe
that he had any real grievance. But it gratified him to feel like
a desperate man. He had got into the habit of seeing himself always
in desperate straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he
could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife
in particular, must have put him there. It had never more than
dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own unhappiness. Though
he took up his gun with dark projects in his mind, he would have
been paralyzed with fright had he known that there was the slightest
probability of his ever carrying any of them out.
Frank went slowly down to the orchard gate, stopped and stood for
a moment lost in thought. He retraced his steps and looked through
the barn and the hayloft. Then he went out to the road, where he
took the foot-path along the outside of the orchard hedge. The
hedge was twice as tall as Frank himself, and so dense that one
could see through it only by peering closely between the leaves.
He could see the empty path a long way in the moonlight. His mind
traveled ahead to the stile, which he always thought of as haunted
by Emil Bergson. But why had he left his horse?
At the wheatfield corner, where the orchard hedge ended and the
path led across the pasture to the Bergsons', Frank stopped. In
the warm, breathless night air he heard a murmuring sound, perfectly
inarticulate, as low as the sound of water coming from a spring,
where there is no fall, and where there are no stones to fret it.
Frank strained his ears. It ceased. He held his breath and began
to tremble. Resting the butt of his gun on the ground, he parted
the mulberry leaves softly with his fingers and peered through
the hedge at the dark figures on the grass, in the shadow of the
mulberry tree. It seemed to him that they must feel his eyes,
that they must hear him breathing. But they did not. Frank, who
had always wanted to see things blacker than they were, for once
wanted to believe less than he saw. The woman lying in the shadow
might so easily be one of the Bergsons' farm-girls.... Again
the murmur, like water welling out of the ground. This time he
heard it more distinctly, and his blood was quicker than his brain.
He began to act, just as a man who falls into the fire begins to
act. The gun sprang to his shoulder, he sighted mechanically and
fired three times without stopping, stopped without knowing why.
Either he shut his eyes or he had vertigo. He did not see anything
while he was firing. He thought he heard a cry simultaneous with
the second report, but he was not sure. He peered again through
the hedge, at the two dark figures under the tree. They had fallen
a little apart from each other, and were perfectly still--No,
not quite; in a white patch of light, where the moon shone through
the branches, a man's hand was plucking spasmodically at the grass.
Suddenly the woman stirred and uttered a cry, then another, and
another. She was living! She was dragging herself toward the
hedge! Frank dropped his gun and ran back along the path, shaking,
stumbling, gasping. He had never imagined such horror. The
cries followed him. They grew fainter and thicker, as if she were
choking. He dropped on his knees beside the hedge and crouched
like a rabbit, listening; fainter, fainter; a sound like a whine;
again--a moan--another--silence. Frank scrambled to his feet and
ran on, groaning and praying. From habit he went toward the house,
where he was used to being soothed when he had worked himself into
a frenzy, but at the sight of the black, open door, he started back.
He knew that he had murdered somebody, that a woman was bleeding
and moaning in the orchard, but he had not realized before that
it was his wife. The gate stared him in the face. He threw his
hands over his head. Which way to turn? He lifted his tormented
face and looked at the sky. "Holy Mother of God, not to suffer!
She was a good girl--not to suffer!"
Frank had been wont to see himself in dramatic situations; but
now, when he stood by the windmill, in the bright space between the
barn and the house, facing his own black doorway, he did not see
himself at all. He stood like the hare when the dogs are approaching
from all sides. And he ran like a hare, back and forth about that
moonlit space, before he could make up his mind to go into the
dark stable for a horse. The thought of going into a doorway was
terrible to him. He caught Emil's horse by the bit and led it out.
He could not have buckled a bridle on his own. After two or three
attempts, he lifted himself into the saddle and started for Hanover.
If he could catch the one o'clock train, he had money enough to
get as far as Omaha.
While he was thinking dully of this in some less sensitized part
of his brain, his acuter faculties were going over and over the
cries he had heard in the orchard. Terror was the only thing that
kept him from going back to her, terror that she might still be
she, that she might still be suffering. A woman, mutilated and
bleeding in his orchard--it was because it was a woman that he
was so afraid. It was inconceivable that he should have hurt a
woman. He would rather be eaten by wild beasts than see her move
on the ground as she had moved in the orchard. Why had she been
so careless? She knew he was like a crazy man when he was angry.
She had more than once taken that gun away from him and held it,
when he was angry with other people. Once it had gone off while
they were struggling over it. She was never afraid. But, when
she knew him, why hadn't she been more careful? Didn't she have
all summer before her to love Emil Bergson in, without taking such
chances? Probably she had met the Smirka boy, too, down there in
the orchard. He didn't care. She could have met all the men on the
Divide there, and welcome, if only she hadn't brought this horror
on him.
There was a wrench in Frank's mind. He did not honestly believe that
of her. He knew that he was doing her wrong. He stopped his horse
to admit this to himself the more directly, to think it out the more
clearly. He knew that he was to blame. For three years he had been
trying to break her spirit. She had a way of making the best of
things that seemed to him a sentimental affectation. He wanted his
wife to resent that he was wasting his best years among these stupid
and unappreciative people; but she had seemed to find the people
quite good enough. If he ever got rich he meant to buy her pretty
clothes and take her to California in a Pullman car, and treat her
like a lady; but in the mean time he wanted her to feel that life was
as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had tried to make her life
ugly. He had refused to share any of the little pleasures she was so
plucky about making for herself. She could be gay about the least
thing in the world; but she must be gay! When she first came to him,
her faith in him, her adoration--Frank struck the mare with his fist.
Why had Marie made him do this thing; why had she brought this upon
him? He was overwhelmed by sickening misfortune. All at once he
heard her cries again--he had forgotten for a moment. "Maria," he
sobbed aloud, "Maria!"
When Frank was halfway to Hanover, the motion of his horse brought
on a violent attack of nausea. After it had passed, he rode on
again, but he could think of nothing except his physical weakness
and his desire to be comforted by his wife. He wanted to get into
his own bed. Had his wife been at home, he would have turned and
gone back to her meekly enough.
----------PART 4, CHAPTER 8---------
When old Ivar climbed down from his loft at four o'clock the next
morning, he came upon Emil's mare, jaded and lather-stained, her
bridle broken, chewing the scattered tufts of hay outside the stable
door. The old man was thrown into a fright at once. He put the
mare in her stall, threw her a measure of oats, and then set out
as fast as his bow-legs could carry him on the path to the nearest
neighbor.
"Something is wrong with that boy. Some misfortune has come upon
us. He would never have used her so, in his right senses. It is
not his way to abuse his mare," the old man kept muttering, as he
scuttled through the short, wet pasture grass on his bare feet.
While Ivar was hurrying across the fields, the first long rays of
the sun were reaching down between the orchard boughs to those two
dew-drenched figures. The story of what had happened was written
plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had
fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain. For Emil the
chapter had been short. He was shot in the heart, and had rolled
over on his back and died. His face was turned up to the sky and
his brows were drawn in a frown, as if he had realized that something
had befallen him. But for Marie Shabata it had not been so easy.
One ball had torn through her right lung, another had shattered
the carotid artery. She must have started up and gone toward the
hedge, leaving a trail of blood. There she had fallen and bled.
From that spot there was another trail, heavier than the first,
where she must have dragged herself back to Emil's body. Once
there, she seemed not to have struggled any more. She had lifted
her head to her lover's breast, taken his hand in both her own,
and bled quietly to death. She was lying on her right side in an
easy and natural position, her cheek on Emil's shoulder. On her
face there was a look of ineffable content. Her lips were parted
a little; her eyes were lightly closed, as if in a day-dream or a
light slumber. After she lay down there, she seemed not to have
moved an eyelash. The hand she held was covered with dark stains,
where she had kissed it.
But the stained, slippery grass, the darkened mulberries, told only
half the story. Above Marie and Emil, two white butterflies from
Frank's alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing
shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart;
and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year
opened their pink hearts to die.
When Ivar reached the path by the hedge, he saw Shabata's rifle
lying in the way. He turned and peered through the branches,
falling upon his knees as if his legs had been mowed from under
him. "Merciful God!" he groaned.
Alexandra, too, had risen early that morning, because of her anxiety
about Emil. She was in Emil's room upstairs when, from the window,
she saw Ivar coming along the path that led from the Shabatas'.
He was running like a spent man, tottering and lurching from side
to side. Ivar never drank, and Alexandra thought at once that one
of his spells had come upon him, and that he must be in a very bad
way indeed. She ran downstairs and hurried out to meet him, to
hide his infirmity from the eyes of her household. The old man
fell in the road at her feet and caught her hand, over which he
bowed his shaggy head. "Mistress, mistress," he sobbed, "it has
fallen! Sin and death for the young ones! God have mercy upon
us!"
PART V. Alexandra
|
O Pioneers!.part 5.chapte | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of part 5, chapter 2, utilizing the provided context. | part 5, chapter 1|part 5, chapter 2 | Alexandra arrives in Lincoln, where she's going to visit Frank Shabata in prison. She decides to go to the university campus, where she last was for Emil's commencement. As she watches the students going about their lives, she wishes some of them would stop to talk to her and tell her about Emil. In fact, one of them does stop to talk, when he accidentally runs into her. She asks him if he's an old student at the university. He tells her he's in his Freshman year. She explains that she's looking for her brother's friends, and he suggests that she look for some of the Seniors in the library. Alexandra goes back to her hotel feeling a little better, although she didn't find anyone who knew Emil. As she gets ready for bed, she thinks about the boy she met on the university campus, about how polite he was, just like Emil, and hopes that he does well in school. The next morning, Alexandra shows up at the penitentiary. She talks to the warden, a cheerful German man by the name of Mr. Schwarz. Alexandra tells the warden Frank's story, but he seems unfazed. He tells her that Frank is doing fine in prison. He sends for him to be brought to speak with Alexandra. When she's alone, and has a chance to take in her surroundings, Alexandra starts to feel nervous for the first time since arriving in Lincoln. A guard brings Frank in. Alexandra hardly recognizes him. His face looks grey, his lips have lost their color, and his once gleaming white teeth look yellow. Alexandra holds out her hand to shake his, assuring him that she has no hard feelings toward him. She tells him that they were more to blame than he was. Frank starts to cry. He tries to say that he never meant either of them any harm, but then he found them... Frank breaks off, as if paralyzed. To Alexandra, it seems like Frank has become a totally different person. He doesn't even seem human. When she talks, trying to assure him again that she doesn't blame him, he seems agitated. He complains that he can't think straight, that he's forgetting his English since coming to prison. Alexandra asks him again if he has any hard feelings toward her. He strikes the table, and starts to rant. He talks about how he never hit his wife, even when he knew all along that she didn't care about him anymore and was seeing another man. If he hadn't taken the gun with him that day, none of this would have happened. Then he breaks off his speech, just like before. Alexandra tells him that she knew he never meant to hurt Marie, and Frank starts to rave again. He tells her that he hates Marie for making him do what he did. As Frank talks, Alexandra remembers Frank's yellow cane. She remembers Marie's story about how Frank, the dashing young man, who got the prettiest girl in all of Omaha. She can't help but blame Marie. But then, she thinks, is there something wrong in being "warm-hearted and impulsive," like Marie was ? Alexandra stands up and offers Frank her hand, again. She tells him that she will not stop until she gets him pardoned by the governor. Franks hears this, and tells her that the first thing he'd do is leave the country and go back to see his mother. Then, without letting go of her hand, Frank starts to ask her whether she thinks he treated Marie badly all those years... Alexandra interrupts him. She's not there to talk about that, she says. Since she can't help Emil anymore, she's resolved to help him. Alexandra leaves the prison. In the streetcar, she thinks how she and Frank have both been destroyed by what's happened. Even though she's free, life for her has also become a prison. She remembers two lines from a poem she used to like as a girl ("The Prisoner of Chillon," by Lord Byron--check out "Shout Outs" for more). She feels disgusted by life. When she gets back to the hotel, the clerk gives her a telegram. It's from Carl. He's arrived in Hanover and is waiting for her to get back. Reading the telegram in her hotel room, Alexandra bursts into tears. |
----------PART 5, CHAPTER 1---------
Ivar was sitting at a cobbler's bench in the barn, mending harness
by the light of a lantern and repeating to himself the 101st Psalm.
It was only five o'clock of a mid-October day, but a storm had
come up in the afternoon, bringing black clouds, a cold wind and
torrents of rain. The old man wore his buffalo-skin coat, and
occasionally stopped to warm his fingers at the lantern. Suddenly
a woman burst into the shed, as if she had been blown in, accompanied by
a shower of rain-drops. It was Signa, wrapped in a man's overcoat
and wearing a pair of boots over her shoes. In time of trouble
Signa had come back to stay with her mistress, for she was the only
one of the maids from whom Alexandra would accept much personal
service. It was three months now since the news of the terrible
thing that had happened in Frank Shabata's orchard had first run
like a fire over the Divide. Signa and Nelse were staying on with
Alexandra until winter.
"Ivar," Signa exclaimed as she wiped the rain from her face, "do
you know where she is?"
The old man put down his cobbler's knife. "Who, the mistress?"
"Yes. She went away about three o'clock. I happened to look out
of the window and saw her going across the fields in her thin dress
and sun-hat. And now this storm has come on. I thought she was
going to Mrs. Hiller's, and I telephoned as soon as the thunder
stopped, but she had not been there. I'm afraid she is out somewhere
and will get her death of cold."
Ivar put on his cap and took up the lantern. "JA, JA, we will see.
I will hitch the boy's mare to the cart and go."
Signa followed him across the wagon-shed to the horses' stable.
She was shivering with cold and excitement. "Where do you suppose
she can be, Ivar?"
The old man lifted a set of single harness carefully from its peg.
"How should I know?"
"But you think she is at the graveyard, don't you?" Signa persisted.
"So do I. Oh, I wish she would be more like herself! I can't
believe it's Alexandra Bergson come to this, with no head about
anything. I have to tell her when to eat and when to go to bed."
"Patience, patience, sister," muttered Ivar as he settled the bit
in the horse's mouth. "When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the
eyes of the spirit are open. She will have a message from those
who are gone, and that will bring her peace. Until then we must
bear with her. You and I are the only ones who have weight with
her. She trusts us."
"How awful it's been these last three months." Signa held the
lantern so that he could see to buckle the straps. "It don't seem
right that we must all be so miserable. Why do we all have to be
punished? Seems to me like good times would never come again."
Ivar expressed himself in a deep sigh, but said nothing. He stooped
and took a sandburr from his toe.
"Ivar," Signa asked suddenly, "will you tell me why you go barefoot?
All the time I lived here in the house I wanted to ask you. Is it
for a penance, or what?"
"No, sister. It is for the indulgence of the body. From my youth
up I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to
every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged.
It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I
understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition
for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes,
the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but
the feet are free members. I indulge them without harm to any
one, even to trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are
quickly cleaned again."
Signa did not laugh. She looked thoughtful as she followed Ivar out
to the wagon-shed and held the shafts up for him, while he backed
in the mare and buckled the hold-backs. "You have been a good
friend to the mistress, Ivar," she murmured.
"And you, God be with you," replied Ivar as he clambered into the
cart and put the lantern under the oilcloth lap-cover. "Now for
a ducking, my girl," he said to the mare, gathering up the reins.
As they emerged from the shed, a stream of water, running off the
thatch, struck the mare on the neck. She tossed her head indignantly,
then struck out bravely on the soft ground, slipping back again and
again as she climbed the hill to the main road. Between the rain
and the darkness Ivar could see very little, so he let Emil's mare
have the rein, keeping her head in the right direction. When the
ground was level, he turned her out of the dirt road upon the sod,
where she was able to trot without slipping.
Before Ivar reached the graveyard, three miles from the house,
the storm had spent itself, and the downpour had died into a soft,
dripping rain. The sky and the land were a dark smoke color, and
seemed to be coming together, like two waves. When Ivar stopped
at the gate and swung out his lantern, a white figure rose from
beside John Bergson's white stone.
The old man sprang to the ground and shuffled toward the gate
calling, "Mistress, mistress!"
Alexandra hurried to meet him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"TYST! Ivar. There's nothing to be worried about. I'm sorry if
I've scared you all. I didn't notice the storm till it was on me,
and I couldn't walk against it. I'm glad you've come. I am so
tired I didn't know how I'd ever get home."
Ivar swung the lantern up so that it shone in her face. "GUD!
You are enough to frighten us, mistress. You look like a drowned
woman. How could you do such a thing!"
Groaning and mumbling he led her out of the gate and helped her
into the cart, wrapping her in the dry blankets on which he had
been sitting.
Alexandra smiled at his solicitude. "Not much use in that, Ivar.
You will only shut the wet in. I don't feel so cold now; but I'm
heavy and numb. I'm glad you came."
Ivar turned the mare and urged her into a sliding trot. Her feet
sent back a continual spatter of mud.
Alexandra spoke to the old man as they jogged along through the
sullen gray twilight of the storm. "Ivar, I think it has done me
good to get cold clear through like this, once. I don't believe
I shall suffer so much any more. When you get so near the dead,
they seem more real than the living. Worldly thoughts leave one.
Ever since Emil died, I've suffered so when it rained. Now that
I've been out in it with him, I shan't dread it. After you once
get cold clear through, the feeling of the rain on you is sweet.
It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It
carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can't
see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and
aren't afraid of them. Maybe it's like that with the dead. If
they feel anything at all, it's the old things, before they were
born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does
when they are little."
"Mistress," said Ivar reproachfully, "those are bad thoughts. The
dead are in Paradise."
Then he hung his head, for he did not believe that Emil was in
Paradise.
When they got home, Signa had a fire burning in the sitting-room
stove. She undressed Alexandra and gave her a hot footbath, while
Ivar made ginger tea in the kitchen. When Alexandra was in bed,
wrapped in hot blankets, Ivar came in with his tea and saw that
she drank it. Signa asked permission to sleep on the slat lounge
outside her door. Alexandra endured their attentions patiently,
but she was glad when they put out the lamp and left her. As she
lay alone in the dark, it occurred to her for the first time that
perhaps she was actually tired of life. All the physical operations
of life seemed difficult and painful. She longed to be free from
her own body, which ached and was so heavy. And longing itself
was heavy: she yearned to be free of that.
As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than
for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted
and carried lightly by some one very strong. He was with her
a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms
she felt free from pain. When he laid her down on her bed again,
she opened her eyes, and, for the first time in her life, she saw
him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was
covered. He was standing in the doorway of her room. His white
cloak was thrown over his face, and his head was bent a little
forward. His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the
world. His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming,
like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the
mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was she had
waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was
very well. Then she went to sleep.
Alexandra wakened in the morning with nothing worse than a hard cold
and a stiff shoulder. She kept her bed for several days, and it
was during that time that she formed a resolution to go to Lincoln
to see Frank Shabata. Ever since she last saw him in the courtroom,
Frank's haggard face and wild eyes had haunted her. The trial had
lasted only three days. Frank had given himself up to the police
in Omaha and pleaded guilty of killing without malice and without
premeditation. The gun was, of course, against him, and the judge
had given him the full sentence,--ten years. He had now been in
the State Penitentiary for a month.
Frank was the only one, Alexandra told herself, for whom anything
could be done. He had been less in the wrong than any of them,
and he was paying the heaviest penalty. She often felt that she
herself had been more to blame than poor Frank. From the time the
Shabatas had first moved to the neighboring farm, she had omitted
no opportunity of throwing Marie and Emil together. Because she
knew Frank was surly about doing little things to help his wife,
she was always sending Emil over to spade or plant or carpenter
for Marie. She was glad to have Emil see as much as possible of an
intelligent, city-bred girl like their neighbor; she noticed that
it improved his manners. She knew that Emil was fond of Marie, but
it had never occurred to her that Emil's feeling might be different
from her own. She wondered at herself now, but she had never
thought of danger in that direction. If Marie had been unmarried,--oh,
yes! Then she would have kept her eyes open. But the mere fact that
she was Shabata's wife, for Alexandra, settled everything. That she was
beautiful, impulsive, barely two years older than Emil, these facts had
had no weight with Alexandra. Emil was a good boy, and only bad boys
ran after married women.
Now, Alexandra could in a measure realize that Marie was, after
all, Marie; not merely a "married woman." Sometimes, when Alexandra
thought of her, it was with an aching tenderness. The moment she
had reached them in the orchard that morning, everything was clear
to her. There was something about those two lying in the grass,
something in the way Marie had settled her cheek on Emil's shoulder,
that told her everything. She wondered then how they could have
helped loving each other; how she could have helped knowing that
they must. Emil's cold, frowning face, the girl's content--Alexandra
had felt awe of them, even in the first shock of her grief.
The idleness of those days in bed, the relaxation of body which
attended them, enabled Alexandra to think more calmly than she had
done since Emil's death. She and Frank, she told herself, were left
out of that group of friends who had been overwhelmed by disaster.
She must certainly see Frank Shabata. Even in the courtroom her
heart had grieved for him. He was in a strange country, he had no
kinsmen or friends, and in a moment he had ruined his life. Being
what he was, she felt, Frank could not have acted otherwise. She
could understand his behavior more easily than she could understand
Marie's. Yes, she must go to Lincoln to see Frank Shabata.
The day after Emil's funeral, Alexandra had written to Carl Linstrum;
a single page of notepaper, a bare statement of what had happened.
She was not a woman who could write much about such a thing, and
about her own feelings she could never write very freely. She knew
that Carl was away from post-offices, prospecting somewhere in the
interior. Before he started he had written her where he expected
to go, but her ideas about Alaska were vague. As the weeks went
by and she heard nothing from him, it seemed to Alexandra that
her heart grew hard against Carl. She began to wonder whether she
would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of
life seemed unimportant.
----------PART 5, CHAPTER 2---------
Late in the afternoon of a brilliant October day, Alexandra Bergson,
dressed in a black suit and traveling-hat, alighted at the Burlington
depot in Lincoln. She drove to the Lindell Hotel, where she had
stayed two years ago when she came up for Emil's Commencement. In
spite of her usual air of sureness and self-possession, Alexandra
felt ill at ease in hotels, and she was glad, when she went to the
clerk's desk to register, that there were not many people in the
lobby. She had her supper early, wearing her hat and black jacket
down to the dining-room and carrying her handbag. After supper
she went out for a walk.
It was growing dark when she reached the university campus. She
did not go into the grounds, but walked slowly up and down the
stone walk outside the long iron fence, looking through at the young
men who were running from one building to another, at the lights
shining from the armory and the library. A squad of cadets were
going through their drill behind the armory, and the commands of
their young officer rang out at regular intervals, so sharp and
quick that Alexandra could not understand them. Two stalwart girls
came down the library steps and out through one of the iron gates.
As they passed her, Alexandra was pleased to hear them speaking
Bohemian to each other. Every few moments a boy would come running
down the flagged walk and dash out into the street as if he were
rushing to announce some wonder to the world. Alexandra felt a
great tenderness for them all. She wished one of them would stop
and speak to her. She wished she could ask them whether they had
known Emil.
As she lingered by the south gate she actually did encounter one
of the boys. He had on his drill cap and was swinging his books
at the end of a long strap. It was dark by this time; he did not
see her and ran against her. He snatched off his cap and stood
bareheaded and panting. "I'm awfully sorry," he said in a bright,
clear voice, with a rising inflection, as if he expected her to
say something.
"Oh, it was my fault!" said Alexandra eagerly. "Are you an old
student here, may I ask?"
"No, ma'am. I'm a Freshie, just off the farm. Cherry County.
Were you hunting somebody?"
"No, thank you. That is--" Alexandra wanted to detain him. "That
is, I would like to find some of my brother's friends. He graduated
two years ago."
"Then you'd have to try the Seniors, wouldn't you? Let's see; I
don't know any of them yet, but there'll be sure to be some of them
around the library. That red building, right there," he pointed.
"Thank you, I'll try there," said Alexandra lingeringly.
"Oh, that's all right! Good-night." The lad clapped his cap on
his head and ran straight down Eleventh Street. Alexandra looked
after him wistfully.
She walked back to her hotel unreasonably comforted. "What a nice
voice that boy had, and how polite he was. I know Emil was always
like that to women." And again, after she had undressed and was
standing in her nightgown, brushing her long, heavy hair by the
electric light, she remembered him and said to herself, "I don't
think I ever heard a nicer voice than that boy had. I hope he
will get on well here. Cherry County; that's where the hay is so
fine, and the coyotes can scratch down to water."
At nine o'clock the next morning Alexandra presented herself
at the warden's office in the State Penitentiary. The warden was
a German, a ruddy, cheerful-looking man who had formerly been a
harness-maker. Alexandra had a letter to him from the German banker
in Hanover. As he glanced at the letter, Mr. Schwartz put away
his pipe.
"That big Bohemian, is it? Sure, he's gettin' along fine," said
Mr. Schwartz cheerfully.
"I am glad to hear that. I was afraid he might be quarrelsome and
get himself into more trouble. Mr. Schwartz, if you have time, I
would like to tell you a little about Frank Shabata, and why I am
interested in him."
