My Antonia

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 parlour, 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!  Everyone 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 haven’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 waterfront 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, everyone said, would be the end of Tiny.  Even if she had begun by running a decent place, she couldn’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 trayful of dishes, glancing rather pertly at the spruce travelling men, and contemptuously at the scrubby ones—­who were so afraid of her that they didn’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 should 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 everyone 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 building 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 the claim.  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—­didn’t seem sensitive about it.  She was satisfied with her success, but not elated.  She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.