The warden listened genially while she told him briefly something
of Frank's history and character, but he did not seem to find
anything unusual in her account.
"Sure, I'll keep an eye on him. We'll take care of him all right,"
he said, rising. "You can talk to him here, while I go to see to
things in the kitchen. I'll have him sent in. He ought to be done
washing out his cell by this time. We have to keep 'em clean, you
know."
The warden paused at the door, speaking back over his shoulder to
a pale young man in convicts' clothes who was seated at a desk in
the corner, writing in a big ledger.
"Bertie, when 1037 is brought in, you just step out and give this
lady a chance to talk."
The young man bowed his head and bent over his ledger again.
When Mr. Schwartz disappeared, Alexandra thrust her black-edged
handkerchief nervously into her handbag. Coming out on the streetcar
she had not had the least dread of meeting Frank. But since she
had been here the sounds and smells in the corridor, the look of the
men in convicts' clothes who passed the glass door of the warden's
office, affected her unpleasantly.
The warden's clock ticked, the young convict's pen scratched
busily in the big book, and his sharp shoulders were shaken every
few seconds by a loose cough which he tried to smother. It was easy
to see that he was a sick man. Alexandra looked at him timidly,
but he did not once raise his eyes. He wore a white shirt under
his striped jacket, a high collar, and a necktie, very carefully
tied. His hands were thin and white and well cared for, and he had
a seal ring on his little finger. When he heard steps approaching
in the corridor, he rose, blotted his book, put his pen in the rack,
and left the room without raising his eyes. Through the door he
opened a guard came in, bringing Frank Shabata.
"You the lady that wanted to talk to 1037? Here he is. Be on your
good behavior, now. He can set down, lady," seeing that Alexandra
remained standing. "Push that white button when you're through
with him, and I'll come."
The guard went out and Alexandra and Frank were left alone.
Alexandra tried not to see his hideous clothes. She tried to look
straight into his face, which she could scarcely believe was his.
It was already bleached to a chalky gray. His lips were colorless,
his fine teeth looked yellowish. He glanced at Alexandra sullenly,
blinked as if he had come from a dark place, and one eyebrow twitched
continually. She felt at once that this interview was a terrible
ordeal to him. His shaved head, showing the conformation of his
skull, gave him a criminal look which he had not had during the
trial.
Alexandra held out her hand. "Frank," she said, her eyes filling
suddenly, "I hope you'll let me be friendly with you. I understand
how you did it. I don't feel hard toward you. They were more to
blame than you."
Frank jerked a dirty blue handkerchief from his trousers pocket.
He had begun to cry. He turned away from Alexandra. "I never
did mean to do not'ing to dat woman," he muttered. "I never mean
to do not'ing to dat boy. I ain't had not'ing ag'in' dat boy. I
always like dat boy fine. An' then I find him--" He stopped. The
feeling went out of his face and eyes. He dropped into a chair
and sat looking stolidly at the floor, his hands hanging loosely
between his knees, the handkerchief lying across his striped leg.
He seemed to have stirred up in his mind a disgust that had paralyzed
his faculties.
"I haven't come up here to blame you, Frank. I think they were
more to blame than you." Alexandra, too, felt benumbed.
Frank looked up suddenly and stared out of the office window. "I
guess dat place all go to hell what I work so hard on," he said
with a slow, bitter smile. "I not care a damn." He stopped and
rubbed the palm of his hand over the light bristles on his head
with annoyance. "I no can t'ink without my hair," he complained.
"I forget English. We not talk here, except swear."
Alexandra was bewildered. Frank seemed to have undergone a change
of personality. There was scarcely anything by which she could
recognize her handsome Bohemian neighbor. He seemed, somehow, not
altogether human. She did not know what to say to him.
"You do not feel hard to me, Frank?" she asked at last.
Frank clenched his fist and broke out in excitement. "I not feel
hard at no woman. I tell you I not that kind-a man. I never hit
my wife. No, never I hurt her when she devil me something awful!"
He struck his fist down on the warden's desk so hard that he
afterward stroked it absently. A pale pink crept over his neck and
face. "Two, t'ree years I know dat woman don' care no more 'bout
me, Alexandra Bergson. I know she after some other man. I know
her, oo-oo! An' I ain't never hurt her. I never would-a done
dat, if I ain't had dat gun along. I don' know what in hell make
me take dat gun. She always say I ain't no man to carry gun. If
she been in dat house, where she ought-a been--But das a foolish
talk."
Frank rubbed his head and stopped suddenly, as he had stopped
before. Alexandra felt that there was something strange in the way
he chilled off, as if something came up in him that extinguished
his power of feeling or thinking.
"Yes, Frank," she said kindly. "I know you never meant to hurt
Marie."
Frank smiled at her queerly. His eyes filled slowly with tears.
"You know, I most forgit dat woman's name. She ain't got no name
for me no more. I never hate my wife, but dat woman what make me
do dat--Honest to God, but I hate her! I no man to fight. I
don' want to kill no boy and no woman. I not care how many men
she take under dat tree. I no care for not'ing but dat fine boy
I kill, Alexandra Bergson. I guess I go crazy sure 'nough."
Alexandra remembered the little yellow cane she had found in Frank's
clothes-closet. She thought of how he had come to this country a
gay young fellow, so attractive that the prettiest Bohemian girl
in Omaha had run away with him. It seemed unreasonable that life
should have landed him in such a place as this. She blamed Marie
bitterly. And why, with her happy, affectionate nature, should
she have brought destruction and sorrow to all who had loved her,
even to poor old Joe Tovesky, the uncle who used to carry her about
so proudly when she was a little girl? That was the strangest thing
of all. Was there, then, something wrong in being warm-hearted
and impulsive like that? Alexandra hated to think so. But there
was Emil, in the Norwegian graveyard at home, and here was Frank
Shabata. Alexandra rose and took him by the hand.
"Frank Shabata, I am never going to stop trying until I get you
pardoned. I'll never give the Governor any peace. I know I can
get you out of this place."
Frank looked at her distrustfully, but he gathered confidence from
her face. "Alexandra," he said earnestly, "if I git out-a here,
I not trouble dis country no more. I go back where I come from;
see my mother."
Alexandra tried to withdraw her hand, but Frank held on to it
nervously. He put out his finger and absently touched a button
on her black jacket. "Alexandra," he said in a low tone, looking
steadily at the button, "you ain' t'ink I use dat girl awful bad
before--"
"No, Frank. We won't talk about that," Alexandra said, pressing
his hand. "I can't help Emil now, so I'm going to do what I can
for you. You know I don't go away from home often, and I came up
here on purpose to tell you this."
The warden at the glass door looked in inquiringly. Alexandra
nodded, and he came in and touched the white button on his desk.
The guard appeared, and with a sinking heart Alexandra saw Frank
led away down the corridor. After a few words with Mr. Schwartz,
she left the prison and made her way to the street-car. She had
refused with horror the warden's cordial invitation to "go through
the institution." As the car lurched over its uneven roadbed, back
toward Lincoln, Alexandra thought of how she and Frank had been
wrecked by the same storm and of how, although she could come out
into the sunlight, she had not much more left in her life than
he. She remembered some lines from a poem she had liked in her
schooldays:--
Henceforth the world will only be
A wider prison-house to me,--
and sighed. A disgust of life weighed upon her heart; some such
feeling as had twice frozen Frank Shabata's features while they
talked together. She wished she were back on the Divide.
When Alexandra entered her hotel, the clerk held up one finger
and beckoned to her. As she approached his desk, he handed her a
telegram. Alexandra took the yellow envelope and looked at it in
perplexity, then stepped into the elevator without opening it. As
she walked down the corridor toward her room, she reflected that
she was, in a manner, immune from evil tidings. On reaching her
room she locked the door, and sitting down on a chair by the dresser,
opened the telegram. It was from Hanover, and it read:--
Arrived Hanover last night. Shall wait here until you come.
Please hurry. CARL LINSTRUM.
Alexandra put her head down on the dresser and burst into tears.
|
Othello.act 1.scene 1 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 1, utilizing the provided context. | act 1, scene 1|scene 1 | The play opens late at night on a street in Venice. Roderigo, a wealthy Venetian gentleman, is discussing the marriage of Desdemona, the daughter of Brabantio. Earlier in the evening, she had eloped with Othello, a Moor who is a respected General in the Venetian army. Roderigo is angry with Iago, for he has paid him a handsome sum to win the love of Desdemona for himself and to keep him informed of her love life. Iago, like Roderigo, is a frustrated man. Othello has overlooked him for a promotion, giving the post of lieutenant to Cassio. Iago continues only as Othellos standard bearer and an ensign in the navy. As a result, he has a grudge against both Othello and Cassio and vows to have revenge upon both of them. At Iagos suggestion, he and Roderigo go to wake up Brabantio and tell him about the elopement of his daughter. Iago is very bawdy in his descriptions. The old Venetian Senator is very angry that his sleep has been disturbed with such news, but he searches his house and finds that his daughter is missing. Coming downstairs, Brabantio is a mess, not thinking clearly and speaking in half-sentences. He bemoans the fact that he did not encourage Roderigo as his daughters suitor. He also demands to know where he can find Othello. Iago quietly slips away from the scene. He does not want Othello to know anything about the part he played in inciting Brabantio; to make his plans work, Iago must stay in the good graces of Othello and appear to be a loyal ensign. Before leaving, he tells Roderigo that Othello and Desdemona are staying at the Sagittary Inn. Roderigo offers to take Brabantio there. |
----------ACT 1, SCENE 1---------
ACT I. SCENE I.
Venice. A street.
Enter Roderigo and Iago.
RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me.
If ever I did dream of such a matter,
Abhor me.
RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.
IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off--capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance
Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war,
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators; for, "Certes," says he,
"I have already chose my officer."
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine
(A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife)
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election;
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christian and heathen, must be belee'd and calm'd
By debitor and creditor. This counter--caster,
He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,
And I--God bless the mark!--his Moorship's ancient.
RODERIGO. By heaven, I rather would have been his hangman.
IAGO. Why, there's no remedy. 'Tis the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first. Now, sir, be judge yourself
Whether I in any just term am affined
To love the Moor.
RODERIGO. I would not follow him then.
IAGO. O, sir, content you.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee--crooking knave,
That doting on his own obsequious bondage
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd.
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And throwing but shows of service on their lords
Do well thrive by them; and when they have lined their coats
Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself.
For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
RODERIGO. What a full fortune does the thick--lips owe,
If he can carry't thus!
IAGO. Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on't
As it may lose some color.
RODERIGO. Here is her father's house; I'll call aloud.
IAGO. Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
RODERIGO. What, ho, Brabantio! Signior Brabantio, ho!
IAGO. Awake! What, ho, Brabantio! Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!
Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!
Thieves! Thieves!
Brabantio appears above, at a window.
BRABANTIO. What is the reason of this terrible summons?
What is the matter there?
RODERIGO. Signior, is all your family within?
IAGO. Are your doors lock'd?
BRABANTIO. Why? Wherefore ask you this?
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd! For shame, put on your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say!
BRABANTIO. What, have you lost your wits?
RODERIGO. Most reverend signior, do you know my voice?
BRABANTIO. Not I. What are you?
RODERIGO. My name is Roderigo.
BRABANTIO. The worser welcome.
I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors.
In honest plainness thou hast heard me say
My daughter is not for thee; and now, in madness,
Being full of supper and distempering draughts,
Upon malicious bravery, dost thou come
To start my quiet.
RODERIGO. Sir, sir, sir--
BRABANTIO. But thou must needs be sure
My spirit and my place have in them power
To make this bitter to thee.
RODERIGO. Patience, good sir.
BRABANTIO. What tell'st thou me of robbing? This is Venice;
My house is not a grange.
RODERIGO. Most grave Brabantio,
In simple and pure soul I come to you.
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve
God,
if the devil bid you. Because we come to do you service and
you
think we are ruffians, you'll have your daughter covered with
a
Barbary horse; you'll have your nephews neigh to you; you'll
have
coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.
BRABANTIO. What profane wretch art thou?
IAGO. I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and
the
Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
BRABANTIO. Thou are a villain.
IAGO. You are--a senator.
BRABANTIO. This thou shalt answer; I know thee, Roderigo.
RODERIGO. Sir, I will answer anything. But, I beseech you,
If't be your pleasure and most wise consent,
As partly I find it is, that your fair daughter,
At this odd--even and dull watch o' the night,
Transported with no worse nor better guard
But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier,
To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor--
If this be known to you, and your allowance,
We then have done you bold and saucy wrongs;
But if you know not this, my manners tell me
We have your wrong rebuke. Do not believe
That, from the sense of all civility,
I thus would play and trifle with your reverence.
Your daughter, if you have not given her leave,
I say again, hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger
Of here and everywhere. Straight satisfy yourself:
If she be in her chamber or your house,
Let loose on me the justice of the state
For thus deluding you.
BRABANTIO. Strike on the tinder, ho!
Give me a taper! Call up all my people!
This accident is not unlike my dream;
Belief of it oppresses me already.
Light, I say, light! Exit
above.
IAGO. Farewell, for I must leave you.
It seems not meet, nor wholesome to my place,
To be produced--as, if I stay, I shall--
Against the Moor; for I do know, the state,
However this may gall him with some check,
Cannot with safety cast him, for he's embark'd
With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars,
Which even now stands in act, that, for their souls,
Another of his fathom they have none
To lead their business; in which regard,
Though I do hate him as I do hell pains,
Yet for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign. That you shall surely find him,
Lead to the Sagittary the raised search,
And there will I be with him. So farewell.
Exit.
Enter, below, Brabantio, in his nightgown, and
Servants with torches.
BRABANTIO. It is too true an evil: gone she is,
And what's to come of my despised time
Is nought but bitterness. Now, Roderigo,
Where didst thou see her? O unhappy girl!
With the Moor, say'st thou? Who would be a father!
How didst thou know 'twas she? O, she deceives me
Past thought! What said she to you? Get more tapers.
Raise all my kindred. Are they married, think you?
RODERIGO. Truly, I think they are.
BRABANTIO. O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood!
Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act. Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo,
Of some such thing?
RODERIGO. Yes, sir, I have indeed.
BRABANTIO. Call up my brother. O, would you had had her!
Some one way, some another. Do you know
Where we may apprehend her and the Moor?
RODERIGO. I think I can discover him, if you please
To get good guard and go along with me.
BRABANTIO. Pray you, lead on. At every house I'll call;
I may command at most. Get weapons, ho!
And raise some special officers of night.
On, good Roderigo, I'll deserve your pains.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT I. SCENE I.
Venice. A street.
Enter Roderigo and Iago.
RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me.
If ever I did dream of such a matter,
Abhor me.
RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.
IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off--capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance
Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war,
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators; for, "Certes," says he,
"I have already chose my officer."
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine
(A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife)
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election;
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christian and heathen, must be belee'd and calm'd
By debitor and creditor. This counter--caster,
He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,
And I--God bless the mark!--his Moorship's ancient.
RODERIGO. By heaven, I rather would have been his hangman.
IAGO. Why, there's no remedy. 'Tis the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first. Now, sir, be judge yourself
Whether I in any just term am affined
To love the Moor.
RODERIGO. I would not follow him then.
IAGO. O, sir, content you.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee--crooking knave,
That doting on his own obsequious bondage
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd.
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And throwing but shows of service on their lords
Do well thrive by them; and when they have lined their coats
Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself.
For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
RODERIGO. What a full fortune does the thick--lips owe,
If he can carry't thus!
IAGO. Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on't
As it may lose some color.
RODERIGO. Here is her father's house; I'll call aloud.
IAGO. Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
RODERIGO. What, ho, Brabantio! Signior Brabantio, ho!
IAGO. Awake! What, ho, Brabantio! Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!
Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!
Thieves! Thieves!
Brabantio appears above, at a window.
BRABANTIO. What is the reason of this terrible summons?
What is the matter there?
RODERIGO. Signior, is all your family within?
IAGO. Are your doors lock'd?
BRABANTIO. Why? Wherefore ask you this?
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd! For shame, put on your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say!
BRABANTIO. What, have you lost your wits?
RODERIGO. Most reverend signior, do you know my voice?
BRABANTIO. Not I. What are you?
RODERIGO. My name is Roderigo.
BRABANTIO. The worser welcome.
I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors.
In honest plainness thou hast heard me say
My daughter is not for thee; and now, in madness,
Being full of supper and distempering draughts,
Upon malicious bravery, dost thou come
To start my quiet.
RODERIGO. Sir, sir, sir--
BRABANTIO. But thou must needs be sure
My spirit and my place have in them power
To make this bitter to thee.
RODERIGO. Patience, good sir.
BRABANTIO. What tell'st thou me of robbing? This is Venice;
My house is not a grange.
RODERIGO. Most grave Brabantio,
In simple and pure soul I come to you.
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve
God,
if the devil bid you. Because we come to do you service and
you
think we are ruffians, you'll have your daughter covered with
a
Barbary horse; you'll have your nephews neigh to you; you'll
have
coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.
BRABANTIO. What profane wretch art thou?
IAGO. I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and
the
Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
BRABANTIO. Thou are a villain.
IAGO. You are--a senator.
BRABANTIO. This thou shalt answer; I know thee, Roderigo.
RODERIGO. Sir, I will answer anything. But, I beseech you,
If't be your pleasure and most wise consent,
As partly I find it is, that your fair daughter,
At this odd--even and dull watch o' the night,
Transported with no worse nor better guard
But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier,
To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor--
If this be known to you, and your allowance,
We then have done you bold and saucy wrongs;
But if you know not this, my manners tell me
We have your wrong rebuke. Do not believe
That, from the sense of all civility,
I thus would play and trifle with your reverence.
Your daughter, if you have not given her leave,
I say again, hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger
Of here and everywhere. Straight satisfy yourself:
If she be in her chamber or your house,
Let loose on me the justice of the state
For thus deluding you.
BRABANTIO. Strike on the tinder, ho!
Give me a taper! Call up all my people!
This accident is not unlike my dream;
Belief of it oppresses me already.
Light, I say, light! Exit
above.
IAGO. Farewell, for I must leave you.
It seems not meet, nor wholesome to my place,
To be produced--as, if I stay, I shall--
Against the Moor; for I do know, the state,
However this may gall him with some check,
Cannot with safety cast him, for he's embark'd
With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars,
Which even now stands in act, that, for their souls,
Another of his fathom they have none
To lead their business; in which regard,
Though I do hate him as I do hell pains,
Yet for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign. That you shall surely find him,
Lead to the Sagittary the raised search,
And there will I be with him. So farewell.
Exit.
Enter, below, Brabantio, in his nightgown, and
Servants with torches.
BRABANTIO. It is too true an evil: gone she is,
And what's to come of my despised time
Is nought but bitterness. Now, Roderigo,
Where didst thou see her? O unhappy girl!
With the Moor, say'st thou? Who would be a father!
How didst thou know 'twas she? O, she deceives me
Past thought! What said she to you? Get more tapers.
Raise all my kindred. Are they married, think you?
RODERIGO. Truly, I think they are.
BRABANTIO. O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood!
Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act. Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo,
Of some such thing?
RODERIGO. Yes, sir, I have indeed.
BRABANTIO. Call up my brother. O, would you had had her!
Some one way, some another. Do you know
Where we may apprehend her and the Moor?
RODERIGO. I think I can discover him, if you please
To get good guard and go along with me.
BRABANTIO. Pray you, lead on. At every house I'll call;
I may command at most. Get weapons, ho!
And raise some special officers of night.
On, good Roderigo, I'll deserve your pains.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT I. SCENE I.
Venice. A street.
Enter Roderigo and Iago.
RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me.
If ever I did dream of such a matter,
Abhor me.
RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.
IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off--capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance
Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war,
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators; for, "Certes," says he,
"I have already chose my officer."
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine
(A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife)
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election;
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christian and heathen, must be belee'd and calm'd
By debitor and creditor. This counter--caster,
He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,
And I--God bless the mark!--his Moorship's ancient.
RODERIGO. By heaven, I rather would have been his hangman.
IAGO. Why, there's no remedy. 'Tis the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first. Now, sir, be judge yourself
Whether I in any just term am affined
To love the Moor.
RODERIGO. I would not follow him then.
IAGO. O, sir, content you.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee--crooking knave,
That doting on his own obsequious bondage
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd.
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And throwing but shows of service on their lords
Do well thrive by them; and when they have lined their coats
Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself.
For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
RODERIGO. What a full fortune does the thick--lips owe,
If he can carry't thus!
IAGO. Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on't
As it may lose some color.
RODERIGO. Here is her father's house; I'll call aloud.
IAGO. Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
RODERIGO. What, ho, Brabantio! Signior Brabantio, ho!
IAGO. Awake! What, ho, Brabantio! Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!
Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!
Thieves! Thieves!
Brabantio appears above, at a window.
BRABANTIO. What is the reason of this terrible summons?
What is the matter there?
RODERIGO. Signior, is all your family within?
IAGO. Are your doors lock'd?
BRABANTIO. Why? Wherefore ask you this?
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd! For shame, put on your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say!
BRABANTIO. What, have you lost your wits?
RODERIGO. Most reverend signior, do you know my voice?
BRABANTIO. Not I. What are you?
RODERIGO. My name is Roderigo.
BRABANTIO. The worser welcome.
I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors.
In honest plainness thou hast heard me say
My daughter is not for thee; and now, in madness,
Being full of supper and distempering draughts,
Upon malicious bravery, dost thou come
To start my quiet.
RODERIGO. Sir, sir, sir--
BRABANTIO. But thou must needs be sure
My spirit and my place have in them power
To make this bitter to thee.
RODERIGO. Patience, good sir.
BRABANTIO. What tell'st thou me of robbing? This is Venice;
My house is not a grange.
RODERIGO. Most grave Brabantio,
In simple and pure soul I come to you.
IAGO. 'Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve
God,
if the devil bid you. Because we come to do you service and
you
think we are ruffians, you'll have your daughter covered with
a
Barbary horse; you'll have your nephews neigh to you; you'll
have
coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.
BRABANTIO. What profane wretch art thou?
IAGO. I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and
the
Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
BRABANTIO. Thou are a villain.
IAGO. You are--a senator.
BRABANTIO. This thou shalt answer; I know thee, Roderigo.
RODERIGO. Sir, I will answer anything. But, I beseech you,
If't be your pleasure and most wise consent,
As partly I find it is, that your fair daughter,
At this odd--even and dull watch o' the night,
Transported with no worse nor better guard
But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier,
To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor--
If this be known to you, and your allowance,
We then have done you bold and saucy wrongs;
But if you know not this, my manners tell me
We have your wrong rebuke. Do not believe
That, from the sense of all civility,
I thus would play and trifle with your reverence.
Your daughter, if you have not given her leave,
I say again, hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger
Of here and everywhere. Straight satisfy yourself:
If she be in her chamber or your house,
Let loose on me the justice of the state
For thus deluding you.
BRABANTIO. Strike on the tinder, ho!
Give me a taper! Call up all my people!
This accident is not unlike my dream;
Belief of it oppresses me already.
Light, I say, light! Exit
above.
IAGO. Farewell, for I must leave you.
It seems not meet, nor wholesome to my place,
To be produced--as, if I stay, I shall--
Against the Moor; for I do know, the state,
However this may gall him with some check,
Cannot with safety cast him, for he's embark'd
With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars,
Which even now stands in act, that, for their souls,
Another of his fathom they have none
To lead their business; in which regard,
Though I do hate him as I do hell pains,
Yet for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign. That you shall surely find him,
Lead to the Sagittary the raised search,
And there will I be with him. So farewell.
Exit.
Enter, below, Brabantio, in his nightgown, and
Servants with torches.
BRABANTIO. It is too true an evil: gone she is,
And what's to come of my despised time
Is nought but bitterness. Now, Roderigo,
Where didst thou see her? O unhappy girl!
With the Moor, say'st thou? Who would be a father!
How didst thou know 'twas she? O, she deceives me
Past thought! What said she to you? Get more tapers.
Raise all my kindred. Are they married, think you?
RODERIGO. Truly, I think they are.
BRABANTIO. O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood!
Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act. Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo,
Of some such thing?
RODERIGO. Yes, sir, I have indeed.
BRABANTIO. Call up my brother. O, would you had had her!
Some one way, some another. Do you know
Where we may apprehend her and the Moor?
RODERIGO. I think I can discover him, if you please
To get good guard and go along with me.
BRABANTIO. Pray you, lead on. At every house I'll call;
I may command at most. Get weapons, ho!
And raise some special officers of night.
On, good Roderigo, I'll deserve your pains.
Exeunt.
|
Othello.act 1.scene 2 | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for scene 2 with the given context. | In this second scene, Iago reveals his scheming and treachery, as he applies it to the unsuspecting Othello. He reaches the Sagittary Inn before Roderigo and Brabantio. Pretending to be Othellos loyal friend and follower, Iago tells him that Roderigo has spoken in an insulting manner about him. Iago says he was so upset at the words that he wanted to stab Roderigo; only his conscience prevented him from doing so. Iago then cautiously advises Othello to be careful, for Roderigo and Brabantio are searching for him, hoping to dissolve his marriage to Desdemona. As torches approach, Iago warns Othello to go inside, but he is not afraid and refuses to hide. The torches are, in fact, carried by Cassio and his men. He informs Othello that the Turkish fleet is on the way to Cyprus and intends to attack it. The Duke is in session with his council and has called for Othello to meet him at once. Roderigo and Brabantio soon arrive on the scene, with a number of armed followers. Othello greets them and remains calm, trying to appear friendly. Brabantio calls Othello a foul thief and threatens to send him to prison. Othello explains with perfect courtesy and dignity that he cannot allow himself to be taken to prison, since he has been called to the council hall. When the old Senator realizes that the Duke has called a meeting, he goes at once to present his case against his daughters husband. |
----------ACT 1, SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
Another street.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Attendants with torches.
IAGO. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murther. I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
OTHELLO. 'Tis better as it is.
IAGO. Nay, but he prated
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against your honor
That, with the little godliness I have,
I did full hard forbear him. But I pray you, sir,
Are you fast married? Be assured of this,
That the magnifico is much beloved,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the Duke's. He will divorce you,
Or put upon you what restraint and grievance
The law, with all his might to enforce it on,
Will give him cable.
OTHELLO. Let him do his spite.
My services, which I have done the signiory,
Shall out--tongue his complaints. 'Tis yet to know--
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate--I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth. But, look! What lights come yond?
IAGO. Those are the raised father and his friends.
You were best go in.
OTHELLO. Not I; I must be found.
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. Is it they?
IAGO. By Janus, I think no.
Enter Cassio and certain Officers with torches.
OTHELLO. The servants of the Duke? And my lieutenant?
The goodness of the night upon you, friends!
What is the news?
CASSIO. The Duke does greet you, general,
And he requires your haste--post--haste appearance,
Even on the instant.
OTHELLO. What is the matter, think you?
CASSIO. Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat. The galleys
Have sent a dozen sequent messengers
This very night at one another's heels;
And many of the consuls, raised and met,
Are at the Duke's already. You have been hotly call'd for,
When, being not at your lodging to be found,
The Senate hath sent about three several quests
To search you out.
OTHELLO. 'Tis well I am found by you.
I will but spend a word here in the house
And go with you.
Exit.
CASSIO. Ancient, what makes he here?
IAGO. Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack;
If it prove lawful prize, he's made forever.
CASSIO. I do not understand.
IAGO. He's married.
CASSIO. To who?
Re-enter Othello.
IAGO. Marry, to--Come, captain, will you go?
OTHELLO. Have with you.
CASSIO. Here comes another troop to seek for you.
IAGO. It is Brabantio. General, be advised,
He comes to bad intent.
Enter Brabantio, Roderigo, and Officers with torches
and weapons.
OTHELLO. Holla! Stand there!
RODERIGO. Signior, it is the Moor.
BRABANTIO. Down with him, thief!
They draw on both
sides.
IAGO. You, Roderigo! Come, sir, I am for you.
OTHELLO. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
BRABANTIO. O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my
daughter?
Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion. I'll have't disputed on;
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practicer
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.
Lay hold upon him. If he do resist,
Subdue him at his peril.
OTHELLO. Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining and the rest.
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter. Where will you that I go
To answer this your charge?
BRABANTIO. To prison, till fit time
Of law and course of direct session
Call thee to answer.
OTHELLO. What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side,
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?
FIRST OFFICER. 'Tis true, most worthy signior;
The Duke's in council, and your noble self,
I am sure, is sent for.
BRABANTIO. How? The Duke in council?
In this time of the night? Bring him away;
Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
Another street.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Attendants with torches.
IAGO. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murther. I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
OTHELLO. 'Tis better as it is.
IAGO. Nay, but he prated
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against your honor
That, with the little godliness I have,
I did full hard forbear him. But I pray you, sir,
Are you fast married? Be assured of this,
That the magnifico is much beloved,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the Duke's. He will divorce you,
Or put upon you what restraint and grievance
The law, with all his might to enforce it on,
Will give him cable.
OTHELLO. Let him do his spite.
My services, which I have done the signiory,
Shall out--tongue his complaints. 'Tis yet to know--
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate--I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth. But, look! What lights come yond?
IAGO. Those are the raised father and his friends.
You were best go in.
OTHELLO. Not I; I must be found.
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. Is it they?
IAGO. By Janus, I think no.
Enter Cassio and certain Officers with torches.
OTHELLO. The servants of the Duke? And my lieutenant?
The goodness of the night upon you, friends!
What is the news?
CASSIO. The Duke does greet you, general,
And he requires your haste--post--haste appearance,
Even on the instant.
OTHELLO. What is the matter, think you?
CASSIO. Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat. The galleys
Have sent a dozen sequent messengers
This very night at one another's heels;
And many of the consuls, raised and met,
Are at the Duke's already. You have been hotly call'd for,
When, being not at your lodging to be found,
The Senate hath sent about three several quests
To search you out.
OTHELLO. 'Tis well I am found by you.
I will but spend a word here in the house
And go with you.
Exit.
CASSIO. Ancient, what makes he here?
IAGO. Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack;
If it prove lawful prize, he's made forever.
CASSIO. I do not understand.
IAGO. He's married.
CASSIO. To who?
Re-enter Othello.
IAGO. Marry, to--Come, captain, will you go?
OTHELLO. Have with you.
CASSIO. Here comes another troop to seek for you.
IAGO. It is Brabantio. General, be advised,
He comes to bad intent.
Enter Brabantio, Roderigo, and Officers with torches
and weapons.
OTHELLO. Holla! Stand there!
RODERIGO. Signior, it is the Moor.
BRABANTIO. Down with him, thief!
They draw on both
sides.
IAGO. You, Roderigo! Come, sir, I am for you.
OTHELLO. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
BRABANTIO. O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my
daughter?
Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion. I'll have't disputed on;
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practicer
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.
Lay hold upon him. If he do resist,
Subdue him at his peril.
OTHELLO. Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining and the rest.
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter. Where will you that I go
To answer this your charge?
BRABANTIO. To prison, till fit time
Of law and course of direct session
Call thee to answer.
OTHELLO. What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side,
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?
FIRST OFFICER. 'Tis true, most worthy signior;
The Duke's in council, and your noble self,
I am sure, is sent for.
BRABANTIO. How? The Duke in council?
In this time of the night? Bring him away;
Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
Another street.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Attendants with torches.
IAGO. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murther. I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
OTHELLO. 'Tis better as it is.
IAGO. Nay, but he prated
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against your honor
That, with the little godliness I have,
I did full hard forbear him. But I pray you, sir,
Are you fast married? Be assured of this,
That the magnifico is much beloved,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the Duke's. He will divorce you,
Or put upon you what restraint and grievance
The law, with all his might to enforce it on,
Will give him cable.
OTHELLO. Let him do his spite.
My services, which I have done the signiory,
Shall out--tongue his complaints. 'Tis yet to know--
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate--I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth. But, look! What lights come yond?
IAGO. Those are the raised father and his friends.
You were best go in.
OTHELLO. Not I; I must be found.
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. Is it they?
IAGO. By Janus, I think no.
Enter Cassio and certain Officers with torches.
OTHELLO. The servants of the Duke? And my lieutenant?
The goodness of the night upon you, friends!
What is the news?
CASSIO. The Duke does greet you, general,
And he requires your haste--post--haste appearance,
Even on the instant.
OTHELLO. What is the matter, think you?
CASSIO. Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat. The galleys
Have sent a dozen sequent messengers
This very night at one another's heels;
And many of the consuls, raised and met,
Are at the Duke's already. You have been hotly call'd for,
When, being not at your lodging to be found,
The Senate hath sent about three several quests
To search you out.
OTHELLO. 'Tis well I am found by you.
I will but spend a word here in the house
And go with you.
Exit.
CASSIO. Ancient, what makes he here?
IAGO. Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack;
If it prove lawful prize, he's made forever.
CASSIO. I do not understand.
IAGO. He's married.
CASSIO. To who?
Re-enter Othello.
IAGO. Marry, to--Come, captain, will you go?
OTHELLO. Have with you.
CASSIO. Here comes another troop to seek for you.
IAGO. It is Brabantio. General, be advised,
He comes to bad intent.
Enter Brabantio, Roderigo, and Officers with torches
and weapons.
OTHELLO. Holla! Stand there!
RODERIGO. Signior, it is the Moor.
BRABANTIO. Down with him, thief!
They draw on both
sides.
IAGO. You, Roderigo! Come, sir, I am for you.
OTHELLO. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
BRABANTIO. O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my
daughter?
Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion. I'll have't disputed on;
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practicer
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.
Lay hold upon him. If he do resist,
Subdue him at his peril.
OTHELLO. Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining and the rest.
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter. Where will you that I go
To answer this your charge?
BRABANTIO. To prison, till fit time
Of law and course of direct session
Call thee to answer.
OTHELLO. What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side,
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?
FIRST OFFICER. 'Tis true, most worthy signior;
The Duke's in council, and your noble self,
I am sure, is sent for.
BRABANTIO. How? The Duke in council?
In this time of the night? Bring him away;
Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 1 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
Another street.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Attendants with torches.
IAGO. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murther. I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
OTHELLO. 'Tis better as it is.
IAGO. Nay, but he prated
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against your honor
That, with the little godliness I have,
I did full hard forbear him. But I pray you, sir,
Are you fast married? Be assured of this,
That the magnifico is much beloved,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the Duke's. He will divorce you,
Or put upon you what restraint and grievance
The law, with all his might to enforce it on,
Will give him cable.
OTHELLO. Let him do his spite.
My services, which I have done the signiory,
Shall out--tongue his complaints. 'Tis yet to know--
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate--I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth. But, look! What lights come yond?
IAGO. Those are the raised father and his friends.
You were best go in.
OTHELLO. Not I; I must be found.
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. Is it they?
IAGO. By Janus, I think no.
Enter Cassio and certain Officers with torches.
OTHELLO. The servants of the Duke? And my lieutenant?
The goodness of the night upon you, friends!
What is the news?
CASSIO. The Duke does greet you, general,
And he requires your haste--post--haste appearance,
Even on the instant.
OTHELLO. What is the matter, think you?
CASSIO. Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat. The galleys
Have sent a dozen sequent messengers
This very night at one another's heels;
And many of the consuls, raised and met,
Are at the Duke's already. You have been hotly call'd for,
When, being not at your lodging to be found,
The Senate hath sent about three several quests
To search you out.
OTHELLO. 'Tis well I am found by you.
I will but spend a word here in the house
And go with you.
Exit.
CASSIO. Ancient, what makes he here?
IAGO. Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack;
If it prove lawful prize, he's made forever.
CASSIO. I do not understand.
IAGO. He's married.
CASSIO. To who?
Re-enter Othello.
IAGO. Marry, to--Come, captain, will you go?
OTHELLO. Have with you.
CASSIO. Here comes another troop to seek for you.
IAGO. It is Brabantio. General, be advised,
He comes to bad intent.
Enter Brabantio, Roderigo, and Officers with torches
and weapons.
OTHELLO. Holla! Stand there!
RODERIGO. Signior, it is the Moor.
BRABANTIO. Down with him, thief!
They draw on both
sides.
IAGO. You, Roderigo! Come, sir, I am for you.
OTHELLO. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
BRABANTIO. O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my
daughter?
Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion. I'll have't disputed on;
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practicer
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.
Lay hold upon him. If he do resist,
Subdue him at his peril.
OTHELLO. Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining and the rest.
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter. Where will you that I go
To answer this your charge?
BRABANTIO. To prison, till fit time
Of law and course of direct session
Call thee to answer.
OTHELLO. What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side,
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?
FIRST OFFICER. 'Tis true, most worthy signior;
The Duke's in council, and your noble self,
I am sure, is sent for.
BRABANTIO. How? The Duke in council?
In this time of the night? Bring him away;
Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 1 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
Another street.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Attendants with torches.
IAGO. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murther. I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
OTHELLO. 'Tis better as it is.
IAGO. Nay, but he prated
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against your honor
That, with the little godliness I have,
I did full hard forbear him. But I pray you, sir,
Are you fast married? Be assured of this,
That the magnifico is much beloved,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the Duke's. He will divorce you,
Or put upon you what restraint and grievance
The law, with all his might to enforce it on,
Will give him cable.
OTHELLO. Let him do his spite.
My services, which I have done the signiory,
Shall out--tongue his complaints. 'Tis yet to know--
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate--I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth. But, look! What lights come yond?
IAGO. Those are the raised father and his friends.
You were best go in.
OTHELLO. Not I; I must be found.
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. Is it they?
IAGO. By Janus, I think no.
Enter Cassio and certain Officers with torches.
OTHELLO. The servants of the Duke? And my lieutenant?
The goodness of the night upon you, friends!
What is the news?
CASSIO. The Duke does greet you, general,
And he requires your haste--post--haste appearance,
Even on the instant.
OTHELLO. What is the matter, think you?
CASSIO. Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat. The galleys
Have sent a dozen sequent messengers
This very night at one another's heels;
And many of the consuls, raised and met,
Are at the Duke's already. You have been hotly call'd for,
When, being not at your lodging to be found,
The Senate hath sent about three several quests
To search you out.
OTHELLO. 'Tis well I am found by you.
I will but spend a word here in the house
And go with you.
Exit.
CASSIO. Ancient, what makes he here?
IAGO. Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack;
If it prove lawful prize, he's made forever.
CASSIO. I do not understand.
IAGO. He's married.
CASSIO. To who?
Re-enter Othello.
IAGO. Marry, to--Come, captain, will you go?
OTHELLO. Have with you.
CASSIO. Here comes another troop to seek for you.
IAGO. It is Brabantio. General, be advised,
He comes to bad intent.
Enter Brabantio, Roderigo, and Officers with torches
and weapons.
OTHELLO. Holla! Stand there!
RODERIGO. Signior, it is the Moor.
BRABANTIO. Down with him, thief!
They draw on both
sides.
IAGO. You, Roderigo! Come, sir, I am for you.
OTHELLO. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
BRABANTIO. O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my
daughter?
Damn'd as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,
For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, to incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world, if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion. I'll have't disputed on;
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practicer
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.
Lay hold upon him. If he do resist,
Subdue him at his peril.
OTHELLO. Hold your hands,
Both you of my inclining and the rest.
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter. Where will you that I go
To answer this your charge?
BRABANTIO. To prison, till fit time
Of law and course of direct session
Call thee to answer.
OTHELLO. What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side,
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?
FIRST OFFICER. 'Tis true, most worthy signior;
The Duke's in council, and your noble self,
I am sure, is sent for.
BRABANTIO. How? The Duke in council?
In this time of the night? Bring him away;
Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.
Exeunt.
|
|
Othello.act 2.scene 2 | cliffnotes | Generate a succinct summary for act 2 scene 2 with the given context. | At the celebration of the victory over the Turks, Iago gets Cassio drunk, and then has Roderigo confront Cassio about the so-called love between him and Desdemona. Cassio starts to fight Roderigo, and then turns his attention to another soldier, and wounds him, but not fatally. Othello wakes up from the noise, and, angry with Cassio, fires him from his position. Iago suggests to the humiliated Cassio that he ask Desdemona to help him regain his position. Iago plots another move in his plan, and decides to tell Othello that Cassio seeks help from Desdemona because they are lovers. |
----------ACT 2, SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A street.
Enter a Herald with a proclamation; people following.
HERALD. It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant
general,
that upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere
perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into
triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to
what
sport and revels his addiction leads him; for besides these
beneficial news, it is the celebration of his nuptial. So
much
was his pleasure should be proclaimed. All offices are open,
and
there is full liberty of feasting from this present hour of
five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the isle of
Cyprus
and our noble general Othello!
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A street.
Enter a Herald with a proclamation; people following.
HERALD. It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant
general,
that upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere
perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into
triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to
what
sport and revels his addiction leads him; for besides these
beneficial news, it is the celebration of his nuptial. So
much
was his pleasure should be proclaimed. All offices are open,
and
there is full liberty of feasting from this present hour of
five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the isle of
Cyprus
and our noble general Othello!
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A street.
Enter a Herald with a proclamation; people following.
HERALD. It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant
general,
that upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere
perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into
triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to
what
sport and revels his addiction leads him; for besides these
beneficial news, it is the celebration of his nuptial. So
much
was his pleasure should be proclaimed. All offices are open,
and
there is full liberty of feasting from this present hour of
five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the isle of
Cyprus
and our noble general Othello!
Exeunt.
----------ACT 2 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A street.
Enter a Herald with a proclamation; people following.
HERALD. It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant
general,
that upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere
perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into
triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to
what
sport and revels his addiction leads him; for besides these
beneficial news, it is the celebration of his nuptial. So
much
was his pleasure should be proclaimed. All offices are open,
and
there is full liberty of feasting from this present hour of
five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the isle of
Cyprus
and our noble general Othello!
Exeunt.
----------ACT 2 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A street.
Enter a Herald with a proclamation; people following.
HERALD. It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant
general,
that upon certain tidings now arrived, importing the mere
perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into
triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to
what
sport and revels his addiction leads him; for besides these
beneficial news, it is the celebration of his nuptial. So
much
was his pleasure should be proclaimed. All offices are open,
and
there is full liberty of feasting from this present hour of
five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the isle of
Cyprus
and our noble general Othello!
Exeunt.
|
|
Othello.act 3.scene 1 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of act 3, scene 1, utilizing the provided context. | Cassio, eager to please, has sent some musicians to play, badly, in hopes of winning back Othello's good favor. Othello's clown comes out and asks the players why their instruments sound so nasal. Next, the Clown insults the musicians by comparing the noise from their instruments to...well, farts. Get it? Wind instruments, breaking wind? Then he tells them that Othello likes their music so much he wants them to stop making noise with it. Of course, if they have any music that can't be heard , they're welcome to play it. The musicians say they don't have any music like that, so he sends them away. Cassio asks him if Emilia is up yet. Just then, Iago enters and is shocked to see Cassio hasn't yet gone to bed. Cassio says he's already sent for Emilia, and Iago promises to send her to Cassio post-haste, so she can hear his plea and make it to Desdemona. In the meantime, Iago promises to lure Othello away from Desdemona, so Cassio can speak with her freely. Iago exits to do more evil master-planning. After Cassio praises Iago for his kindness and honesty, Emilia enters and reports that Desdemona is already pleading to Othello on Cassio's behalf. Othello worries that Montano, Cassio's victim, is kind of a big deal in Cyprus, though Othello has decided that his liking for Cassio should be enough to overcome the fact that Cassio has wronged the wrong guy. Cassio asks Emilia if perhaps he might speak to Desdemona alone. Emilia goes to see if she can arrange such a meeting. |
----------ACT 3, SCENE 1---------
ACT III. SCENE I.
Before the castle.
Enter Cassio and some Musicians.
CASSIO. Masters, play here, I will content your pains;
Something
that's brief; and bid "Good morrow, general."
Music.
Enter Clown.
CLOWN. Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that
they speak i' the nose thus?
FIRST MUSICIAN. How, sir, how?
CLOWN. Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
FIRST MUSICIAN. Ay, marry, are they, sir.
CLOWN. O, thereby hangs a tail.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN. Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. But,
masters, here's money for you; and the general so likes your
music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more
noise with it.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Well, sir, we will not.
CLOWN. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again;
but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly
care.
FIRST MUSICIAN. We have none such, sir.
CLOWN. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away.
Go, vanish into air, away! Exeunt
Musicians.
CASSIO. Dost thou hear, my honest friend?
CLOWN. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.
CASSIO. Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of
gold
for thee. If the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife
be
stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little
favor
of speech. Wilt thou do this?
CLOWN. She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall
seem
to notify unto her.
CASSIO. Do, good my friend. Exit
Clown.
Enter Iago.
In happy time, Iago.
IAGO. You have not been abed, then?
CASSIO. Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife. My suit to her
Is that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.
IAGO. I'll send her to you presently;
And I'll devise a mean to draw the Moor
Out of the way, that your converse and business
May be more free.
CASSIO. I humbly thank you for't. [Exit Iago.] I never knew
A Florentine more kind and honest.
Enter Emilia.
EMILIA. Good morrow, good lieutenant. I am sorry
For your displeasure, but all will sure be well.
The general and his wife are talking of it,
And she speaks for you stoutly. The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings
To take the safest occasion by the front
To bring you in again.
CASSIO. Yet, I beseech you,
If you think fit, or that it may be done,
Give me advantage of some brief discourse
With Desdemona alone.
EMILIA. Pray you, come in.
I will bestow you where you shall have time
To speak your bosom freely.
CASSIO. I am much bound to you.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT III. SCENE I.
Before the castle.
Enter Cassio and some Musicians.
CASSIO. Masters, play here, I will content your pains;
Something
that's brief; and bid "Good morrow, general."
Music.
Enter Clown.
CLOWN. Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that
they speak i' the nose thus?
FIRST MUSICIAN. How, sir, how?
CLOWN. Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
FIRST MUSICIAN. Ay, marry, are they, sir.
CLOWN. O, thereby hangs a tail.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN. Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. But,
masters, here's money for you; and the general so likes your
music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more
noise with it.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Well, sir, we will not.
CLOWN. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again;
but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly
care.
FIRST MUSICIAN. We have none such, sir.
CLOWN. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away.
Go, vanish into air, away! Exeunt
Musicians.
CASSIO. Dost thou hear, my honest friend?
CLOWN. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.
CASSIO. Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of
gold
for thee. If the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife
be
stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little
favor
of speech. Wilt thou do this?
CLOWN. She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall
seem
to notify unto her.
CASSIO. Do, good my friend. Exit
Clown.
Enter Iago.
In happy time, Iago.
IAGO. You have not been abed, then?
CASSIO. Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife. My suit to her
Is that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.
IAGO. I'll send her to you presently;
And I'll devise a mean to draw the Moor
Out of the way, that your converse and business
May be more free.
CASSIO. I humbly thank you for't. [Exit Iago.] I never knew
A Florentine more kind and honest.
Enter Emilia.
EMILIA. Good morrow, good lieutenant. I am sorry
For your displeasure, but all will sure be well.
The general and his wife are talking of it,
And she speaks for you stoutly. The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings
To take the safest occasion by the front
To bring you in again.
CASSIO. Yet, I beseech you,
If you think fit, or that it may be done,
Give me advantage of some brief discourse
With Desdemona alone.
EMILIA. Pray you, come in.
I will bestow you where you shall have time
To speak your bosom freely.
CASSIO. I am much bound to you.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT III. SCENE I.
Before the castle.
Enter Cassio and some Musicians.
CASSIO. Masters, play here, I will content your pains;
Something
that's brief; and bid "Good morrow, general."
Music.
Enter Clown.
CLOWN. Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that
they speak i' the nose thus?
FIRST MUSICIAN. How, sir, how?
CLOWN. Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
FIRST MUSICIAN. Ay, marry, are they, sir.
CLOWN. O, thereby hangs a tail.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN. Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. But,
masters, here's money for you; and the general so likes your
music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more
noise with it.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Well, sir, we will not.
CLOWN. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again;
but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly
care.
FIRST MUSICIAN. We have none such, sir.
CLOWN. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away.
Go, vanish into air, away! Exeunt
Musicians.
CASSIO. Dost thou hear, my honest friend?
CLOWN. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.
CASSIO. Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of
gold
for thee. If the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife
be
stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little
favor
of speech. Wilt thou do this?
CLOWN. She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall
seem
to notify unto her.
CASSIO. Do, good my friend. Exit
Clown.
Enter Iago.
In happy time, Iago.
IAGO. You have not been abed, then?
CASSIO. Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife. My suit to her
Is that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.
IAGO. I'll send her to you presently;
And I'll devise a mean to draw the Moor
Out of the way, that your converse and business
May be more free.
CASSIO. I humbly thank you for't. [Exit Iago.] I never knew
A Florentine more kind and honest.
Enter Emilia.
EMILIA. Good morrow, good lieutenant. I am sorry
For your displeasure, but all will sure be well.
The general and his wife are talking of it,
And she speaks for you stoutly. The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings
To take the safest occasion by the front
To bring you in again.
CASSIO. Yet, I beseech you,
If you think fit, or that it may be done,
Give me advantage of some brief discourse
With Desdemona alone.
EMILIA. Pray you, come in.
I will bestow you where you shall have time
To speak your bosom freely.
CASSIO. I am much bound to you.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 3 SCENE 1---------
ACT III. SCENE I.
Before the castle.
Enter Cassio and some Musicians.
CASSIO. Masters, play here, I will content your pains;
Something
that's brief; and bid "Good morrow, general."
Music.
Enter Clown.
CLOWN. Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that
they speak i' the nose thus?
FIRST MUSICIAN. How, sir, how?
CLOWN. Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
FIRST MUSICIAN. Ay, marry, are they, sir.
CLOWN. O, thereby hangs a tail.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN. Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. But,
masters, here's money for you; and the general so likes your
music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more
noise with it.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Well, sir, we will not.
CLOWN. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again;
but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly
care.
FIRST MUSICIAN. We have none such, sir.
CLOWN. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away.
Go, vanish into air, away! Exeunt
Musicians.
CASSIO. Dost thou hear, my honest friend?
CLOWN. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.
CASSIO. Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of
gold
for thee. If the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife
be
stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little
favor
of speech. Wilt thou do this?
CLOWN. She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall
seem
to notify unto her.
CASSIO. Do, good my friend. Exit
Clown.
Enter Iago.
In happy time, Iago.
IAGO. You have not been abed, then?
CASSIO. Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife. My suit to her
Is that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.
IAGO. I'll send her to you presently;
And I'll devise a mean to draw the Moor
Out of the way, that your converse and business
May be more free.
CASSIO. I humbly thank you for't. [Exit Iago.] I never knew
A Florentine more kind and honest.
Enter Emilia.
EMILIA. Good morrow, good lieutenant. I am sorry
For your displeasure, but all will sure be well.
The general and his wife are talking of it,
And she speaks for you stoutly. The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings
To take the safest occasion by the front
To bring you in again.
CASSIO. Yet, I beseech you,
If you think fit, or that it may be done,
Give me advantage of some brief discourse
With Desdemona alone.
EMILIA. Pray you, come in.
I will bestow you where you shall have time
To speak your bosom freely.
CASSIO. I am much bound to you.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 3 SCENE 1---------
ACT III. SCENE I.
Before the castle.
Enter Cassio and some Musicians.
CASSIO. Masters, play here, I will content your pains;
Something
that's brief; and bid "Good morrow, general."
Music.
Enter Clown.
CLOWN. Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that
they speak i' the nose thus?
FIRST MUSICIAN. How, sir, how?
CLOWN. Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
FIRST MUSICIAN. Ay, marry, are they, sir.
CLOWN. O, thereby hangs a tail.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN. Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. But,
masters, here's money for you; and the general so likes your
music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more
noise with it.
FIRST MUSICIAN. Well, sir, we will not.
CLOWN. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again;
but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly
care.
FIRST MUSICIAN. We have none such, sir.
CLOWN. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away.
Go, vanish into air, away! Exeunt
Musicians.
CASSIO. Dost thou hear, my honest friend?
CLOWN. No, I hear not your honest friend; I hear you.
CASSIO. Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of
gold
for thee. If the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife
be
stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little
favor
of speech. Wilt thou do this?
CLOWN. She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall
seem
to notify unto her.
CASSIO. Do, good my friend. Exit
Clown.
Enter Iago.
In happy time, Iago.
IAGO. You have not been abed, then?
CASSIO. Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife. My suit to her
Is that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.
IAGO. I'll send her to you presently;
And I'll devise a mean to draw the Moor
Out of the way, that your converse and business
May be more free.
CASSIO. I humbly thank you for't. [Exit Iago.] I never knew
A Florentine more kind and honest.
Enter Emilia.
EMILIA. Good morrow, good lieutenant. I am sorry
For your displeasure, but all will sure be well.
The general and his wife are talking of it,
And she speaks for you stoutly. The Moor replies
That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus
And great affinity and that in wholesome wisdom
He might not but refuse you; but he protests he loves you
And needs no other suitor but his likings
To take the safest occasion by the front
To bring you in again.
CASSIO. Yet, I beseech you,
If you think fit, or that it may be done,
Give me advantage of some brief discourse
With Desdemona alone.
EMILIA. Pray you, come in.
I will bestow you where you shall have time
To speak your bosom freely.
CASSIO. I am much bound to you.
Exeunt.
|
|
Othello.act 3.scene 2 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 2, utilizing the provided context. | Othello writes a report to Venice that the danger from the Turks is over. He sends Iago away to post the mail. Othello then goes to inspect the fortifications, telling Iago to meet him later. |
----------ACT 3, SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Gentlemen.
OTHELLO. These letters give, Iago, to the pilot,
And by him do my duties to the Senate.
That done, I will be walking on the works;
Repair there to me.
IAGO. Well, my good lord, I'll do't.
OTHELLO. This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see't?
GENTLEMEN. We'll wait upon your lordship.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Gentlemen.
OTHELLO. These letters give, Iago, to the pilot,
And by him do my duties to the Senate.
That done, I will be walking on the works;
Repair there to me.
IAGO. Well, my good lord, I'll do't.
OTHELLO. This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see't?
GENTLEMEN. We'll wait upon your lordship.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Gentlemen.
OTHELLO. These letters give, Iago, to the pilot,
And by him do my duties to the Senate.
That done, I will be walking on the works;
Repair there to me.
IAGO. Well, my good lord, I'll do't.
OTHELLO. This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see't?
GENTLEMEN. We'll wait upon your lordship.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 3 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Gentlemen.
OTHELLO. These letters give, Iago, to the pilot,
And by him do my duties to the Senate.
That done, I will be walking on the works;
Repair there to me.
IAGO. Well, my good lord, I'll do't.
OTHELLO. This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see't?
GENTLEMEN. We'll wait upon your lordship.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 3 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello, Iago, and Gentlemen.
OTHELLO. These letters give, Iago, to the pilot,
And by him do my duties to the Senate.
That done, I will be walking on the works;
Repair there to me.
IAGO. Well, my good lord, I'll do't.
OTHELLO. This fortification, gentlemen, shall we see't?
GENTLEMEN. We'll wait upon your lordship.
Exeunt.
|
|
Othello.act 3.scene 4 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 4, utilizing the provided context. | act 3, scene 4|scene 4 | Desdemona sends for Cassio to tell him that she has spoken with Othello; she is also worried that she has lost her handkerchief. When Othello enters, he claims a headache and asks her for a handkerchief to bind his head, but he will have only the embroidered strawberry handkerchief. In vain, Desdemona tries to deflect his questions about the handkerchief, speaking again of Cassio. Othello walks out in fury. Cassio gives Bianca Desdemona's handkerchief, which he found in his lodgings and asks her to make a copy of it for him, as he will have to return the original when he finds the owner. Bianca immediately recognizes it as belonging to a woman and berates Cassio for having another mistress. |
----------ACT 3, SCENE 4---------
SCENE IV.
Before the castle.
Enter Desdemona, Emilia, and Clown.
DESDEMONA. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?
CLOWN. I dare not say he lies anywhere.
DESDEMONA. Why, man?
CLOWN. He's a soldier; and for one to say a soldier lies, is
stabbing.
DESDEMONA. Go to! Where lodges he?
CLOWN. To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie.
DESDEMONA. Can anything be made of this?
CLOWN. I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a
lodging,
and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine
own
throat.
DESDEMONA. Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN. I will catechize the world for him; that is, make
questions
and by them answer.
DESDEMONA. Seek him, bid him come hither. Tell him I have moved
my
lord on his behalf and hope all will be well.
CLOWN. To do this is within the compass of man's wit, and
therefore
I will attempt the doing it.
Exit.
DESDEMONA. Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?
EMILIA. I know not, madam.
DESDEMONA. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of crusadoes; and, but my noble Moor
Is true of mind and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
EMILIA. Is he not jealous?
DESDEMONA. Who, he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humors from him.
EMILIA. Look, where he comes.
DESDEMONA. I will not leave him now till Cassio
Be call'd to him.
Enter Othello.
How is't with you, my lord?
OTHELLO. Well, my good lady. [Aside.] O, hardness to dissemble!
How do you, Desdemona?
DESDEMONA. Well, my good lord.
OTHELLO. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
DESDEMONA. It yet has felt no age nor known no sorrow.
OTHELLO. This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty, fasting, and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.
DESDEMONA. You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
OTHELLO. A liberal hand. The hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.
DESDEMONA. I cannot speak of this. Come now, your promise.
OTHELLO. What promise, chuck?
DESDEMONA. I have sent to bid Cassio come speak with you.
OTHELLO. I have a salt and sorry rheum offends me;
Lend me thy handkerchief.
DESDEMONA. Here, my lord.
OTHELLO. That which I gave you.
DESDEMONA. I have it not about me.
OTHELLO. Not?
DESDEMONA. No, faith, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's a fault. That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She dying gave it me,
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on't;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose't or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
DESDEMONA. Is't possible?
OTHELLO. 'Tis true; there's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maiden's hearts.
DESDEMONA. Indeed! is't true?
OTHELLO. Most veritable; therefore look to't well.
DESDEMONA. Then would to God that I had never seen't!
OTHELLO. Ha! wherefore?
DESDEMONA. Why do you speak so startingly and rash?
OTHELLO. Is't lost? is't gone? speak, is it out o' the way?
DESDEMONA. Heaven bless us!
OTHELLO. Say you?
DESDEMONA. It is not lost; but what an if it were?
OTHELLO. How?
DESDEMONA. I say, it is not lost.
OTHELLO. Fetch't, let me see it.
DESDEMONA. Why, so I can, sir, but I will not now.
This is a trick to put me from my suit.
Pray you, let Cassio be received again.
OTHELLO. Fetch me the handkerchief, my mind misgives.
DESDEMONA. Come, come,
You'll never meet a more sufficient man.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. I pray, talk me of Cassio.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. A man that all his time
Hath founded his good fortunes on your love,
Shared dangers with you--
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. In sooth, you are to blame.
OTHELLO. Away!
Exit.
EMILIA. Is not this man jealous?
DESDEMONA. I ne'er saw this before.
Sure there's some wonder in this handkerchief;
I am most unhappy in the loss of it.
EMILIA. 'Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us. Look you! Cassio and my husband.
Enter Cassio and Iago.
IAGO. There is no other way; 'tis she must do't.
And, lo, the happiness! Go and importune her.
DESDEMONA. How now, good Cassio! What's the news with you?
CASSIO. Madam, my former suit: I do beseech you
That by your virtuous means I may again
Exist and be a member of his love
Whom I with all the office of my heart
Entirely honor. I would not be delay'd.
If my offense be of such mortal kind
That nor my service past nor present sorrows
Nor purposed merit in futurity
Can ransom me into his love again,
But to know so must be my benefit;
So shall I clothe me in a forced content
And shut myself up in some other course
To Fortune's alms.
DESDEMONA. Alas, thrice-gentle Cassio!
My advocation is not now in tune;
My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him
Were he in favor as in humor alter'd.
So help me every spirit sanctified,
As I have spoken for you all my best
And stood within the blank of his displeasure
For my free speech! You must awhile be patient.
What I can do I will; and more I will
Than for myself I dare. Let that suffice you.
IAGO. Is my lord angry?
EMILIA. He went hence but now,
And certainly in strange unquietness.
IAGO. Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon,
When it hath blown his ranks into the air
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puff'd his own brother. And can he be angry?
Something of moment then. I will go meet him.
There's matter in't indeed if he be angry.
DESDEMONA. I prithee, do so. Exit
Iago.
Something sure of state,
Either from Venice or some unhatch'd practice
Made demonstrable here in Cyprus to him,
Hath puddled his clear spirit; and in such cases
Men's natures wrangle with inferior things,
Though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so;
For let our finger ache, and it indues
Our other healthful members even to that sense
Of pain. Nay, we must think men are not gods,
Nor of them look for such observancy
As fits the bridal. Beshrew me much, Emilia,
I was, unhandsome warrior as I am,
Arraigning his unkindness with my soul;
But now I find I had suborn'd the witness,
And he's indicted falsely.
EMILIA. Pray heaven it be state matters, as you think,
And no conception nor no jealous toy
Concerning you.
DESDEMONA. Alas the day, I never gave him cause!
EMILIA. But jealous souls will not be answer'd so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous. 'Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.
DESDEMONA. Heaven keep that monster from Othello's mind!
EMILIA. Lady, amen.
DESDEMONA. I will go seek him. Cassio, walk hereabout.
If I do find him fit, I'll move your suit,
And seek to effect it to my uttermost.
CASSIO. I humbly thank your ladyship.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Bianca.
BIANCA. Save you, friend Cassio!
CASSIO. What make you from home?
How is it with you, my most fair Bianca?
I'faith, sweet love, I was coming to your house.
BIANCA. And I was going to your lodging, Cassio.
What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?
Eight score eight hours? and lovers' absent hours,
More tedious than the dial eight score times?
O weary reckoning!
CASSIO. Pardon me, Bianca.
I have this while with leaden thoughts been press'd;
But I shall in a more continuate time
Strike off this score of absence. Sweet Bianca,
Gives her Desdemona's
handkerchief.
Take me this work out.
BIANCA. O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend.
To the felt absence now I feel a cause.
Is't come to this? Well, well.
CASSIO. Go to, woman!
Throw your vile guesses in the devil's teeth,
From whence you have them. You are jealous now
That this is from some mistress, some remembrance.
No, by my faith, Bianca.
BIANCA. Why, whose is it?
CASSIO. I know not, sweet. I found it in my chamber.
I like the work well. Ere it be demanded--
As like enough it will--I'ld have it copied.
Take it, and do't; and leave me for this time.
BIANCA. Leave you! wherefore?
CASSIO. I do attend here on the general;
And think it no addition, nor my wish,
To have him see me woman'd.
BIANCA. Why, I pray you?
CASSIO. Not that I love you not.
BIANCA. But that you do not love me.
I pray you, bring me on the way a little,
And say if I shall see you soon at night.
CASSIO. 'Tis but a little way that I can bring you,
For I attend here, but I'll see you soon.
BIANCA. 'Tis very good; I must be circumstanced.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 4---------
SCENE IV.
Before the castle.
Enter Desdemona, Emilia, and Clown.
DESDEMONA. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?
CLOWN. I dare not say he lies anywhere.
DESDEMONA. Why, man?
CLOWN. He's a soldier; and for one to say a soldier lies, is
stabbing.
DESDEMONA. Go to! Where lodges he?
CLOWN. To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie.
DESDEMONA. Can anything be made of this?
CLOWN. I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a
lodging,
and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine
own
throat.
DESDEMONA. Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN. I will catechize the world for him; that is, make
questions
and by them answer.
DESDEMONA. Seek him, bid him come hither. Tell him I have moved
my
lord on his behalf and hope all will be well.
CLOWN. To do this is within the compass of man's wit, and
therefore
I will attempt the doing it.
Exit.
DESDEMONA. Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?
EMILIA. I know not, madam.
DESDEMONA. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of crusadoes; and, but my noble Moor
Is true of mind and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
EMILIA. Is he not jealous?
DESDEMONA. Who, he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humors from him.
EMILIA. Look, where he comes.
DESDEMONA. I will not leave him now till Cassio
Be call'd to him.
Enter Othello.
How is't with you, my lord?
OTHELLO. Well, my good lady. [Aside.] O, hardness to dissemble!
How do you, Desdemona?
DESDEMONA. Well, my good lord.
OTHELLO. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
DESDEMONA. It yet has felt no age nor known no sorrow.
OTHELLO. This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty, fasting, and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.
DESDEMONA. You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
OTHELLO. A liberal hand. The hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.
DESDEMONA. I cannot speak of this. Come now, your promise.
OTHELLO. What promise, chuck?
DESDEMONA. I have sent to bid Cassio come speak with you.
OTHELLO. I have a salt and sorry rheum offends me;
Lend me thy handkerchief.
DESDEMONA. Here, my lord.
OTHELLO. That which I gave you.
DESDEMONA. I have it not about me.
OTHELLO. Not?
DESDEMONA. No, faith, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's a fault. That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She dying gave it me,
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on't;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose't or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
DESDEMONA. Is't possible?
OTHELLO. 'Tis true; there's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maiden's hearts.
DESDEMONA. Indeed! is't true?
OTHELLO. Most veritable; therefore look to't well.
DESDEMONA. Then would to God that I had never seen't!
OTHELLO. Ha! wherefore?
DESDEMONA. Why do you speak so startingly and rash?
OTHELLO. Is't lost? is't gone? speak, is it out o' the way?
DESDEMONA. Heaven bless us!
OTHELLO. Say you?
DESDEMONA. It is not lost; but what an if it were?
OTHELLO. How?
DESDEMONA. I say, it is not lost.
OTHELLO. Fetch't, let me see it.
DESDEMONA. Why, so I can, sir, but I will not now.
This is a trick to put me from my suit.
Pray you, let Cassio be received again.
OTHELLO. Fetch me the handkerchief, my mind misgives.
DESDEMONA. Come, come,
You'll never meet a more sufficient man.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. I pray, talk me of Cassio.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. A man that all his time
Hath founded his good fortunes on your love,
Shared dangers with you--
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. In sooth, you are to blame.
OTHELLO. Away!
Exit.
EMILIA. Is not this man jealous?
DESDEMONA. I ne'er saw this before.
Sure there's some wonder in this handkerchief;
I am most unhappy in the loss of it.
EMILIA. 'Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us. Look you! Cassio and my husband.
Enter Cassio and Iago.
IAGO. There is no other way; 'tis she must do't.
And, lo, the happiness! Go and importune her.
DESDEMONA. How now, good Cassio! What's the news with you?
CASSIO. Madam, my former suit: I do beseech you
That by your virtuous means I may again
Exist and be a member of his love
Whom I with all the office of my heart
Entirely honor. I would not be delay'd.
If my offense be of such mortal kind
That nor my service past nor present sorrows
Nor purposed merit in futurity
Can ransom me into his love again,
But to know so must be my benefit;
So shall I clothe me in a forced content
And shut myself up in some other course
To Fortune's alms.
DESDEMONA. Alas, thrice-gentle Cassio!
My advocation is not now in tune;
My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him
Were he in favor as in humor alter'd.
So help me every spirit sanctified,
As I have spoken for you all my best
And stood within the blank of his displeasure
For my free speech! You must awhile be patient.
What I can do I will; and more I will
Than for myself I dare. Let that suffice you.
IAGO. Is my lord angry?
EMILIA. He went hence but now,
And certainly in strange unquietness.
IAGO. Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon,
When it hath blown his ranks into the air
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puff'd his own brother. And can he be angry?
Something of moment then. I will go meet him.
There's matter in't indeed if he be angry.
DESDEMONA. I prithee, do so. Exit
Iago.
Something sure of state,
Either from Venice or some unhatch'd practice
Made demonstrable here in Cyprus to him,
Hath puddled his clear spirit; and in such cases
Men's natures wrangle with inferior things,
Though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so;
For let our finger ache, and it indues
Our other healthful members even to that sense
Of pain. Nay, we must think men are not gods,
Nor of them look for such observancy
As fits the bridal. Beshrew me much, Emilia,
I was, unhandsome warrior as I am,
Arraigning his unkindness with my soul;
But now I find I had suborn'd the witness,
And he's indicted falsely.
EMILIA. Pray heaven it be state matters, as you think,
And no conception nor no jealous toy
Concerning you.
DESDEMONA. Alas the day, I never gave him cause!
EMILIA. But jealous souls will not be answer'd so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous. 'Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.
DESDEMONA. Heaven keep that monster from Othello's mind!
EMILIA. Lady, amen.
DESDEMONA. I will go seek him. Cassio, walk hereabout.
If I do find him fit, I'll move your suit,
And seek to effect it to my uttermost.
CASSIO. I humbly thank your ladyship.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Bianca.
BIANCA. Save you, friend Cassio!
CASSIO. What make you from home?
How is it with you, my most fair Bianca?
I'faith, sweet love, I was coming to your house.
BIANCA. And I was going to your lodging, Cassio.
What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?
Eight score eight hours? and lovers' absent hours,
More tedious than the dial eight score times?
O weary reckoning!
CASSIO. Pardon me, Bianca.
I have this while with leaden thoughts been press'd;
But I shall in a more continuate time
Strike off this score of absence. Sweet Bianca,
Gives her Desdemona's
handkerchief.
Take me this work out.
BIANCA. O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend.
To the felt absence now I feel a cause.
Is't come to this? Well, well.
CASSIO. Go to, woman!
Throw your vile guesses in the devil's teeth,
From whence you have them. You are jealous now
That this is from some mistress, some remembrance.
No, by my faith, Bianca.
BIANCA. Why, whose is it?
CASSIO. I know not, sweet. I found it in my chamber.
I like the work well. Ere it be demanded--
As like enough it will--I'ld have it copied.
Take it, and do't; and leave me for this time.
BIANCA. Leave you! wherefore?
CASSIO. I do attend here on the general;
And think it no addition, nor my wish,
To have him see me woman'd.
BIANCA. Why, I pray you?
CASSIO. Not that I love you not.
BIANCA. But that you do not love me.
I pray you, bring me on the way a little,
And say if I shall see you soon at night.
CASSIO. 'Tis but a little way that I can bring you,
For I attend here, but I'll see you soon.
BIANCA. 'Tis very good; I must be circumstanced.
Exeunt.
|
null | cliffnotes | Craft a concise overview of scene 4 using the context provided. | scene 4|act 3 scene 4 | In a light-hearted vein, Desdemona talks to the clown and asks him to find Cassio for her. She also talks about the loss of her handkerchief, for she treasured it as a gift from Othello. Emilia, who knows the truth, keeps silent about it. Othello enters and asks her to lend the handkerchief to him. She says that she does not have it with her at the moment. Her husband becomes so enraged that she is afraid to say that she has lost it. She tries to talk of Cassio, but Othello shouts, "the handkerchief," now convinced that she has given it to Cassio. Othello says that there is witchcraft in the handkerchief, and the woman who loses it will also lose her husbands love; Desdemona is almost ready to believe it. Desdemona cannot fathom the cause of Othellos odd behavior. Emilia thinks that Othellos trouble is jealousy, but Desdemona is sure that is impossible. Iago and Cassio now arrive. Iago, who withholds the information that he has been appointed the new lieutenant, presses Cassio to talk to Desdemona again, as there is no other way for him to be reinstated. When Desdemona says that Othello was upset over her pleadings on behalf of Cassio, Iago suggests that he must be worried about some state affairs. Desdemona accepts Iagos explanation and tells Cassio to be patient, for she will make her request again at the appropriate time. Iago and Desdemona go away, and Cassio is left alone. His mistress Bianca arrives and scolds him for ignoring her. He gives her the strawberry handkerchief and asks her to copy its pattern. He then tells her to leave the place, at once, as the General would he angry if he saw her there. However, he promises to meet her soon, and if possible, he would dine with her that very night. |
----------SCENE 4---------
SCENE IV.
Before the castle.
Enter Desdemona, Emilia, and Clown.
DESDEMONA. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?
CLOWN. I dare not say he lies anywhere.
DESDEMONA. Why, man?
CLOWN. He's a soldier; and for one to say a soldier lies, is
stabbing.
DESDEMONA. Go to! Where lodges he?
CLOWN. To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie.
DESDEMONA. Can anything be made of this?
CLOWN. I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a
lodging,
and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine
own
throat.
DESDEMONA. Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN. I will catechize the world for him; that is, make
questions
and by them answer.
DESDEMONA. Seek him, bid him come hither. Tell him I have moved
my
lord on his behalf and hope all will be well.
CLOWN. To do this is within the compass of man's wit, and
therefore
I will attempt the doing it.
Exit.
DESDEMONA. Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?
EMILIA. I know not, madam.
DESDEMONA. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of crusadoes; and, but my noble Moor
Is true of mind and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
EMILIA. Is he not jealous?
DESDEMONA. Who, he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humors from him.
EMILIA. Look, where he comes.
DESDEMONA. I will not leave him now till Cassio
Be call'd to him.
Enter Othello.
How is't with you, my lord?
OTHELLO. Well, my good lady. [Aside.] O, hardness to dissemble!
How do you, Desdemona?
DESDEMONA. Well, my good lord.
OTHELLO. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
DESDEMONA. It yet has felt no age nor known no sorrow.
OTHELLO. This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty, fasting, and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.
DESDEMONA. You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
OTHELLO. A liberal hand. The hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.
DESDEMONA. I cannot speak of this. Come now, your promise.
OTHELLO. What promise, chuck?
DESDEMONA. I have sent to bid Cassio come speak with you.
OTHELLO. I have a salt and sorry rheum offends me;
Lend me thy handkerchief.
DESDEMONA. Here, my lord.
OTHELLO. That which I gave you.
DESDEMONA. I have it not about me.
OTHELLO. Not?
DESDEMONA. No, faith, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's a fault. That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She dying gave it me,
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on't;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose't or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
DESDEMONA. Is't possible?
OTHELLO. 'Tis true; there's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maiden's hearts.
DESDEMONA. Indeed! is't true?
OTHELLO. Most veritable; therefore look to't well.
DESDEMONA. Then would to God that I had never seen't!
OTHELLO. Ha! wherefore?
DESDEMONA. Why do you speak so startingly and rash?
OTHELLO. Is't lost? is't gone? speak, is it out o' the way?
DESDEMONA. Heaven bless us!
OTHELLO. Say you?
DESDEMONA. It is not lost; but what an if it were?
OTHELLO. How?
DESDEMONA. I say, it is not lost.
OTHELLO. Fetch't, let me see it.
DESDEMONA. Why, so I can, sir, but I will not now.
This is a trick to put me from my suit.
Pray you, let Cassio be received again.
OTHELLO. Fetch me the handkerchief, my mind misgives.
DESDEMONA. Come, come,
You'll never meet a more sufficient man.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. I pray, talk me of Cassio.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. A man that all his time
Hath founded his good fortunes on your love,
Shared dangers with you--
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. In sooth, you are to blame.
OTHELLO. Away!
Exit.
EMILIA. Is not this man jealous?
DESDEMONA. I ne'er saw this before.
Sure there's some wonder in this handkerchief;
I am most unhappy in the loss of it.
EMILIA. 'Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us. Look you! Cassio and my husband.
Enter Cassio and Iago.
IAGO. There is no other way; 'tis she must do't.
And, lo, the happiness! Go and importune her.
DESDEMONA. How now, good Cassio! What's the news with you?
CASSIO. Madam, my former suit: I do beseech you
That by your virtuous means I may again
Exist and be a member of his love
Whom I with all the office of my heart
Entirely honor. I would not be delay'd.
If my offense be of such mortal kind
That nor my service past nor present sorrows
Nor purposed merit in futurity
Can ransom me into his love again,
But to know so must be my benefit;
So shall I clothe me in a forced content
And shut myself up in some other course
To Fortune's alms.
DESDEMONA. Alas, thrice-gentle Cassio!
My advocation is not now in tune;
My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him
Were he in favor as in humor alter'd.
So help me every spirit sanctified,
As I have spoken for you all my best
And stood within the blank of his displeasure
For my free speech! You must awhile be patient.
What I can do I will; and more I will
Than for myself I dare. Let that suffice you.
IAGO. Is my lord angry?
EMILIA. He went hence but now,
And certainly in strange unquietness.
IAGO. Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon,
When it hath blown his ranks into the air
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puff'd his own brother. And can he be angry?
Something of moment then. I will go meet him.
There's matter in't indeed if he be angry.
DESDEMONA. I prithee, do so. Exit
Iago.
Something sure of state,
Either from Venice or some unhatch'd practice
Made demonstrable here in Cyprus to him,
Hath puddled his clear spirit; and in such cases
Men's natures wrangle with inferior things,
Though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so;
For let our finger ache, and it indues
Our other healthful members even to that sense
Of pain. Nay, we must think men are not gods,
Nor of them look for such observancy
As fits the bridal. Beshrew me much, Emilia,
I was, unhandsome warrior as I am,
Arraigning his unkindness with my soul;
But now I find I had suborn'd the witness,
And he's indicted falsely.
EMILIA. Pray heaven it be state matters, as you think,
And no conception nor no jealous toy
Concerning you.
DESDEMONA. Alas the day, I never gave him cause!
EMILIA. But jealous souls will not be answer'd so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous. 'Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.
DESDEMONA. Heaven keep that monster from Othello's mind!
EMILIA. Lady, amen.
DESDEMONA. I will go seek him. Cassio, walk hereabout.
If I do find him fit, I'll move your suit,
And seek to effect it to my uttermost.
CASSIO. I humbly thank your ladyship.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Bianca.
BIANCA. Save you, friend Cassio!
CASSIO. What make you from home?
How is it with you, my most fair Bianca?
I'faith, sweet love, I was coming to your house.
BIANCA. And I was going to your lodging, Cassio.
What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?
Eight score eight hours? and lovers' absent hours,
More tedious than the dial eight score times?
O weary reckoning!
CASSIO. Pardon me, Bianca.
I have this while with leaden thoughts been press'd;
But I shall in a more continuate time
Strike off this score of absence. Sweet Bianca,
Gives her Desdemona's
handkerchief.
Take me this work out.
BIANCA. O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend.
To the felt absence now I feel a cause.
Is't come to this? Well, well.
CASSIO. Go to, woman!
Throw your vile guesses in the devil's teeth,
From whence you have them. You are jealous now
That this is from some mistress, some remembrance.
No, by my faith, Bianca.
BIANCA. Why, whose is it?
CASSIO. I know not, sweet. I found it in my chamber.
I like the work well. Ere it be demanded--
As like enough it will--I'ld have it copied.
Take it, and do't; and leave me for this time.
BIANCA. Leave you! wherefore?
CASSIO. I do attend here on the general;
And think it no addition, nor my wish,
To have him see me woman'd.
BIANCA. Why, I pray you?
CASSIO. Not that I love you not.
BIANCA. But that you do not love me.
I pray you, bring me on the way a little,
And say if I shall see you soon at night.
CASSIO. 'Tis but a little way that I can bring you,
For I attend here, but I'll see you soon.
BIANCA. 'Tis very good; I must be circumstanced.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 3 SCENE 4 ---------
SCENE IV.
Before the castle.
Enter Desdemona, Emilia, and Clown.
DESDEMONA. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?
CLOWN. I dare not say he lies anywhere.
DESDEMONA. Why, man?
CLOWN. He's a soldier; and for one to say a soldier lies, is
stabbing.
DESDEMONA. Go to! Where lodges he?
CLOWN. To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie.
DESDEMONA. Can anything be made of this?
CLOWN. I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a
lodging,
and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine
own
throat.
DESDEMONA. Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN. I will catechize the world for him; that is, make
questions
and by them answer.
DESDEMONA. Seek him, bid him come hither. Tell him I have moved
my
lord on his behalf and hope all will be well.
CLOWN. To do this is within the compass of man's wit, and
therefore
I will attempt the doing it.
Exit.
DESDEMONA. Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia?
EMILIA. I know not, madam.
DESDEMONA. Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of crusadoes; and, but my noble Moor
Is true of mind and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
EMILIA. Is he not jealous?
DESDEMONA. Who, he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humors from him.
EMILIA. Look, where he comes.
DESDEMONA. I will not leave him now till Cassio
Be call'd to him.
Enter Othello.
How is't with you, my lord?
OTHELLO. Well, my good lady. [Aside.] O, hardness to dissemble!
How do you, Desdemona?
DESDEMONA. Well, my good lord.
OTHELLO. Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
DESDEMONA. It yet has felt no age nor known no sorrow.
OTHELLO. This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty, fasting, and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.
DESDEMONA. You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
OTHELLO. A liberal hand. The hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.
DESDEMONA. I cannot speak of this. Come now, your promise.
OTHELLO. What promise, chuck?
DESDEMONA. I have sent to bid Cassio come speak with you.
OTHELLO. I have a salt and sorry rheum offends me;
Lend me thy handkerchief.
DESDEMONA. Here, my lord.
OTHELLO. That which I gave you.
DESDEMONA. I have it not about me.
OTHELLO. Not?
DESDEMONA. No, faith, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's a fault. That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She dying gave it me,
And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on't;
Make it a darling like your precious eye;
To lose't or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.
DESDEMONA. Is't possible?
OTHELLO. 'Tis true; there's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maiden's hearts.
DESDEMONA. Indeed! is't true?
OTHELLO. Most veritable; therefore look to't well.
DESDEMONA. Then would to God that I had never seen't!
OTHELLO. Ha! wherefore?
DESDEMONA. Why do you speak so startingly and rash?
OTHELLO. Is't lost? is't gone? speak, is it out o' the way?
DESDEMONA. Heaven bless us!
OTHELLO. Say you?
DESDEMONA. It is not lost; but what an if it were?
OTHELLO. How?
DESDEMONA. I say, it is not lost.
OTHELLO. Fetch't, let me see it.
DESDEMONA. Why, so I can, sir, but I will not now.
This is a trick to put me from my suit.
Pray you, let Cassio be received again.
OTHELLO. Fetch me the handkerchief, my mind misgives.
DESDEMONA. Come, come,
You'll never meet a more sufficient man.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. I pray, talk me of Cassio.
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. A man that all his time
Hath founded his good fortunes on your love,
Shared dangers with you--
OTHELLO. The handkerchief!
DESDEMONA. In sooth, you are to blame.
OTHELLO. Away!
Exit.
EMILIA. Is not this man jealous?
DESDEMONA. I ne'er saw this before.
Sure there's some wonder in this handkerchief;
I am most unhappy in the loss of it.
EMILIA. 'Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us. Look you! Cassio and my husband.
Enter Cassio and Iago.
IAGO. There is no other way; 'tis she must do't.
And, lo, the happiness! Go and importune her.
DESDEMONA. How now, good Cassio! What's the news with you?
CASSIO. Madam, my former suit: I do beseech you
That by your virtuous means I may again
Exist and be a member of his love
Whom I with all the office of my heart
Entirely honor. I would not be delay'd.
If my offense be of such mortal kind
That nor my service past nor present sorrows
Nor purposed merit in futurity
Can ransom me into his love again,
But to know so must be my benefit;
So shall I clothe me in a forced content
And shut myself up in some other course
To Fortune's alms.
DESDEMONA. Alas, thrice-gentle Cassio!
My advocation is not now in tune;
My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him
Were he in favor as in humor alter'd.
So help me every spirit sanctified,
As I have spoken for you all my best
And stood within the blank of his displeasure
For my free speech! You must awhile be patient.
What I can do I will; and more I will
Than for myself I dare. Let that suffice you.
IAGO. Is my lord angry?
EMILIA. He went hence but now,
And certainly in strange unquietness.
IAGO. Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon,
When it hath blown his ranks into the air
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puff'd his own brother. And can he be angry?
Something of moment then. I will go meet him.
There's matter in't indeed if he be angry.
DESDEMONA. I prithee, do so. Exit
Iago.
Something sure of state,
Either from Venice or some unhatch'd practice
Made demonstrable here in Cyprus to him,
Hath puddled his clear spirit; and in such cases
Men's natures wrangle with inferior things,
Though great ones are their object. 'Tis even so;
For let our finger ache, and it indues
Our other healthful members even to that sense
Of pain. Nay, we must think men are not gods,
Nor of them look for such observancy
As fits the bridal. Beshrew me much, Emilia,
I was, unhandsome warrior as I am,
Arraigning his unkindness with my soul;
But now I find I had suborn'd the witness,
And he's indicted falsely.
EMILIA. Pray heaven it be state matters, as you think,
And no conception nor no jealous toy
Concerning you.
DESDEMONA. Alas the day, I never gave him cause!
EMILIA. But jealous souls will not be answer'd so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous. 'Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.
DESDEMONA. Heaven keep that monster from Othello's mind!
EMILIA. Lady, amen.
DESDEMONA. I will go seek him. Cassio, walk hereabout.
If I do find him fit, I'll move your suit,
And seek to effect it to my uttermost.
CASSIO. I humbly thank your ladyship.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Bianca.
BIANCA. Save you, friend Cassio!
CASSIO. What make you from home?
How is it with you, my most fair Bianca?
I'faith, sweet love, I was coming to your house.
BIANCA. And I was going to your lodging, Cassio.
What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?
Eight score eight hours? and lovers' absent hours,
More tedious than the dial eight score times?
O weary reckoning!
CASSIO. Pardon me, Bianca.
I have this while with leaden thoughts been press'd;
But I shall in a more continuate time
Strike off this score of absence. Sweet Bianca,
Gives her Desdemona's
handkerchief.
Take me this work out.
BIANCA. O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend.
To the felt absence now I feel a cause.
Is't come to this? Well, well.
CASSIO. Go to, woman!
Throw your vile guesses in the devil's teeth,
From whence you have them. You are jealous now
That this is from some mistress, some remembrance.
No, by my faith, Bianca.
BIANCA. Why, whose is it?
CASSIO. I know not, sweet. I found it in my chamber.
I like the work well. Ere it be demanded--
As like enough it will--I'ld have it copied.
Take it, and do't; and leave me for this time.
BIANCA. Leave you! wherefore?
CASSIO. I do attend here on the general;
And think it no addition, nor my wish,
To have him see me woman'd.
BIANCA. Why, I pray you?
CASSIO. Not that I love you not.
BIANCA. But that you do not love me.
I pray you, bring me on the way a little,
And say if I shall see you soon at night.
CASSIO. 'Tis but a little way that I can bring you,
For I attend here, but I'll see you soon.
BIANCA. 'Tis very good; I must be circumstanced.
Exeunt.
|
Othello.act 4.scene 1 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 1, utilizing the provided context. | act 4, scene 1|scene 1 | In a conversation with Othello, Iago says that Cassio has confessed to sex with Desdemona. This revelation is too much for Othello, who becomes incoherent and faints. When Cassio enters, Iago claims that Othello has epilepsy and has had seizures before. Rather than revive him, they must let the fit take its course. Iago sends Cassio away, telling him to come back later. Othello, regaining consciousness, talks of himself as one among many cuckolds, but Iago tells him to hide and observe Cassio, who is returning. Iago says he will draw Cassio out to tell of his amorous adventures with Desdemona. Othello withdraws, too emotionally involved to understand that Iago is manipulating him, and Iago talks with Cassio about Bianca. Othello sees his smiles and laughter but cannot hear the details and believes he is joking about how much Desdemona loves him. Then Bianca herself enters, with Desdemona's handkerchief, which she throws back at Cassio. Seeing his wife's handkerchief in the hands of Cassio's mistress is, for Othello, the "ocular proof" he sought. He is now convinced of Desdemona's infidelity and knows he must kill both Cassio and Desdemona that very night. |
----------ACT 4, SCENE 1---------
ACT IV. SCENE I.
Cyprus. Before the castle.
Enter Othello and Iago.
IAGO. Will you think so?
OTHELLO. Think so, Iago?
IAGO. What,
To kiss in private?
OTHELLO. An unauthorized kiss.
IAGO. Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?
OTHELLO. Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm!
It is hypocrisy against the devil.
They that mean virtuously and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.
IAGO. So they do nothing, 'tis a venial slip.
But if I give my wife a handkerchief--
OTHELLO. What then?
IAGO. Why, then, 'tis hers, my lord, and being hers,
She may, I think, bestow't on any man.
OTHELLO. She is protectress of her honor too.
May she give that?
IAGO. Her honor is an essence that's not seen;
They have it very oft that have it not.
But for the handkerchief--
OTHELLO. By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it.
Thou said'st--O, it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all--he had my handkerchief.
IAGO. Ay, what of that?
OTHELLO. That's not so good now.
IAGO. What,
If I had said I had seen him do you wrong?
Or heard him say--as knaves be such abroad,
Who having, by their own importunate suit,
Or voluntary dotage of some mistress,
Convinced or supplied them, cannot choose
But they must blab--
OTHELLO. Hath he said anything?
IAGO. He hath, my lord; but be you well assured,
No more than he'll unswear.
OTHELLO. What hath he said?
IAGO. Faith, that he did--I know not what he did.
OTHELLO. What? what?
IAGO. Lie--
OTHELLO. With her?
IAGO. With her, on her, what you will.
OTHELLO. Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they
belie her. Lie with her! 'Zounds, that's fulsome!
Handkerchief--
confessions--handkerchief! To confess and be hanged for his
labor--
first, to be hanged, and then to confess. I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion
without
some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish!
Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible? Confess? Handkerchief?
O
devil!
Falls in a
trance.
IAGO. Work on,
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach. What, ho! My lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!
Enter Cassio.
How now, Cassio!
CASSIO. What's the matter?
IAGO. My lord is fall'n into an epilepsy.
This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.
CASSIO. Rub him about the temples.
IAGO. No, forbear;
The lethargy must have his quiet course.
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look, he stirs.
Do you withdraw yourself a little while,
He will recover straight. When he is gone,
I would on great occasion speak with you. Exit
Cassio.
How is it, general? Have you not hurt your head?
OTHELLO. Dost thou mock me?
IAGO. I mock you? No, by heaven.
Would you would bear your fortune like a man!
OTHELLO. A horned man's a monster and a beast.
IAGO. There's many a beast then in a populous city,
And many a civil monster.
OTHELLO. Did he confess it?
IAGO. Good sir, be a man;
Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked
May draw with you. There's millions now alive
That nightly lie in those unproper beds
Which they dare swear peculiar. Your case is better.
O, 'tis the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock,
To lip a wanton in a secure couch,
And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know,
And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.
OTHELLO. O, thou art wise; 'tis certain.
IAGO. Stand you awhile
apart,
Confine yourself but in a patient list.
Whilst you were here o'erwhelmed with your grief--
A passion most unsuiting such a man--
Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,
And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy;
Bade him anon return and here speak with me
The which he promised. Do but encave yourself
And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns,
That dwell in every region of his face;
For I will make him tell the tale anew,
Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when
He hath and is again to cope your wife.
I say, but mark his gesture. Marry, patience,
Or I shall say you are all in all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
OTHELLO. Dost thou hear, Iago?
I will be found most cunning in my patience;
But (dost thou hear?) most bloody.
IAGO. That's not amiss;
But yet keep time in all. Will you withdraw?
Othello
retires.
Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,
A housewife that by selling her desires
Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature
That dotes on Cassio, as 'tis the strumpet's plague
To beguile many and be beguiled by one.
He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain
From the excess of laughter. Here he comes.
Re-enter Cassio.
As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behavior
Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?
CASSIO. The worser that you give me the addition
Whose want even kills me.
IAGO. Ply Desdemona well, and you are sure on't.
Now, if this suit lay in Bianca's power,
How quickly should you speed!
CASSIO. Alas, poor caitiff!
OTHELLO. Look, how he laughs already!
IAGO. I never knew a woman love man so.
CASSIO. Alas, poor rogue! I think, i'faith, she loves me.
OTHELLO. Now he denies it faintly and laughs it out.
IAGO. Do you hear, Cassio?
OTHELLO. Now he importunes him
To tell it o'er. Go to; well said, well said.
IAGO. She gives it out that you shall marry her.
Do you intend it?
CASSIO. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?
CASSIO. I marry her! What? A customer! I prithee, bear some
charity
to my wit; do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. So, so, so, so. They laugh that win.
IAGO. Faith, the cry goes that you shall marry her.
CASSIO. Prithee, say true.
IAGO. I am a very villain else.
OTHELLO. Have you scored me? Well.
CASSIO. This is the monkey's own giving out. She is persuaded I
will marry her, out of her own love and flattery, not out of
my
promise.
OTHELLO. Iago beckons me; now he begins the story.
CASSIO. She was here even now; she haunts me in every place. I
was
the other day talking on the sea bank with certain Venetians,
and
thither comes the bauble, and, by this hand, she falls me
thus
about my neck--
OTHELLO. Crying, "O dear Cassio!" as it were; his gesture
imports
it.
CASSIO. So hangs and lolls and weeps upon me; so hales and
pulls
me. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I
see
that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.
CASSIO. Well, I must leave her company.
IAGO. Before me! look where she comes.
CASSIO. 'Tis such another fitchew! marry, a perfumed one.
Enter Bianca.
What do you mean by this haunting of me?
BIANCA. Let the devil and his dam haunt you! What did you mean
by
that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine
fool to
take it. I must take out the work? A likely piece of work
that
you should find it in your chamber and not know who left it
there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the
work?
There, give it your hobbyhorse. Wheresoever you had it, I'll
take
out no work on't.
CASSIO. How now, my sweet Bianca! how now! how now!
OTHELLO. By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!
BIANCA. An you'll come to supper tonight, you may; an you will
not,
come when you are next prepared for.
Exit.
IAGO. After her, after her.
CASSIO. Faith, I must; she'll rail i' the street else.
IAGO. Will you sup there?
CASSIO. Faith, I intend so.
IAGO. Well, I may chance to see you, for I would very fain
speak
with you.
CASSIO. Prithee, come; will you?
IAGO. Go to; say no more. Exit
Cassio.
OTHELLO. [Advancing.] How shall I murther him, Iago?
IAGO. Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice?
OTHELLO. O Iago!
IAGO. And did you see the handkerchief?
OTHELLO. Was that mine?
IAGO. Yours, by this hand. And to see how he prizes the foolish
woman your wife! She gave it him, and he hath given it his
whore.
OTHELLO. I would have him nine years akilling. A fine woman! a
fair
woman! a sweet woman!
IAGO. Nay, you must forget that.
OTHELLO. Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damned tonight,
for
she shall not live. No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike
it,
and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter
creature.
She might lie by an emperor's side, and command him tasks.
IAGO. Nay, that's not your way.
OTHELLO. Hang her! I do but say what she is. So delicate with
her
needle, an admirable musician. O, she will sing the
savageness
out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention--
IAGO. She's the worse for all this.
OTHELLO. O, a thousand, a thousand times. And then, of so
gentle a
condition!
IAGO. Ay, too gentle.
OTHELLO. Nay, that's certain. But yet the pity of it, Iago!
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
IAGO. If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to
offend, for, if it touch not you, it comes near nobody.
OTHELLO. I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!
IAGO. O, 'tis foul in her.
OTHELLO. With mine officer!
IAGO. That's fouler.
OTHELLO. Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I'll not
expostulate
with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again.
This
night, Iago.
IAGO. Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the
bed
she hath contaminated.
OTHELLO. Good, good, the justice of it pleases, very good.
IAGO. And for Cassio, let me be his undertaker. You shall hear
more
by midnight.
OTHELLO. Excellent good. [A trumpet within.] What trumpet is
that
same?
IAGO. Something from Venice, sure. 'Tis Lodovico
Come from the Duke. And, see your wife is with him.
Enter Lodovico, Desdemona, and Attendants.
LODOVICO. God save the worthy general!
OTHELLO. With all my heart, sir.
LODOVICO. The Duke and Senators of Venice greet you.
Gives him a
letter.
OTHELLO. I kiss the instrument of their pleasures.
Opens the letter, and
reads.
DESDEMONA. And what's the news, good cousin Lodovico?
IAGO. I am very glad to see you, signior;
Welcome to Cyprus.
LODOVICO. I thank you. How does Lieutenant Cassio?
IAGO. Lives, sir.
DESDEMONA. Cousin, there's fall'n between him and my lord
An unkind breach; but you shall make all well.
OTHELLO. Are you sure of that?
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. [Reads.] "This fail you not to do, as you will--"
LODOVICO. He did not call; he's busy in the paper.
Is there division 'twixt my lord and Cassio?
DESDEMONA. A most unhappy one. I would do much
To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio.
OTHELLO. Fire and brimstone!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. Are you wise?
DESDEMONA. What, is he angry?
LODOVICO. May be the letter moved him;
For, as I think, they do command him home,
Deputing Cassio in his government.
DESDEMONA. By my troth, I am glad on't.
OTHELLO. Indeed!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. I am glad to see you mad.
DESDEMONA. Why, sweet Othello?
OTHELLO. Devil! Strikes
her.
DESDEMONA. I have not deserved this.
LODOVICO. My lord, this would not be believed in Venice,
Though I should swear I saw't. 'Tis very much.
Make her amends; she weeps.
OTHELLO. O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.
Out of my sight!
DESDEMONA. [Going.] I will not stay to offend you.
LODOVICO. Truly, an obedient lady.
I do beseech your lordship, call her back.
OTHELLO. Mistress!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. What would you with her, sir?
LODOVICO. Who, I, my lord?
OTHELLO. Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn.
Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. Proceed you in your tears.
Concerning this, sir--O well-painted passion!--
I am commanded home. Get you away;
I'll send for you anon. Sir, I obey the mandate,
And will return to Venice. Hence, avaunt!
Exit
Desdemona.
Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, tonight,
I do entreat that we may sup together.
You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!
Exit.
LODOVICO. Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? This the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
IAGO. He is much changed.
LODOVICO. Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?
IAGO. He's that he is. I may not breathe my censure
What he might be: if what he might he is not,
I would to heaven he were!
LODOVICO. What, strike his wife!
IAGO. Faith, that was not so well; yet would I knew
That stroke would prove the worst!
LODOVICO. Is it his use?
Or did the letters work upon his blood,
And new create this fault?
IAGO. Alas, alas!
It is not honesty in me to speak
What I have seen and known. You shall observe him,
And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech. Do but go after,
And mark how he continues.
LODOVICO. I am sorry that I am deceived in him.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT IV. SCENE I.
Cyprus. Before the castle.
Enter Othello and Iago.
IAGO. Will you think so?
OTHELLO. Think so, Iago?
IAGO. What,
To kiss in private?
OTHELLO. An unauthorized kiss.
IAGO. Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?
OTHELLO. Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm!
It is hypocrisy against the devil.
They that mean virtuously and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.
IAGO. So they do nothing, 'tis a venial slip.
But if I give my wife a handkerchief--
OTHELLO. What then?
IAGO. Why, then, 'tis hers, my lord, and being hers,
She may, I think, bestow't on any man.
OTHELLO. She is protectress of her honor too.
May she give that?
IAGO. Her honor is an essence that's not seen;
They have it very oft that have it not.
But for the handkerchief--
OTHELLO. By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it.
Thou said'st--O, it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all--he had my handkerchief.
IAGO. Ay, what of that?
OTHELLO. That's not so good now.
IAGO. What,
If I had said I had seen him do you wrong?
Or heard him say--as knaves be such abroad,
Who having, by their own importunate suit,
Or voluntary dotage of some mistress,
Convinced or supplied them, cannot choose
But they must blab--
OTHELLO. Hath he said anything?
IAGO. He hath, my lord; but be you well assured,
No more than he'll unswear.
OTHELLO. What hath he said?
IAGO. Faith, that he did--I know not what he did.
OTHELLO. What? what?
IAGO. Lie--
OTHELLO. With her?
IAGO. With her, on her, what you will.
OTHELLO. Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they
belie her. Lie with her! 'Zounds, that's fulsome!
Handkerchief--
confessions--handkerchief! To confess and be hanged for his
labor--
first, to be hanged, and then to confess. I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion
without
some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish!
Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible? Confess? Handkerchief?
O
devil!
Falls in a
trance.
IAGO. Work on,
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach. What, ho! My lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!
Enter Cassio.
How now, Cassio!
CASSIO. What's the matter?
IAGO. My lord is fall'n into an epilepsy.
This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.
CASSIO. Rub him about the temples.
IAGO. No, forbear;
The lethargy must have his quiet course.
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look, he stirs.
Do you withdraw yourself a little while,
He will recover straight. When he is gone,
I would on great occasion speak with you. Exit
Cassio.
How is it, general? Have you not hurt your head?
OTHELLO. Dost thou mock me?
IAGO. I mock you? No, by heaven.
Would you would bear your fortune like a man!
OTHELLO. A horned man's a monster and a beast.
IAGO. There's many a beast then in a populous city,
And many a civil monster.
OTHELLO. Did he confess it?
IAGO. Good sir, be a man;
Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked
May draw with you. There's millions now alive
That nightly lie in those unproper beds
Which they dare swear peculiar. Your case is better.
O, 'tis the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock,
To lip a wanton in a secure couch,
And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know,
And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.
OTHELLO. O, thou art wise; 'tis certain.
IAGO. Stand you awhile
apart,
Confine yourself but in a patient list.
Whilst you were here o'erwhelmed with your grief--
A passion most unsuiting such a man--
Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,
And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy;
Bade him anon return and here speak with me
The which he promised. Do but encave yourself
And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns,
That dwell in every region of his face;
For I will make him tell the tale anew,
Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when
He hath and is again to cope your wife.
I say, but mark his gesture. Marry, patience,
Or I shall say you are all in all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
OTHELLO. Dost thou hear, Iago?
I will be found most cunning in my patience;
But (dost thou hear?) most bloody.
IAGO. That's not amiss;
But yet keep time in all. Will you withdraw?
Othello
retires.
Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,
A housewife that by selling her desires
Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature
That dotes on Cassio, as 'tis the strumpet's plague
To beguile many and be beguiled by one.
He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain
From the excess of laughter. Here he comes.
Re-enter Cassio.
As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behavior
Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?
CASSIO. The worser that you give me the addition
Whose want even kills me.
IAGO. Ply Desdemona well, and you are sure on't.
Now, if this suit lay in Bianca's power,
How quickly should you speed!
CASSIO. Alas, poor caitiff!
OTHELLO. Look, how he laughs already!
IAGO. I never knew a woman love man so.
CASSIO. Alas, poor rogue! I think, i'faith, she loves me.
OTHELLO. Now he denies it faintly and laughs it out.
IAGO. Do you hear, Cassio?
OTHELLO. Now he importunes him
To tell it o'er. Go to; well said, well said.
IAGO. She gives it out that you shall marry her.
Do you intend it?
CASSIO. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?
CASSIO. I marry her! What? A customer! I prithee, bear some
charity
to my wit; do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. So, so, so, so. They laugh that win.
IAGO. Faith, the cry goes that you shall marry her.
CASSIO. Prithee, say true.
IAGO. I am a very villain else.
OTHELLO. Have you scored me? Well.
CASSIO. This is the monkey's own giving out. She is persuaded I
will marry her, out of her own love and flattery, not out of
my
promise.
OTHELLO. Iago beckons me; now he begins the story.
CASSIO. She was here even now; she haunts me in every place. I
was
the other day talking on the sea bank with certain Venetians,
and
thither comes the bauble, and, by this hand, she falls me
thus
about my neck--
OTHELLO. Crying, "O dear Cassio!" as it were; his gesture
imports
it.
CASSIO. So hangs and lolls and weeps upon me; so hales and
pulls
me. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I
see
that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.
CASSIO. Well, I must leave her company.
IAGO. Before me! look where she comes.
CASSIO. 'Tis such another fitchew! marry, a perfumed one.
Enter Bianca.
What do you mean by this haunting of me?
BIANCA. Let the devil and his dam haunt you! What did you mean
by
that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine
fool to
take it. I must take out the work? A likely piece of work
that
you should find it in your chamber and not know who left it
there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the
work?
There, give it your hobbyhorse. Wheresoever you had it, I'll
take
out no work on't.
CASSIO. How now, my sweet Bianca! how now! how now!
OTHELLO. By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!
BIANCA. An you'll come to supper tonight, you may; an you will
not,
come when you are next prepared for.
Exit.
IAGO. After her, after her.
CASSIO. Faith, I must; she'll rail i' the street else.
IAGO. Will you sup there?
CASSIO. Faith, I intend so.
IAGO. Well, I may chance to see you, for I would very fain
speak
with you.
CASSIO. Prithee, come; will you?
IAGO. Go to; say no more. Exit
Cassio.
OTHELLO. [Advancing.] How shall I murther him, Iago?
IAGO. Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice?
OTHELLO. O Iago!
IAGO. And did you see the handkerchief?
OTHELLO. Was that mine?
IAGO. Yours, by this hand. And to see how he prizes the foolish
woman your wife! She gave it him, and he hath given it his
whore.
OTHELLO. I would have him nine years akilling. A fine woman! a
fair
woman! a sweet woman!
IAGO. Nay, you must forget that.
OTHELLO. Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damned tonight,
for
she shall not live. No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike
it,
and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter
creature.
She might lie by an emperor's side, and command him tasks.
IAGO. Nay, that's not your way.
OTHELLO. Hang her! I do but say what she is. So delicate with
her
needle, an admirable musician. O, she will sing the
savageness
out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention--
IAGO. She's the worse for all this.
OTHELLO. O, a thousand, a thousand times. And then, of so
gentle a
condition!
IAGO. Ay, too gentle.
OTHELLO. Nay, that's certain. But yet the pity of it, Iago!
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
IAGO. If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to
offend, for, if it touch not you, it comes near nobody.
OTHELLO. I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!
IAGO. O, 'tis foul in her.
OTHELLO. With mine officer!
IAGO. That's fouler.
OTHELLO. Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I'll not
expostulate
with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again.
This
night, Iago.
IAGO. Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the
bed
she hath contaminated.
OTHELLO. Good, good, the justice of it pleases, very good.
IAGO. And for Cassio, let me be his undertaker. You shall hear
more
by midnight.
OTHELLO. Excellent good. [A trumpet within.] What trumpet is
that
same?
IAGO. Something from Venice, sure. 'Tis Lodovico
Come from the Duke. And, see your wife is with him.
Enter Lodovico, Desdemona, and Attendants.
LODOVICO. God save the worthy general!
OTHELLO. With all my heart, sir.
LODOVICO. The Duke and Senators of Venice greet you.
Gives him a
letter.
OTHELLO. I kiss the instrument of their pleasures.
Opens the letter, and
reads.
DESDEMONA. And what's the news, good cousin Lodovico?
IAGO. I am very glad to see you, signior;
Welcome to Cyprus.
LODOVICO. I thank you. How does Lieutenant Cassio?
IAGO. Lives, sir.
DESDEMONA. Cousin, there's fall'n between him and my lord
An unkind breach; but you shall make all well.
OTHELLO. Are you sure of that?
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. [Reads.] "This fail you not to do, as you will--"
LODOVICO. He did not call; he's busy in the paper.
Is there division 'twixt my lord and Cassio?
DESDEMONA. A most unhappy one. I would do much
To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio.
OTHELLO. Fire and brimstone!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. Are you wise?
DESDEMONA. What, is he angry?
LODOVICO. May be the letter moved him;
For, as I think, they do command him home,
Deputing Cassio in his government.
DESDEMONA. By my troth, I am glad on't.
OTHELLO. Indeed!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. I am glad to see you mad.
DESDEMONA. Why, sweet Othello?
OTHELLO. Devil! Strikes
her.
DESDEMONA. I have not deserved this.
LODOVICO. My lord, this would not be believed in Venice,
Though I should swear I saw't. 'Tis very much.
Make her amends; she weeps.
OTHELLO. O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.
Out of my sight!
DESDEMONA. [Going.] I will not stay to offend you.
LODOVICO. Truly, an obedient lady.
I do beseech your lordship, call her back.
OTHELLO. Mistress!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. What would you with her, sir?
LODOVICO. Who, I, my lord?
OTHELLO. Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn.
Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. Proceed you in your tears.
Concerning this, sir--O well-painted passion!--
I am commanded home. Get you away;
I'll send for you anon. Sir, I obey the mandate,
And will return to Venice. Hence, avaunt!
Exit
Desdemona.
Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, tonight,
I do entreat that we may sup together.
You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!
Exit.
LODOVICO. Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? This the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
IAGO. He is much changed.
LODOVICO. Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?
IAGO. He's that he is. I may not breathe my censure
What he might be: if what he might he is not,
I would to heaven he were!
LODOVICO. What, strike his wife!
IAGO. Faith, that was not so well; yet would I knew
That stroke would prove the worst!
LODOVICO. Is it his use?
Or did the letters work upon his blood,
And new create this fault?
IAGO. Alas, alas!
It is not honesty in me to speak
What I have seen and known. You shall observe him,
And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech. Do but go after,
And mark how he continues.
LODOVICO. I am sorry that I am deceived in him.
Exeunt.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 1, utilizing the provided context. | scene 1|act 4 scene 1 | At the beginning of the scene, Othello is hovering uneasily between Iagos wicked version of events and his knowledge of Desdemonas pure nature. When Iago tells him that Cassio has confessed to him of his affair with Desdemona, Othellos defenses crumble, and he collapses on the ground unconscious and paralyzed. Cassio arrives on the scene, and Iago explains to him that Othello is epileptic, now having a fit. He must not be disturbed, for he will soon come to his senses. He asks Cassio to return shortly, for he has something important to tell him. Iago proceeds very cautiously. As soon as Othello revives, Iago tells him to hide behind the curtains and, from there, listen to his conversation with Cassio. He tells Othello that Cassio will probably speak most insultingly of Desdemona, providing further proof of her unfaithfulness. When Cassio returns, Iago talks to him about Bianca in a joking and bawdy way. Othello overhears only a part of the conversation and misunderstands everything. He thinks Cassio is talking insultingly about his wife. As fate would have it, Bianca arrives at this time and throws the handkerchief at Cassio, angrily claiming it must be a token of love from some beloved of his. Cassio follow her out, trying to appease her. Othello is mad with rage at what he hears and sees. He wants Cassio and Desdemona killed immediately. Iago promises to help him. He will undertake to murder Cassio that very night; Othello must strangle Desdemona in the very bed that she has defiled. Othello agrees. Lodovico and Gratiano, messengers from Venice, arrive, accompanied by Desdemona. Lodovico hands Othello a letter from the Duke with orders for the recall of Othello to Venice and the appointment of Cassio as the Governor in his place. Desdemona expresses her joy at the promotion of Cassio. The jealous Othello misunderstands her emotions and, throwing aside all dignity and self-control, he strikes her in the presence of others and torments her until she weeps and leaves. He then leaves in great anger. Lodovico and others are amazed at his brutality. The two messengers feel that the confidence they had reposed in Othello is misplaced. He is not worthy of the high post to which he has been appointed. |
----------SCENE 1---------
ACT IV. SCENE I.
Cyprus. Before the castle.
Enter Othello and Iago.
IAGO. Will you think so?
OTHELLO. Think so, Iago?
IAGO. What,
To kiss in private?
OTHELLO. An unauthorized kiss.
IAGO. Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?
OTHELLO. Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm!
It is hypocrisy against the devil.
They that mean virtuously and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.
IAGO. So they do nothing, 'tis a venial slip.
But if I give my wife a handkerchief--
OTHELLO. What then?
IAGO. Why, then, 'tis hers, my lord, and being hers,
She may, I think, bestow't on any man.
OTHELLO. She is protectress of her honor too.
May she give that?
IAGO. Her honor is an essence that's not seen;
They have it very oft that have it not.
But for the handkerchief--
OTHELLO. By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it.
Thou said'st--O, it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all--he had my handkerchief.
IAGO. Ay, what of that?
OTHELLO. That's not so good now.
IAGO. What,
If I had said I had seen him do you wrong?
Or heard him say--as knaves be such abroad,
Who having, by their own importunate suit,
Or voluntary dotage of some mistress,
Convinced or supplied them, cannot choose
But they must blab--
OTHELLO. Hath he said anything?
IAGO. He hath, my lord; but be you well assured,
No more than he'll unswear.
OTHELLO. What hath he said?
IAGO. Faith, that he did--I know not what he did.
OTHELLO. What? what?
IAGO. Lie--
OTHELLO. With her?
IAGO. With her, on her, what you will.
OTHELLO. Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they
belie her. Lie with her! 'Zounds, that's fulsome!
Handkerchief--
confessions--handkerchief! To confess and be hanged for his
labor--
first, to be hanged, and then to confess. I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion
without
some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish!
Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible? Confess? Handkerchief?
O
devil!
Falls in a
trance.
IAGO. Work on,
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach. What, ho! My lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!
Enter Cassio.
How now, Cassio!
CASSIO. What's the matter?
IAGO. My lord is fall'n into an epilepsy.
This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.
CASSIO. Rub him about the temples.
IAGO. No, forbear;
The lethargy must have his quiet course.
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look, he stirs.
Do you withdraw yourself a little while,
He will recover straight. When he is gone,
I would on great occasion speak with you. Exit
Cassio.
How is it, general? Have you not hurt your head?
OTHELLO. Dost thou mock me?
IAGO. I mock you? No, by heaven.
Would you would bear your fortune like a man!
OTHELLO. A horned man's a monster and a beast.
IAGO. There's many a beast then in a populous city,
And many a civil monster.
OTHELLO. Did he confess it?
IAGO. Good sir, be a man;
Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked
May draw with you. There's millions now alive
That nightly lie in those unproper beds
Which they dare swear peculiar. Your case is better.
O, 'tis the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock,
To lip a wanton in a secure couch,
And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know,
And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.
OTHELLO. O, thou art wise; 'tis certain.
IAGO. Stand you awhile
apart,
Confine yourself but in a patient list.
Whilst you were here o'erwhelmed with your grief--
A passion most unsuiting such a man--
Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,
And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy;
Bade him anon return and here speak with me
The which he promised. Do but encave yourself
And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns,
That dwell in every region of his face;
For I will make him tell the tale anew,
Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when
He hath and is again to cope your wife.
I say, but mark his gesture. Marry, patience,
Or I shall say you are all in all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
OTHELLO. Dost thou hear, Iago?
I will be found most cunning in my patience;
But (dost thou hear?) most bloody.
IAGO. That's not amiss;
But yet keep time in all. Will you withdraw?
Othello
retires.
Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,
A housewife that by selling her desires
Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature
That dotes on Cassio, as 'tis the strumpet's plague
To beguile many and be beguiled by one.
He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain
From the excess of laughter. Here he comes.
Re-enter Cassio.
As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behavior
Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?
CASSIO. The worser that you give me the addition
Whose want even kills me.
IAGO. Ply Desdemona well, and you are sure on't.
Now, if this suit lay in Bianca's power,
How quickly should you speed!
CASSIO. Alas, poor caitiff!
OTHELLO. Look, how he laughs already!
IAGO. I never knew a woman love man so.
CASSIO. Alas, poor rogue! I think, i'faith, she loves me.
OTHELLO. Now he denies it faintly and laughs it out.
IAGO. Do you hear, Cassio?
OTHELLO. Now he importunes him
To tell it o'er. Go to; well said, well said.
IAGO. She gives it out that you shall marry her.
Do you intend it?
CASSIO. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?
CASSIO. I marry her! What? A customer! I prithee, bear some
charity
to my wit; do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. So, so, so, so. They laugh that win.
IAGO. Faith, the cry goes that you shall marry her.
CASSIO. Prithee, say true.
IAGO. I am a very villain else.
OTHELLO. Have you scored me? Well.
CASSIO. This is the monkey's own giving out. She is persuaded I
will marry her, out of her own love and flattery, not out of
my
promise.
OTHELLO. Iago beckons me; now he begins the story.
CASSIO. She was here even now; she haunts me in every place. I
was
the other day talking on the sea bank with certain Venetians,
and
thither comes the bauble, and, by this hand, she falls me
thus
about my neck--
OTHELLO. Crying, "O dear Cassio!" as it were; his gesture
imports
it.
CASSIO. So hangs and lolls and weeps upon me; so hales and
pulls
me. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I
see
that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.
CASSIO. Well, I must leave her company.
IAGO. Before me! look where she comes.
CASSIO. 'Tis such another fitchew! marry, a perfumed one.
Enter Bianca.
What do you mean by this haunting of me?
BIANCA. Let the devil and his dam haunt you! What did you mean
by
that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine
fool to
take it. I must take out the work? A likely piece of work
that
you should find it in your chamber and not know who left it
there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the
work?
There, give it your hobbyhorse. Wheresoever you had it, I'll
take
out no work on't.
CASSIO. How now, my sweet Bianca! how now! how now!
OTHELLO. By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!
BIANCA. An you'll come to supper tonight, you may; an you will
not,
come when you are next prepared for.
Exit.
IAGO. After her, after her.
CASSIO. Faith, I must; she'll rail i' the street else.
IAGO. Will you sup there?
CASSIO. Faith, I intend so.
IAGO. Well, I may chance to see you, for I would very fain
speak
with you.
CASSIO. Prithee, come; will you?
IAGO. Go to; say no more. Exit
Cassio.
OTHELLO. [Advancing.] How shall I murther him, Iago?
IAGO. Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice?
OTHELLO. O Iago!
IAGO. And did you see the handkerchief?
OTHELLO. Was that mine?
IAGO. Yours, by this hand. And to see how he prizes the foolish
woman your wife! She gave it him, and he hath given it his
whore.
OTHELLO. I would have him nine years akilling. A fine woman! a
fair
woman! a sweet woman!
IAGO. Nay, you must forget that.
OTHELLO. Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damned tonight,
for
she shall not live. No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike
it,
and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter
creature.
She might lie by an emperor's side, and command him tasks.
IAGO. Nay, that's not your way.
OTHELLO. Hang her! I do but say what she is. So delicate with
her
needle, an admirable musician. O, she will sing the
savageness
out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention--
IAGO. She's the worse for all this.
OTHELLO. O, a thousand, a thousand times. And then, of so
gentle a
condition!
IAGO. Ay, too gentle.
OTHELLO. Nay, that's certain. But yet the pity of it, Iago!
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
IAGO. If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to
offend, for, if it touch not you, it comes near nobody.
OTHELLO. I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!
IAGO. O, 'tis foul in her.
OTHELLO. With mine officer!
IAGO. That's fouler.
OTHELLO. Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I'll not
expostulate
with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again.
This
night, Iago.
IAGO. Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the
bed
she hath contaminated.
OTHELLO. Good, good, the justice of it pleases, very good.
IAGO. And for Cassio, let me be his undertaker. You shall hear
more
by midnight.
OTHELLO. Excellent good. [A trumpet within.] What trumpet is
that
same?
IAGO. Something from Venice, sure. 'Tis Lodovico
Come from the Duke. And, see your wife is with him.
Enter Lodovico, Desdemona, and Attendants.
LODOVICO. God save the worthy general!
OTHELLO. With all my heart, sir.
LODOVICO. The Duke and Senators of Venice greet you.
Gives him a
letter.
OTHELLO. I kiss the instrument of their pleasures.
Opens the letter, and
reads.
DESDEMONA. And what's the news, good cousin Lodovico?
IAGO. I am very glad to see you, signior;
Welcome to Cyprus.
LODOVICO. I thank you. How does Lieutenant Cassio?
IAGO. Lives, sir.
DESDEMONA. Cousin, there's fall'n between him and my lord
An unkind breach; but you shall make all well.
OTHELLO. Are you sure of that?
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. [Reads.] "This fail you not to do, as you will--"
LODOVICO. He did not call; he's busy in the paper.
Is there division 'twixt my lord and Cassio?
DESDEMONA. A most unhappy one. I would do much
To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio.
OTHELLO. Fire and brimstone!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. Are you wise?
DESDEMONA. What, is he angry?
LODOVICO. May be the letter moved him;
For, as I think, they do command him home,
Deputing Cassio in his government.
DESDEMONA. By my troth, I am glad on't.
OTHELLO. Indeed!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. I am glad to see you mad.
DESDEMONA. Why, sweet Othello?
OTHELLO. Devil! Strikes
her.
DESDEMONA. I have not deserved this.
LODOVICO. My lord, this would not be believed in Venice,
Though I should swear I saw't. 'Tis very much.
Make her amends; she weeps.
OTHELLO. O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.
Out of my sight!
DESDEMONA. [Going.] I will not stay to offend you.
LODOVICO. Truly, an obedient lady.
I do beseech your lordship, call her back.
OTHELLO. Mistress!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. What would you with her, sir?
LODOVICO. Who, I, my lord?
OTHELLO. Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn.
Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. Proceed you in your tears.
Concerning this, sir--O well-painted passion!--
I am commanded home. Get you away;
I'll send for you anon. Sir, I obey the mandate,
And will return to Venice. Hence, avaunt!
Exit
Desdemona.
Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, tonight,
I do entreat that we may sup together.
You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!
Exit.
LODOVICO. Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? This the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
IAGO. He is much changed.
LODOVICO. Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?
IAGO. He's that he is. I may not breathe my censure
What he might be: if what he might he is not,
I would to heaven he were!
LODOVICO. What, strike his wife!
IAGO. Faith, that was not so well; yet would I knew
That stroke would prove the worst!
LODOVICO. Is it his use?
Or did the letters work upon his blood,
And new create this fault?
IAGO. Alas, alas!
It is not honesty in me to speak
What I have seen and known. You shall observe him,
And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech. Do but go after,
And mark how he continues.
LODOVICO. I am sorry that I am deceived in him.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 4 SCENE 1---------
ACT IV. SCENE I.
Cyprus. Before the castle.
Enter Othello and Iago.
IAGO. Will you think so?
OTHELLO. Think so, Iago?
IAGO. What,
To kiss in private?
OTHELLO. An unauthorized kiss.
IAGO. Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?
OTHELLO. Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm!
It is hypocrisy against the devil.
They that mean virtuously and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts and they tempt heaven.
IAGO. So they do nothing, 'tis a venial slip.
But if I give my wife a handkerchief--
OTHELLO. What then?
IAGO. Why, then, 'tis hers, my lord, and being hers,
She may, I think, bestow't on any man.
OTHELLO. She is protectress of her honor too.
May she give that?
IAGO. Her honor is an essence that's not seen;
They have it very oft that have it not.
But for the handkerchief--
OTHELLO. By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it.
Thou said'st--O, it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all--he had my handkerchief.
IAGO. Ay, what of that?
OTHELLO. That's not so good now.
IAGO. What,
If I had said I had seen him do you wrong?
Or heard him say--as knaves be such abroad,
Who having, by their own importunate suit,
Or voluntary dotage of some mistress,
Convinced or supplied them, cannot choose
But they must blab--
OTHELLO. Hath he said anything?
IAGO. He hath, my lord; but be you well assured,
No more than he'll unswear.
OTHELLO. What hath he said?
IAGO. Faith, that he did--I know not what he did.
OTHELLO. What? what?
IAGO. Lie--
OTHELLO. With her?
IAGO. With her, on her, what you will.
OTHELLO. Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they
belie her. Lie with her! 'Zounds, that's fulsome!
Handkerchief--
confessions--handkerchief! To confess and be hanged for his
labor--
first, to be hanged, and then to confess. I tremble at it.
Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion
without
some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish!
Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible? Confess? Handkerchief?
O
devil!
Falls in a
trance.
IAGO. Work on,
My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught,
And many worthy and chaste dames even thus,
All guiltless, meet reproach. What, ho! My lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!
Enter Cassio.
How now, Cassio!
CASSIO. What's the matter?
IAGO. My lord is fall'n into an epilepsy.
This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.
CASSIO. Rub him about the temples.
IAGO. No, forbear;
The lethargy must have his quiet course.
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look, he stirs.
Do you withdraw yourself a little while,
He will recover straight. When he is gone,
I would on great occasion speak with you. Exit
Cassio.
How is it, general? Have you not hurt your head?
OTHELLO. Dost thou mock me?
IAGO. I mock you? No, by heaven.
Would you would bear your fortune like a man!
OTHELLO. A horned man's a monster and a beast.
IAGO. There's many a beast then in a populous city,
And many a civil monster.
OTHELLO. Did he confess it?
IAGO. Good sir, be a man;
Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked
May draw with you. There's millions now alive
That nightly lie in those unproper beds
Which they dare swear peculiar. Your case is better.
O, 'tis the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock,
To lip a wanton in a secure couch,
And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know,
And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.
OTHELLO. O, thou art wise; 'tis certain.
IAGO. Stand you awhile
apart,
Confine yourself but in a patient list.
Whilst you were here o'erwhelmed with your grief--
A passion most unsuiting such a man--
Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,
And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy;
Bade him anon return and here speak with me
The which he promised. Do but encave yourself
And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns,
That dwell in every region of his face;
For I will make him tell the tale anew,
Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when
He hath and is again to cope your wife.
I say, but mark his gesture. Marry, patience,
Or I shall say you are all in all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
OTHELLO. Dost thou hear, Iago?
I will be found most cunning in my patience;
But (dost thou hear?) most bloody.
IAGO. That's not amiss;
But yet keep time in all. Will you withdraw?
Othello
retires.
Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,
A housewife that by selling her desires
Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature
That dotes on Cassio, as 'tis the strumpet's plague
To beguile many and be beguiled by one.
He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain
From the excess of laughter. Here he comes.
Re-enter Cassio.
As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behavior
Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?
CASSIO. The worser that you give me the addition
Whose want even kills me.
IAGO. Ply Desdemona well, and you are sure on't.
Now, if this suit lay in Bianca's power,
How quickly should you speed!
CASSIO. Alas, poor caitiff!
OTHELLO. Look, how he laughs already!
IAGO. I never knew a woman love man so.
CASSIO. Alas, poor rogue! I think, i'faith, she loves me.
OTHELLO. Now he denies it faintly and laughs it out.
IAGO. Do you hear, Cassio?
OTHELLO. Now he importunes him
To tell it o'er. Go to; well said, well said.
IAGO. She gives it out that you shall marry her.
Do you intend it?
CASSIO. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?
CASSIO. I marry her! What? A customer! I prithee, bear some
charity
to my wit; do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. So, so, so, so. They laugh that win.
IAGO. Faith, the cry goes that you shall marry her.
CASSIO. Prithee, say true.
IAGO. I am a very villain else.
OTHELLO. Have you scored me? Well.
CASSIO. This is the monkey's own giving out. She is persuaded I
will marry her, out of her own love and flattery, not out of
my
promise.
OTHELLO. Iago beckons me; now he begins the story.
CASSIO. She was here even now; she haunts me in every place. I
was
the other day talking on the sea bank with certain Venetians,
and
thither comes the bauble, and, by this hand, she falls me
thus
about my neck--
OTHELLO. Crying, "O dear Cassio!" as it were; his gesture
imports
it.
CASSIO. So hangs and lolls and weeps upon me; so hales and
pulls
me. Ha, ha, ha!
OTHELLO. Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I
see
that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.
CASSIO. Well, I must leave her company.
IAGO. Before me! look where she comes.
CASSIO. 'Tis such another fitchew! marry, a perfumed one.
Enter Bianca.
What do you mean by this haunting of me?
BIANCA. Let the devil and his dam haunt you! What did you mean
by
that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine
fool to
take it. I must take out the work? A likely piece of work
that
you should find it in your chamber and not know who left it
there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the
work?
There, give it your hobbyhorse. Wheresoever you had it, I'll
take
out no work on't.
CASSIO. How now, my sweet Bianca! how now! how now!
OTHELLO. By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!
BIANCA. An you'll come to supper tonight, you may; an you will
not,
come when you are next prepared for.
Exit.
IAGO. After her, after her.
CASSIO. Faith, I must; she'll rail i' the street else.
IAGO. Will you sup there?
CASSIO. Faith, I intend so.
IAGO. Well, I may chance to see you, for I would very fain
speak
with you.
CASSIO. Prithee, come; will you?
IAGO. Go to; say no more. Exit
Cassio.
OTHELLO. [Advancing.] How shall I murther him, Iago?
IAGO. Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice?
OTHELLO. O Iago!
IAGO. And did you see the handkerchief?
OTHELLO. Was that mine?
IAGO. Yours, by this hand. And to see how he prizes the foolish
woman your wife! She gave it him, and he hath given it his
whore.
OTHELLO. I would have him nine years akilling. A fine woman! a
fair
woman! a sweet woman!
IAGO. Nay, you must forget that.
OTHELLO. Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damned tonight,
for
she shall not live. No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike
it,
and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter
creature.
She might lie by an emperor's side, and command him tasks.
IAGO. Nay, that's not your way.
OTHELLO. Hang her! I do but say what she is. So delicate with
her
needle, an admirable musician. O, she will sing the
savageness
out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention--
IAGO. She's the worse for all this.
OTHELLO. O, a thousand, a thousand times. And then, of so
gentle a
condition!
IAGO. Ay, too gentle.
OTHELLO. Nay, that's certain. But yet the pity of it, Iago!
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
IAGO. If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to
offend, for, if it touch not you, it comes near nobody.
OTHELLO. I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!
IAGO. O, 'tis foul in her.
OTHELLO. With mine officer!
IAGO. That's fouler.
OTHELLO. Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I'll not
expostulate
with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again.
This
night, Iago.
IAGO. Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the
bed
she hath contaminated.
OTHELLO. Good, good, the justice of it pleases, very good.
IAGO. And for Cassio, let me be his undertaker. You shall hear
more
by midnight.
OTHELLO. Excellent good. [A trumpet within.] What trumpet is
that
same?
IAGO. Something from Venice, sure. 'Tis Lodovico
Come from the Duke. And, see your wife is with him.
Enter Lodovico, Desdemona, and Attendants.
LODOVICO. God save the worthy general!
OTHELLO. With all my heart, sir.
LODOVICO. The Duke and Senators of Venice greet you.
Gives him a
letter.
OTHELLO. I kiss the instrument of their pleasures.
Opens the letter, and
reads.
DESDEMONA. And what's the news, good cousin Lodovico?
IAGO. I am very glad to see you, signior;
Welcome to Cyprus.
LODOVICO. I thank you. How does Lieutenant Cassio?
IAGO. Lives, sir.
DESDEMONA. Cousin, there's fall'n between him and my lord
An unkind breach; but you shall make all well.
OTHELLO. Are you sure of that?
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. [Reads.] "This fail you not to do, as you will--"
LODOVICO. He did not call; he's busy in the paper.
Is there division 'twixt my lord and Cassio?
DESDEMONA. A most unhappy one. I would do much
To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio.
OTHELLO. Fire and brimstone!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. Are you wise?
DESDEMONA. What, is he angry?
LODOVICO. May be the letter moved him;
For, as I think, they do command him home,
Deputing Cassio in his government.
DESDEMONA. By my troth, I am glad on't.
OTHELLO. Indeed!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. I am glad to see you mad.
DESDEMONA. Why, sweet Othello?
OTHELLO. Devil! Strikes
her.
DESDEMONA. I have not deserved this.
LODOVICO. My lord, this would not be believed in Venice,
Though I should swear I saw't. 'Tis very much.
Make her amends; she weeps.
OTHELLO. O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.
Out of my sight!
DESDEMONA. [Going.] I will not stay to offend you.
LODOVICO. Truly, an obedient lady.
I do beseech your lordship, call her back.
OTHELLO. Mistress!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. What would you with her, sir?
LODOVICO. Who, I, my lord?
OTHELLO. Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn.
Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. Proceed you in your tears.
Concerning this, sir--O well-painted passion!--
I am commanded home. Get you away;
I'll send for you anon. Sir, I obey the mandate,
And will return to Venice. Hence, avaunt!
Exit
Desdemona.
Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, tonight,
I do entreat that we may sup together.
You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!
Exit.
LODOVICO. Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? This the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
IAGO. He is much changed.
LODOVICO. Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?
IAGO. He's that he is. I may not breathe my censure
What he might be: if what he might he is not,
I would to heaven he were!
LODOVICO. What, strike his wife!
IAGO. Faith, that was not so well; yet would I knew
That stroke would prove the worst!
LODOVICO. Is it his use?
Or did the letters work upon his blood,
And new create this fault?
IAGO. Alas, alas!
It is not honesty in me to speak
What I have seen and known. You shall observe him,
And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech. Do but go after,
And mark how he continues.
LODOVICO. I am sorry that I am deceived in him.
Exeunt.
|
Othello.act 4.scene 2 | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of act 4, scene 2, utilizing the provided context. | act 4, scene 2|scene 2 | We open with Othello grilling Emilia, trying to get her to confess that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair. Emilia tells him that he's crazy--she has observed Cassio and Desdemona every minute they were together, and nothing remotely suspicious has happened. She's sure that Desdemona is honest, if ever there were an honest woman. Emilia insists that only some wretch could have put this thought into his head. Othello then sends Emilia to get Desdemona, dismissing her claims as the simple testimony of a simple woman. Othello has convinced himself that Desdemona is cunning in her harlotry, and it's no surprise she wouldn't be found out, even by her woman friend. Apprehensively, Desdemona enters. Othello flies into a passion, falling into tears. He accuses Desdemona of being false , but Desdemona denies it and tries to argue otherwise. She then suggests that Othello's rage might be inspired by the letter he received earlier today calling him back to Venice. Desdemona wonders if perhaps Othello thinks the summons to leave Cyprus were the machinations of her angry father back in Venice. Still, she says if her father had a hand in this, she's not to blame, as she remains staunchly on Othello's side. Still, Othello mourns his mystery loss; he says he could bear any amount of suffering from the world, and proceeds to detail any and all types, including sores, poverty, slavery, and a world of scorn. With any of these, he says, he could have patience--but he cannot bear this abuse of his heart. Desdemona begs him to tell her what she has done wrong, and Othello calls her a whore and a strumpet. Desdemona swears on her soul that she has never touched anybody but him, but he doesn't believe her. Emilia walks in on this little exchange, so Othello takes to abusing her, too. He praises her for being the gatekeeper to Hell, and tells her that she'd do best to keep the events of this night to herself. Othello then exits, and the ladies are left with raised eyebrows. Emilia questions Desdemona worriedly about Othello's behavior, wondering what's happened to her "lord." She then declares that she has no lord, nor does she have tears to cry, and no answer is appropriate about what is going on with Othello except an answer that could be told in tears. Desdemona bids Emilia to lay her wedding sheets on the quarreling lovers' bed tonight, and asks to have Iago come and talk to her. Alone, she resents bearing all this abuse, mostly because she's done nothing wrong. Emilia returns with Iago. Desdemona says she can't even begin to comprehend the things Othello has said to her. She was brought up so gently that she can't make sense of his abuse. Thankfully, Emilia witnessed the whole thing and is happy to dish. She says Othello called Desdemona a whore and all sorts of other cruel names--things worse than a drunk beggar would have said to a prostitute. Iago pretends not to know why Othello would behave this way and begs Desdemona not to weep. Next, Emilia reminds Desdemona that she turned down all sorts of nice, rich Venetian boys, even her father, and her friends, and her country...all to marry Othello. She also suggests that it could only be some really vile person, seeking his own self interest, that plied Othello with lies about Desdemona's faithfulness in order to make him jealous. She prattles on about this for a while, and Iago tells her to speak quietly, but Emilia notes that it was a very similar scheme, lies from a lying liar, that made Iago believe Othello had been with her too. Iago tells Emilia to shut up already. Desdemona begs Iago to tell her what to do, or go talk to Othello on her behalf, to cure him of his wrong-mindedness. She can't believe this is happening to her--as she truly loves Othello. She can't even imagine going behind his back to be with somebody else. Iago tells Desdemona not to worry--Othello is probably just upset about state business. He points out that the messengers from Venice are waiting to eat with the women, which is clearly more important than Othello's inexplicable and murderous rage. Iago promises "things shall be well" , and Desdemona and Emilia leave Iago alone. Roderigo comes in to yell at Iago for not yet setting him up with Desdemona but still spending all of his money. Roderigo's finally starting to wise up to the fact that Iago is just using him for his cash, and in fact never really cared about him. Roderigo, who seems rather broke at the moment, wants to know what happened to all the expensive jewelry he gave Iago to give to Desdemona. Iago kept promising that Desdemona was getting the gifts and wanted to give something up in return, but he has yet to see any special favors of Othello's wife. Roderigo then throws down the gauntlet--he declares that he'll go and see Desdemona himself. If she returns his jewels, he'll repent ever having tried to court a married woman. But if she has no jewels to return, then Roderigo will take it out on Iago. Iago, hearing Roderigo threaten him, declares him a much better man than he'd ever taken him for. Iago insists he's actually been working on the situation and that Roderigo will be all up in Desdemona's jewels come tomorrow night. All Roderigo has to do is listen to Iago's plan. Iago informs Roderigo that Othello's been called back to Venice, and Cassio is to replace him in Cyprus. Iago also casts random lies, claiming Othello is headed to Mauritania with Desdemona. If Roderigo were to get rid of Cassio, then Othello couldn't leave Cyprus. Anyway, Iago quite expertly calms Roderigo down and convinces him that he needs to kill Cassio that very night, probably while Cassio is having dinner with his harlot who, it seems, forgave him for the whole handkerchief thing. Iago promises he'll be right behind him to help with the murdering. Iago declares all of this should go down sometime between midnight and one in the morning. Iago is clear: murdering Cassio is the only way to get to Desdemona. Roderigo, ever a wit, points out that this plan really doesn't make any sense. Somehow Roderigo is appeased when Iago promises he'll explain it all later. |
----------ACT 4, SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello and Emilia.
OTHELLO. You have seen nothing, then?
EMILIA. Nor ever heard, nor ever did suspect.
OTHELLO. Yes, you have seen Cassio and she together.
EMILIA. But then I saw no harm, and then I heard
Each syllable that breath made up between them.
OTHELLO. What, did they never whisper?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. Nor send you out o' the way?
EMILIA. Never.
OTHELLO. To fetch her fan, her gloves, her mask, nor nothing?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's strange.
EMILIA. I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest,
Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other,
Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom.
If any wretch have put this in your head,
Let heaven requite it with the serpent's curse!
For if she be not honest, chaste, and true,
There's no man happy; the purest of their wives
Is foul as slander.
OTHELLO. Bid her come hither; go. Exit
Emilia.
She says enough; yet she's a simple bawd
That cannot say as much. This is a subtle whore,
A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
And yet she'll kneel and pray; I have seen her do't.
Enter Desdemona with Emilia.
DESDEMONA. My lord, what is your will?
OTHELLO. Pray, chuck, come
hither.
DESDEMONA. What is your pleasure?
OTHELLO. Let me see your eyes;
Look in my face.
DESDEMONA. What horrible fancy's this?
OTHELLO. [To Emilia.] Some of your function, mistress,
Leave procreants alone and shut the door;
Cough, or cry "hem," if anybody come.
Your mystery, your mystery; nay, dispatch. Exit
Emilia.
DESDEMONA. Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.
OTHELLO. Why, what art thou?
DESDEMONA. Your wife, my lord, your true and loyal wife.
OTHELLO. Come, swear it, damn thyself;
Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves
Should fear to seize thee. Therefore be double-damn'd;
Swear thou art honest.
DESDEMONA. Heaven doth truly know it.
OTHELLO. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.
DESDEMONA. To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?
OTHELLO. O Desdemona! Away! away! away!
DESDEMONA. Alas the heavy day! Why do you weep?
Am I the motive of these tears, my lord?
If haply you my father do suspect
An instrument of this your calling back,
Lay not your blame on me. If you have lost him,
Why, I have lost him too.
OTHELLO. Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rain'd
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time for scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too, well, very well;
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
DESDEMONA. I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.
OTHELLO. O, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles,
That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been
born!
DESDEMONA. Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?
OTHELLO. Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write "whore" upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner!
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed!
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth,
And will not hear it. What committed?
Impudent strumpet!
DESDEMONA. By heaven, you do me wrong.
OTHELLO. Are not you a strumpet?
DESDEMONA. No, as I am a Christian.
If to preserve this vessel for my lord
From any other foul unlawful touch
Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.
OTHELLO. What, not a whore?
DESDEMONA. No, as I shall be saved.
OTHELLO. Is't possible?
DESDEMONA. O, heaven forgive us!
OTHELLO. I cry you mercy then;
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello. [Raises his voice.] You, mistress,
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,
And keep the gate of hell!
Re-enter Emilia.
You, you, ay, you!
We have done our course; there's money for your pains.
I pray you, turn the key, and keep our counsel.
Exit.
EMILIA. Alas, what does this gentleman conceive?
How do you, madam? How do you, my good lady?
DESDEMONA. Faith, half asleep.
EMILIA. Good madam, what's the matter with my lord?
DESDEMONA. With who?
EMILIA. Why, with my lord, madam.
DESDEMONA. Who is thy lord?
EMILIA. He that is yours, sweet lady.
DESDEMONA. I have none. Do not talk to me, Emilia;
I cannot weep, nor answer have I none
But what should go by water. Prithee, tonight
Lay on my bed my wedding sheets. Remember,
And call thy husband hither.
EMILIA. Here's a change indeed!
Exit.
DESDEMONA. 'Tis meet I should be used so, very meet.
How have I been behaved, that he might stick
The small'st opinion on my least misuse?
Re-enter Emilia with Iago.
IAGO. What is your pleasure, madam? How is't with you?
DESDEMONA. I cannot tell. Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.
He might have chid me so, for in good faith,
I am a child to chiding.
IAGO. What's the matter, lady?
EMILIA. Alas, Iago, my lord hath so bewhored her,
Thrown such despite and heavy terms upon her,
As true hearts cannot bear.
DESDEMONA. Am I that name, Iago?
IAGO. What name, fair lady?
DESDEMONA. Such as she says my lord did say I was.
EMILIA. He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.
IAGO. Why did he so?
DESDEMONA. I do not know; I am sure I am none such.
IAGO. Do not weep, do not weep. Alas the day!
EMILIA. Hath she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be call'd whore? Would it not make one weep?
DESDEMONA. It is my wretched fortune.
IAGO. Beshrew him for't!
How comes this trick upon him?
DESDEMONA. Nay, heaven doth know.
EMILIA. I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
IAGO. Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible.
DESDEMONA. If any such there be, heaven pardon him!
EMILIA. A halter pardon him! And hell gnaw his bones!
Why should he call her whore? Who keeps her company?
What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?
The Moor's abused by some most villainous knave,
Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow.
O heaven, that such companions thou'ldst unfold,
And put in every honest hand a whip
To lash the rascals naked through the world
Even from the east to the west!
IAGO. Speak within door.
EMILIA. O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn'd your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.
IAGO. You are a fool; go to.
DESDEMONA. O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him, for by this light of heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel:
If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love
Either in discourse of thought or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,
Delighted them in any other form,
Or that I do not yet, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. I cannot say "whore."
It doth abhor me now I speak the word;
To do the act that might the addition earn
Not the world's mass of vanity could make me.
IAGO. I pray you, be content; 'tis but his humor:
The business of the state does him offense,
And he does chide with you.
DESDEMONA. If 'twere no other--
IAGO. 'Tis but so, I warrant. Trumpets
within.
Hark, how these instruments summon to supper!
The messengers of Venice stay the meat.
Go in, and weep not; all things shall be well.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Roderigo.
How now, Roderigo!
RODERIGO. I do not find that thou dealest justly with me.
IAGO. What in the contrary?
RODERIGO. Every day thou daffest me with some device, Iago; and
rather, as it seems to me now, keepest from me all
conveniency
than suppliest me with the least advantage of hope. I will
indeed
no longer endure it; nor am I yet persuaded to put up in
peace
what already I have foolishly suffered.
IAGO. Will you hear me, Roderigo?
RODERIGO. Faith, I have heard too much, for your words and
performances are no kin together.
IAGO. You charge me most unjustly.
RODERIGO. With nought but truth. I have wasted myself out of my
means. The jewels you have had from me to deliver to
Desdemona
would half have corrupted a votarist. You have told me she
hath
received them and returned me expectations and comforts of
sudden
respect and acquaintance; but I find none.
IAGO. Well, go to, very well.
RODERIGO. Very well! go to! I cannot go to, man; nor 'tis not
very
well. By this hand, I say 'tis very scurvy, and begin to find
myself fopped in it.
IAGO. Very well.
RODERIGO. I tell you 'tis not very well. I will make myself
known
to Desdemona. If she will return me my jewels, I will give
over
my suit and repent my unlawful solicitation; if not, assure
yourself I will seek satisfaction of you.
IAGO. You have said now.
RODERIGO. Ay, and said nothing but what I protest intendment of
doing.
IAGO. Why, now I see there's mettle in thee; and even from this
instant do build on thee a better opinion than ever before.
Give
me thy hand, Roderigo. Thou hast taken against me a most just
exception; but yet, I protest, I have dealt most directly in
thy
affair.
RODERIGO. It hath not appeared.
IAGO. I grant indeed it hath not appeared, and your suspicion
is
not without wit and judgement. But, Roderigo, if thou hast
that
in thee indeed, which I have greater reason to believe now
than
ever, I mean purpose, courage, and valor, this night show it;
if
thou the next night following enjoy not Desdemona, take me
from
this world with treachery and devise engines for my life.
RODERIGO. Well, what is it? Is it within reason and compass?
IAGO. Sir, there is especial commission come from Venice to
depute
Cassio in Othello's place.
RODERIGO. Is that true? Why then Othello and Desdemona return
again
to Venice.
IAGO. O, no; he goes into Mauritania, and takes away with him
the
fair Desdemona, unless his abode be lingered here by some
accident; wherein none can be so determinate as the removing
of
Cassio.
RODERIGO. How do you mean, removing of him?
IAGO. Why, by making him uncapable of Othello's place; knocking
out
his brains.
RODERIGO. And that you would have me to do?
IAGO. Ay, if you dare do yourself a profit and a right. He sups
tonight with a harlotry, and thither will I go to him. He
knows
not yet of his honorable fortune. If you will watch his going
thence, which his will fashion to fall out between twelve and
one, you may take him at your pleasure; I will be near to
second
your attempt, and he shall fall between us. Come, stand not
amazed at it, but go along with me; I will show you such a
necessity in his death that you shall think yourself bound to
put
it on him. It is now high supper-time, and the night grows to
waste. About it.
RODERIGO. I will hear further reason for this.
IAGO. And you shall be satisfied.
Exeunt.
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello and Emilia.
OTHELLO. You have seen nothing, then?
EMILIA. Nor ever heard, nor ever did suspect.
OTHELLO. Yes, you have seen Cassio and she together.
EMILIA. But then I saw no harm, and then I heard
Each syllable that breath made up between them.
OTHELLO. What, did they never whisper?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. Nor send you out o' the way?
EMILIA. Never.
OTHELLO. To fetch her fan, her gloves, her mask, nor nothing?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's strange.
EMILIA. I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest,
Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other,
Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom.
If any wretch have put this in your head,
Let heaven requite it with the serpent's curse!
For if she be not honest, chaste, and true,
There's no man happy; the purest of their wives
Is foul as slander.
OTHELLO. Bid her come hither; go. Exit
Emilia.
She says enough; yet she's a simple bawd
That cannot say as much. This is a subtle whore,
A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
And yet she'll kneel and pray; I have seen her do't.
Enter Desdemona with Emilia.
DESDEMONA. My lord, what is your will?
OTHELLO. Pray, chuck, come
hither.
DESDEMONA. What is your pleasure?
OTHELLO. Let me see your eyes;
Look in my face.
DESDEMONA. What horrible fancy's this?
OTHELLO. [To Emilia.] Some of your function, mistress,
Leave procreants alone and shut the door;
Cough, or cry "hem," if anybody come.
Your mystery, your mystery; nay, dispatch. Exit
Emilia.
DESDEMONA. Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.
OTHELLO. Why, what art thou?
DESDEMONA. Your wife, my lord, your true and loyal wife.
OTHELLO. Come, swear it, damn thyself;
Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves
Should fear to seize thee. Therefore be double-damn'd;
Swear thou art honest.
DESDEMONA. Heaven doth truly know it.
OTHELLO. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.
DESDEMONA. To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?
OTHELLO. O Desdemona! Away! away! away!
DESDEMONA. Alas the heavy day! Why do you weep?
Am I the motive of these tears, my lord?
If haply you my father do suspect
An instrument of this your calling back,
Lay not your blame on me. If you have lost him,
Why, I have lost him too.
OTHELLO. Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rain'd
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time for scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too, well, very well;
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
DESDEMONA. I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.
OTHELLO. O, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles,
That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been
born!
DESDEMONA. Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?
OTHELLO. Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write "whore" upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner!
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed!
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth,
And will not hear it. What committed?
Impudent strumpet!
DESDEMONA. By heaven, you do me wrong.
OTHELLO. Are not you a strumpet?
DESDEMONA. No, as I am a Christian.
If to preserve this vessel for my lord
From any other foul unlawful touch
Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.
OTHELLO. What, not a whore?
DESDEMONA. No, as I shall be saved.
OTHELLO. Is't possible?
DESDEMONA. O, heaven forgive us!
OTHELLO. I cry you mercy then;
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello. [Raises his voice.] You, mistress,
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,
And keep the gate of hell!
Re-enter Emilia.
You, you, ay, you!
We have done our course; there's money for your pains.
I pray you, turn the key, and keep our counsel.
Exit.
EMILIA. Alas, what does this gentleman conceive?
How do you, madam? How do you, my good lady?
DESDEMONA. Faith, half asleep.
EMILIA. Good madam, what's the matter with my lord?
DESDEMONA. With who?
EMILIA. Why, with my lord, madam.
DESDEMONA. Who is thy lord?
EMILIA. He that is yours, sweet lady.
DESDEMONA. I have none. Do not talk to me, Emilia;
I cannot weep, nor answer have I none
But what should go by water. Prithee, tonight
Lay on my bed my wedding sheets. Remember,
And call thy husband hither.
EMILIA. Here's a change indeed!
Exit.
DESDEMONA. 'Tis meet I should be used so, very meet.
How have I been behaved, that he might stick
The small'st opinion on my least misuse?
Re-enter Emilia with Iago.
IAGO. What is your pleasure, madam? How is't with you?
DESDEMONA. I cannot tell. Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.
He might have chid me so, for in good faith,
I am a child to chiding.
IAGO. What's the matter, lady?
EMILIA. Alas, Iago, my lord hath so bewhored her,
Thrown such despite and heavy terms upon her,
As true hearts cannot bear.
DESDEMONA. Am I that name, Iago?
IAGO. What name, fair lady?
DESDEMONA. Such as she says my lord did say I was.
EMILIA. He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.
IAGO. Why did he so?
DESDEMONA. I do not know; I am sure I am none such.
IAGO. Do not weep, do not weep. Alas the day!
EMILIA. Hath she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be call'd whore? Would it not make one weep?
DESDEMONA. It is my wretched fortune.
IAGO. Beshrew him for't!
How comes this trick upon him?
DESDEMONA. Nay, heaven doth know.
EMILIA. I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
IAGO. Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible.
DESDEMONA. If any such there be, heaven pardon him!
EMILIA. A halter pardon him! And hell gnaw his bones!
Why should he call her whore? Who keeps her company?
What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?
The Moor's abused by some most villainous knave,
Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow.
O heaven, that such companions thou'ldst unfold,
And put in every honest hand a whip
To lash the rascals naked through the world
Even from the east to the west!
IAGO. Speak within door.
EMILIA. O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn'd your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.
IAGO. You are a fool; go to.
DESDEMONA. O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him, for by this light of heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel:
If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love
Either in discourse of thought or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,
Delighted them in any other form,
Or that I do not yet, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. I cannot say "whore."
It doth abhor me now I speak the word;
To do the act that might the addition earn
Not the world's mass of vanity could make me.
IAGO. I pray you, be content; 'tis but his humor:
The business of the state does him offense,
And he does chide with you.
DESDEMONA. If 'twere no other--
IAGO. 'Tis but so, I warrant. Trumpets
within.
Hark, how these instruments summon to supper!
The messengers of Venice stay the meat.
Go in, and weep not; all things shall be well.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Roderigo.
How now, Roderigo!
RODERIGO. I do not find that thou dealest justly with me.
IAGO. What in the contrary?
RODERIGO. Every day thou daffest me with some device, Iago; and
rather, as it seems to me now, keepest from me all
conveniency
than suppliest me with the least advantage of hope. I will
indeed
no longer endure it; nor am I yet persuaded to put up in
peace
what already I have foolishly suffered.
IAGO. Will you hear me, Roderigo?
RODERIGO. Faith, I have heard too much, for your words and
performances are no kin together.
IAGO. You charge me most unjustly.
RODERIGO. With nought but truth. I have wasted myself out of my
means. The jewels you have had from me to deliver to
Desdemona
would half have corrupted a votarist. You have told me she
hath
received them and returned me expectations and comforts of
sudden
respect and acquaintance; but I find none.
IAGO. Well, go to, very well.
RODERIGO. Very well! go to! I cannot go to, man; nor 'tis not
very
well. By this hand, I say 'tis very scurvy, and begin to find
myself fopped in it.
IAGO. Very well.
RODERIGO. I tell you 'tis not very well. I will make myself
known
to Desdemona. If she will return me my jewels, I will give
over
my suit and repent my unlawful solicitation; if not, assure
yourself I will seek satisfaction of you.
IAGO. You have said now.
RODERIGO. Ay, and said nothing but what I protest intendment of
doing.
IAGO. Why, now I see there's mettle in thee; and even from this
instant do build on thee a better opinion than ever before.
Give
me thy hand, Roderigo. Thou hast taken against me a most just
exception; but yet, I protest, I have dealt most directly in
thy
affair.
RODERIGO. It hath not appeared.
IAGO. I grant indeed it hath not appeared, and your suspicion
is
not without wit and judgement. But, Roderigo, if thou hast
that
in thee indeed, which I have greater reason to believe now
than
ever, I mean purpose, courage, and valor, this night show it;
if
thou the next night following enjoy not Desdemona, take me
from
this world with treachery and devise engines for my life.
RODERIGO. Well, what is it? Is it within reason and compass?
IAGO. Sir, there is especial commission come from Venice to
depute
Cassio in Othello's place.
RODERIGO. Is that true? Why then Othello and Desdemona return
again
to Venice.
IAGO. O, no; he goes into Mauritania, and takes away with him
the
fair Desdemona, unless his abode be lingered here by some
accident; wherein none can be so determinate as the removing
of
Cassio.
RODERIGO. How do you mean, removing of him?
IAGO. Why, by making him uncapable of Othello's place; knocking
out
his brains.
RODERIGO. And that you would have me to do?
IAGO. Ay, if you dare do yourself a profit and a right. He sups
tonight with a harlotry, and thither will I go to him. He
knows
not yet of his honorable fortune. If you will watch his going
thence, which his will fashion to fall out between twelve and
one, you may take him at your pleasure; I will be near to
second
your attempt, and he shall fall between us. Come, stand not
amazed at it, but go along with me; I will show you such a
necessity in his death that you shall think yourself bound to
put
it on him. It is now high supper-time, and the night grows to
waste. About it.
RODERIGO. I will hear further reason for this.
IAGO. And you shall be satisfied.
Exeunt.
|
null | cliffnotes | Create a compact summary that covers the main points of scene 2, utilizing the provided context. | scene 2|act 4 scene 2 | Othello tries to force admission from Emilia that Desdemona and Cassio are lovers, but Emilia is steadfast in her denials, saying that her mistress is pure and chaste. Then, he sends for Desdemona and tries to force a confession of infidelity from her, not using Cassios name. At first the innocent Desdemona does not understand his charges. She merely thinks he is again behaving oddly and clings to the idea that Othello is enmeshed with some political difficulty or perhaps anger at being recalled to Venice. Then Othellos savage words of accusation sink in to her mind, and she realizes what she is being accused of. She is horrified, but there is nothing she can do except deny the charge. Her denials fall on deaf ears. Emilia comes back to find her mistress in a blurred state, mid- way between sleep and waking. She is like a child who has been beaten to stupefaction. When she somewhat recovers, she calls for Iago. She plans to send him to Othello to ask her husband to forgive her for whatever it is that has made him angry. Iago assures her that it is some political matter that is troubling Othello and that it will pass. He lies, "Go in and weep not, all things shall be well". Roderigo feels that he is being befouled by Iago. He has become bankrupt. Iago has taken his gold and jewels on the pretext of giving them as presents to Desdemona, but he is far removed from the gratification of his desires. Roderigo threatens to reveal his treachery. But Iago again prevails upon him to have patience for a short while more, assuring him that he is close to winning the hand of Desdemona. For Roderigo to gain his goal, however, he must murder Cassio. Iago says that he himself will help if anything goes wrong. Roderigo agrees to his plan. |
----------SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello and Emilia.
OTHELLO. You have seen nothing, then?
EMILIA. Nor ever heard, nor ever did suspect.
OTHELLO. Yes, you have seen Cassio and she together.
EMILIA. But then I saw no harm, and then I heard
Each syllable that breath made up between them.
OTHELLO. What, did they never whisper?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. Nor send you out o' the way?
EMILIA. Never.
OTHELLO. To fetch her fan, her gloves, her mask, nor nothing?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's strange.
EMILIA. I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest,
Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other,
Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom.
If any wretch have put this in your head,
Let heaven requite it with the serpent's curse!
For if she be not honest, chaste, and true,
There's no man happy; the purest of their wives
Is foul as slander.
OTHELLO. Bid her come hither; go. Exit
Emilia.
She says enough; yet she's a simple bawd
That cannot say as much. This is a subtle whore,
A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
And yet she'll kneel and pray; I have seen her do't.
Enter Desdemona with Emilia.
DESDEMONA. My lord, what is your will?
OTHELLO. Pray, chuck, come
hither.
DESDEMONA. What is your pleasure?
OTHELLO. Let me see your eyes;
Look in my face.
DESDEMONA. What horrible fancy's this?
OTHELLO. [To Emilia.] Some of your function, mistress,
Leave procreants alone and shut the door;
Cough, or cry "hem," if anybody come.
Your mystery, your mystery; nay, dispatch. Exit
Emilia.
DESDEMONA. Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.
OTHELLO. Why, what art thou?
DESDEMONA. Your wife, my lord, your true and loyal wife.
OTHELLO. Come, swear it, damn thyself;
Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves
Should fear to seize thee. Therefore be double-damn'd;
Swear thou art honest.
DESDEMONA. Heaven doth truly know it.
OTHELLO. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.
DESDEMONA. To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?
OTHELLO. O Desdemona! Away! away! away!
DESDEMONA. Alas the heavy day! Why do you weep?
Am I the motive of these tears, my lord?
If haply you my father do suspect
An instrument of this your calling back,
Lay not your blame on me. If you have lost him,
Why, I have lost him too.
OTHELLO. Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rain'd
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time for scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too, well, very well;
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
DESDEMONA. I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.
OTHELLO. O, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles,
That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been
born!
DESDEMONA. Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?
OTHELLO. Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write "whore" upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner!
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed!
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth,
And will not hear it. What committed?
Impudent strumpet!
DESDEMONA. By heaven, you do me wrong.
OTHELLO. Are not you a strumpet?
DESDEMONA. No, as I am a Christian.
If to preserve this vessel for my lord
From any other foul unlawful touch
Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.
OTHELLO. What, not a whore?
DESDEMONA. No, as I shall be saved.
OTHELLO. Is't possible?
DESDEMONA. O, heaven forgive us!
OTHELLO. I cry you mercy then;
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello. [Raises his voice.] You, mistress,
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,
And keep the gate of hell!
Re-enter Emilia.
You, you, ay, you!
We have done our course; there's money for your pains.
I pray you, turn the key, and keep our counsel.
Exit.
EMILIA. Alas, what does this gentleman conceive?
How do you, madam? How do you, my good lady?
DESDEMONA. Faith, half asleep.
EMILIA. Good madam, what's the matter with my lord?
DESDEMONA. With who?
EMILIA. Why, with my lord, madam.
DESDEMONA. Who is thy lord?
EMILIA. He that is yours, sweet lady.
DESDEMONA. I have none. Do not talk to me, Emilia;
I cannot weep, nor answer have I none
But what should go by water. Prithee, tonight
Lay on my bed my wedding sheets. Remember,
And call thy husband hither.
EMILIA. Here's a change indeed!
Exit.
DESDEMONA. 'Tis meet I should be used so, very meet.
How have I been behaved, that he might stick
The small'st opinion on my least misuse?
Re-enter Emilia with Iago.
IAGO. What is your pleasure, madam? How is't with you?
DESDEMONA. I cannot tell. Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.
He might have chid me so, for in good faith,
I am a child to chiding.
IAGO. What's the matter, lady?
EMILIA. Alas, Iago, my lord hath so bewhored her,
Thrown such despite and heavy terms upon her,
As true hearts cannot bear.
DESDEMONA. Am I that name, Iago?
IAGO. What name, fair lady?
DESDEMONA. Such as she says my lord did say I was.
EMILIA. He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.
IAGO. Why did he so?
DESDEMONA. I do not know; I am sure I am none such.
IAGO. Do not weep, do not weep. Alas the day!
EMILIA. Hath she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be call'd whore? Would it not make one weep?
DESDEMONA. It is my wretched fortune.
IAGO. Beshrew him for't!
How comes this trick upon him?
DESDEMONA. Nay, heaven doth know.
EMILIA. I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
IAGO. Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible.
DESDEMONA. If any such there be, heaven pardon him!
EMILIA. A halter pardon him! And hell gnaw his bones!
Why should he call her whore? Who keeps her company?
What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?
The Moor's abused by some most villainous knave,
Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow.
O heaven, that such companions thou'ldst unfold,
And put in every honest hand a whip
To lash the rascals naked through the world
Even from the east to the west!
IAGO. Speak within door.
EMILIA. O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn'd your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.
IAGO. You are a fool; go to.
DESDEMONA. O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him, for by this light of heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel:
If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love
Either in discourse of thought or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,
Delighted them in any other form,
Or that I do not yet, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. I cannot say "whore."
It doth abhor me now I speak the word;
To do the act that might the addition earn
Not the world's mass of vanity could make me.
IAGO. I pray you, be content; 'tis but his humor:
The business of the state does him offense,
And he does chide with you.
DESDEMONA. If 'twere no other--
IAGO. 'Tis but so, I warrant. Trumpets
within.
Hark, how these instruments summon to supper!
The messengers of Venice stay the meat.
Go in, and weep not; all things shall be well.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Roderigo.
How now, Roderigo!
RODERIGO. I do not find that thou dealest justly with me.
IAGO. What in the contrary?
RODERIGO. Every day thou daffest me with some device, Iago; and
rather, as it seems to me now, keepest from me all
conveniency
than suppliest me with the least advantage of hope. I will
indeed
no longer endure it; nor am I yet persuaded to put up in
peace
what already I have foolishly suffered.
IAGO. Will you hear me, Roderigo?
RODERIGO. Faith, I have heard too much, for your words and
performances are no kin together.
IAGO. You charge me most unjustly.
RODERIGO. With nought but truth. I have wasted myself out of my
means. The jewels you have had from me to deliver to
Desdemona
would half have corrupted a votarist. You have told me she
hath
received them and returned me expectations and comforts of
sudden
respect and acquaintance; but I find none.
IAGO. Well, go to, very well.
RODERIGO. Very well! go to! I cannot go to, man; nor 'tis not
very
well. By this hand, I say 'tis very scurvy, and begin to find
myself fopped in it.
IAGO. Very well.
RODERIGO. I tell you 'tis not very well. I will make myself
known
to Desdemona. If she will return me my jewels, I will give
over
my suit and repent my unlawful solicitation; if not, assure
yourself I will seek satisfaction of you.
IAGO. You have said now.
RODERIGO. Ay, and said nothing but what I protest intendment of
doing.
IAGO. Why, now I see there's mettle in thee; and even from this
instant do build on thee a better opinion than ever before.
Give
me thy hand, Roderigo. Thou hast taken against me a most just
exception; but yet, I protest, I have dealt most directly in
thy
affair.
RODERIGO. It hath not appeared.
IAGO. I grant indeed it hath not appeared, and your suspicion
is
not without wit and judgement. But, Roderigo, if thou hast
that
in thee indeed, which I have greater reason to believe now
than
ever, I mean purpose, courage, and valor, this night show it;
if
thou the next night following enjoy not Desdemona, take me
from
this world with treachery and devise engines for my life.
RODERIGO. Well, what is it? Is it within reason and compass?
IAGO. Sir, there is especial commission come from Venice to
depute
Cassio in Othello's place.
RODERIGO. Is that true? Why then Othello and Desdemona return
again
to Venice.
IAGO. O, no; he goes into Mauritania, and takes away with him
the
fair Desdemona, unless his abode be lingered here by some
accident; wherein none can be so determinate as the removing
of
Cassio.
RODERIGO. How do you mean, removing of him?
IAGO. Why, by making him uncapable of Othello's place; knocking
out
his brains.
RODERIGO. And that you would have me to do?
IAGO. Ay, if you dare do yourself a profit and a right. He sups
tonight with a harlotry, and thither will I go to him. He
knows
not yet of his honorable fortune. If you will watch his going
thence, which his will fashion to fall out between twelve and
one, you may take him at your pleasure; I will be near to
second
your attempt, and he shall fall between us. Come, stand not
amazed at it, but go along with me; I will show you such a
necessity in his death that you shall think yourself bound to
put
it on him. It is now high supper-time, and the night grows to
waste. About it.
RODERIGO. I will hear further reason for this.
IAGO. And you shall be satisfied.
Exeunt.
----------ACT 4 SCENE 2---------
SCENE II.
A room in the castle.
Enter Othello and Emilia.
OTHELLO. You have seen nothing, then?
EMILIA. Nor ever heard, nor ever did suspect.
OTHELLO. Yes, you have seen Cassio and she together.
EMILIA. But then I saw no harm, and then I heard
Each syllable that breath made up between them.
OTHELLO. What, did they never whisper?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. Nor send you out o' the way?
EMILIA. Never.
OTHELLO. To fetch her fan, her gloves, her mask, nor nothing?
EMILIA. Never, my lord.
OTHELLO. That's strange.
EMILIA. I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest,
Lay down my soul at stake. If you think other,
Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom.
If any wretch have put this in your head,
Let heaven requite it with the serpent's curse!
For if she be not honest, chaste, and true,
There's no man happy; the purest of their wives
Is foul as slander.
OTHELLO. Bid her come hither; go. Exit
Emilia.
She says enough; yet she's a simple bawd
That cannot say as much. This is a subtle whore,
A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
And yet she'll kneel and pray; I have seen her do't.
Enter Desdemona with Emilia.
DESDEMONA. My lord, what is your will?
OTHELLO. Pray, chuck, come
hither.
DESDEMONA. What is your pleasure?
OTHELLO. Let me see your eyes;
Look in my face.
DESDEMONA. What horrible fancy's this?
OTHELLO. [To Emilia.] Some of your function, mistress,
Leave procreants alone and shut the door;
Cough, or cry "hem," if anybody come.
Your mystery, your mystery; nay, dispatch. Exit
Emilia.
DESDEMONA. Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.
OTHELLO. Why, what art thou?
DESDEMONA. Your wife, my lord, your true and loyal wife.
OTHELLO. Come, swear it, damn thyself;
Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves
Should fear to seize thee. Therefore be double-damn'd;
Swear thou art honest.
DESDEMONA. Heaven doth truly know it.
OTHELLO. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.
DESDEMONA. To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?
OTHELLO. O Desdemona! Away! away! away!
DESDEMONA. Alas the heavy day! Why do you weep?
Am I the motive of these tears, my lord?
If haply you my father do suspect
An instrument of this your calling back,
Lay not your blame on me. If you have lost him,
Why, I have lost him too.
OTHELLO. Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rain'd
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time for scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too, well, very well;
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
DESDEMONA. I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.
OTHELLO. O, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles,
That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been
born!
DESDEMONA. Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?
OTHELLO. Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write "whore" upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner!
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed!
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth,
And will not hear it. What committed?
Impudent strumpet!
DESDEMONA. By heaven, you do me wrong.
OTHELLO. Are not you a strumpet?
DESDEMONA. No, as I am a Christian.
If to preserve this vessel for my lord
From any other foul unlawful touch
Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.
OTHELLO. What, not a whore?
DESDEMONA. No, as I shall be saved.
OTHELLO. Is't possible?
DESDEMONA. O, heaven forgive us!
OTHELLO. I cry you mercy then;
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello. [Raises his voice.] You, mistress,
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,
And keep the gate of hell!
Re-enter Emilia.
You, you, ay, you!
We have done our course; there's money for your pains.
I pray you, turn the key, and keep our counsel.
Exit.
EMILIA. Alas, what does this gentleman conceive?
How do you, madam? How do you, my good lady?
DESDEMONA. Faith, half asleep.
EMILIA. Good madam, what's the matter with my lord?
DESDEMONA. With who?
EMILIA. Why, with my lord, madam.
DESDEMONA. Who is thy lord?
EMILIA. He that is yours, sweet lady.
DESDEMONA. I have none. Do not talk to me, Emilia;
I cannot weep, nor answer have I none
But what should go by water. Prithee, tonight
Lay on my bed my wedding sheets. Remember,
And call thy husband hither.
EMILIA. Here's a change indeed!
Exit.
DESDEMONA. 'Tis meet I should be used so, very meet.
How have I been behaved, that he might stick
The small'st opinion on my least misuse?
Re-enter Emilia with Iago.
IAGO. What is your pleasure, madam? How is't with you?
DESDEMONA. I cannot tell. Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.
He might have chid me so, for in good faith,
I am a child to chiding.
IAGO. What's the matter, lady?
EMILIA. Alas, Iago, my lord hath so bewhored her,
Thrown such despite and heavy terms upon her,
As true hearts cannot bear.
DESDEMONA. Am I that name, Iago?
IAGO. What name, fair lady?
DESDEMONA. Such as she says my lord did say I was.
EMILIA. He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.
IAGO. Why did he so?
DESDEMONA. I do not know; I am sure I am none such.
IAGO. Do not weep, do not weep. Alas the day!
EMILIA. Hath she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be call'd whore? Would it not make one weep?
DESDEMONA. It is my wretched fortune.
IAGO. Beshrew him for't!
How comes this trick upon him?
DESDEMONA. Nay, heaven doth know.
EMILIA. I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
IAGO. Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible.
DESDEMONA. If any such there be, heaven pardon him!
EMILIA. A halter pardon him! And hell gnaw his bones!
Why should he call her whore? Who keeps her company?
What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?
The Moor's abused by some most villainous knave,
Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow.
O heaven, that such companions thou'ldst unfold,
And put in every honest hand a whip
To lash the rascals naked through the world
Even from the east to the west!
IAGO. Speak within door.
EMILIA. O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn'd your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.
IAGO. You are a fool; go to.
DESDEMONA. O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him, for by this light of heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel:
If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love
Either in discourse of thought or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,
Delighted them in any other form,
Or that I do not yet, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. I cannot say "whore."
It doth abhor me now I speak the word;
To do the act that might the addition earn
Not the world's mass of vanity could make me.
IAGO. I pray you, be content; 'tis but his humor:
The business of the state does him offense,
And he does chide with you.
DESDEMONA. If 'twere no other--
IAGO. 'Tis but so, I warrant. Trumpets
within.
Hark, how these instruments summon to supper!
The messengers of Venice stay the meat.
Go in, and weep not; all things shall be well.
Exeunt Desdemona and
Emilia.
Enter Roderigo.
How now, Roderigo!
RODERIGO. I do not find that thou dealest justly with me.
IAGO. What in the contrary?
RODERIGO. Every day thou daffest me with some device, Iago; and
rather, as it seems to me now, keepest from me all
conveniency
than suppliest me with the least advantage of hope. I will
indeed
no longer endure it; nor am I yet persuaded to put up in
peace
what already I have foolishly suffered.
IAGO. Will you hear me, Roderigo?
RODERIGO. Faith, I have heard too much, for your words and
performances are no kin together.
IAGO. You charge me most unjustly.
RODERIGO. With nought but truth. I have wasted myself out of my
means. The jewels you have had from me to deliver to
Desdemona
would half have corrupted a votarist. You have told me she
hath
received them and returned me expectations and comforts of
sudden
respect and acquaintance; but I find none.
IAGO. Well, go to, very well.
RODERIGO. Very well! go to! I cannot go to, man; nor 'tis not
very
well. By this hand, I say 'tis very scurvy, and begin to find
myself fopped in it.
IAGO. Very well.
RODERIGO. I tell you 'tis not very well. I will make myself
known
to Desdemona. If she will return me my jewels, I will give
over
my suit and repent my unlawful solicitation; if not, assure
yourself I will seek satisfaction of you.
IAGO. You have said now.
RODERIGO. Ay, and said nothing but what I protest intendment of
doing.
IAGO. Why, now I see there's mettle in thee; and even from this
instant do build on thee a better opinion than ever before.
Give
me thy hand, Roderigo. Thou hast taken against me a most just
exception; but yet, I protest, I have dealt most directly in
thy
affair.
RODERIGO. It hath not appeared.
IAGO. I grant indeed it hath not appeared, and your suspicion
is
not without wit and judgement. But, Roderigo, if thou hast
that
in thee indeed, which I have greater reason to believe now
than
ever, I mean purpose, courage, and valor, this night show it;
if
thou the next night following enjoy not Desdemona, take me
from
this world with treachery and devise engines for my life.
RODERIGO. Well, what is it? Is it within reason and compass?
IAGO. Sir, there is especial commission come from Venice to
depute
Cassio in Othello's place.
RODERIGO. Is that true? Why then Othello and Desdemona return
again
to Venice.
IAGO. O, no; he goes into Mauritania, and takes away with him
the
fair Desdemona, unless his abode be lingered here by some
accident; wherein none can be so determinate as the removing
of
Cassio.
RODERIGO. How do you mean, removing of him?
IAGO. Why, by making him uncapable of Othello's place; knocking
out
his brains.
RODERIGO. And that you would have me to do?
IAGO. Ay, if you dare do yourself a profit and a right. He sups
tonight with a harlotry, and thither will I go to him. He
knows
not yet of his honorable fortune. If you will watch his going
thence, which his will fashion to fall out between twelve and
one, you may take him at your pleasure; I will be near to
second
your attempt, and he shall fall between us. Come, stand not
amazed at it, but go along with me; I will show you such a
necessity in his death that you shall think yourself bound to
put
it on him. It is now high supper-time, and the night grows to
waste. About it.
RODERIGO. I will hear further reason for this.
IAGO. And you shall be satisfied.
Exeunt.
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Subsets and Splits