My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

  VII

  WINTER lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale andshabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, andmen'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 andpinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.

  Through January and February I went to the river with the Harlings onclear nights, and we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on thefrozen sand. But by March the ice was rough and choppy, and the snow onthe river bluffs was gray and mournful-looking. I was tired of school,tired of winter clothes, of the rutted streets, of the dirty drifts andthe piles of cinders that had lain in the yards so long. There was onlyone break in the dreary monotony of that month; when Blind d'Arnault, thenegro pianist, came to town. He gave a concert at the Opera House onMonday night, and he and his manager spent Saturday and Sunday at ourcomfortable hotel. Mrs. Harling had known d'Arnault for years. She toldAntonia she had better go to see Tiny that Saturday evening, as therewould certainly be music at the Boys' Home.

  Saturday night after supper I ran downtown to the hotel and slippedquietly into the parlor. The chairs and sofas were already occupied, andthe air smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The parlor had once been tworooms, and the floor was sway-backed where the partition had been cutaway. The wind from without made waves in the long carpet. A coal stoveglowed at either end of the room, and the grand piano in the middle stoodopen.

  There was an atmosphere of unusual freedom about the house that night, forMrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha for a week. Johnnie had been having drinkswith the guests until he was rather absent-minded. It was Mrs. Gardenerwho ran the business and looked after everything. Her husband stood at thedesk and welcomed incoming travelers. He was a popular fellow, but nomanager.

  Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drovethe best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh.She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitousabout them as her friends were. She was tall, dark, severe, with somethingIndian-like in the rigid immobility of her face. Her manner was cold, andshe talked little. Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, afavor when they stayed at her house. Even the smartest traveling men wereflattered when Mrs. Gardener stopped to chat with them for a moment. Thepatrons of the hotel were divided into two classes; those who had seenMrs. Gardener's diamonds, and those who had not.

  When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, wasat the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago.He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, withfriends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I didnot know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furnituresalesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, who traveledfor a jewelry house and sold musical instruments. The talk was all aboutgood and bad hotels, actors and actresses and musical prodigies. I learnedthat Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who wereto play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great successin "A Winter's Tale," in London.

  The door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener came in, directingBlind d'Arnault,--he would never consent to be led. He was a heavy, bulkymulatto, on short legs, and he came tapping the floor in front of him withhis gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in the light, with a showof white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken, papery eyelids laymotionless over his blind eyes.

  "Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. Wegoing to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for methis evening?" It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those Iremembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience init. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind theears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have beenrepulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was thehappiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.

  He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I noticedthe nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When he wassitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like arocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he wasnot 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 thekeys a few times, tinkling off scales, then turned to the company.

  "She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the lasttime I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up beforeI come. Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices. Seems likewe 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 rockinghimself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveledeyelids never fluttering.

  He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where thespirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks oldhe had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was oldenough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the nervousmotion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young negro wenchwho 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 himdevotedly, 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 fromthe "Big House" were for the blind child, and she beat and cuffed herother children whenever she found them teasing him or trying to get hischicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early, remembered everythinghe 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 "yellowMartha's simple child." He was docile and obedient, but when he was sixyears old he began to run away from home, always taking the samedirection. He felt his way through the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, upto the south wing of the "Big House," where Miss Nellie d'Arnaultpracticed the piano every morning. This angered his mother more thananything else he could have done; she was so ashamed of his ugliness thatshe could n't bear to have white folks see him. Whenever she caught himslipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told himwhat dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever foundhim near the "Big House." But the next time Samson had a chance, he ranaway again. If Miss d'Arnault stopped practicing for a moment and wenttoward the window, she saw this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in anold piece of sacking, standing in the open space between the hollyhockrows, his body rocking automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun andwearing an expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tellMartha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of hisfoolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of hearingwas nearly all he had,--though it did not occur to her that he might havemore of it than other children.

  One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her lessonto her music-master. The windows were open. He heard them get up from thepiano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He heard the doorclose 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 ina room. He put one foot over the window sill and straddled it. His motherhad told him over and over how his master would give him to the bigmastiff if he ever found him "meddling." Samson had got too near themastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. Hethought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.

  Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touchedit 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 slipperysides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shapeand size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold andhard, and like nothing else in his b
lack universe. He went back to itsmouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into themellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must bedone with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached thishighly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himselfto it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature ofhim. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger outpassages from things Miss Nellie had been practicing, passages that werealready his, that lay under the bones of his pinched, conical littleskull, definite as animal desires. The door opened; Miss Nellie and hermusic-master stood behind it, but blind Samson, who was so sensitive topresences, did not know they were there. He was feeling out the patternthat lay all ready-made on the big and little keys. When he paused for amoment, because the sound was wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nelliespoke softly. He whirled about in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in thedark, struck his head on the open window, and fell screaming and bleedingto the floor. He had what his mother called a fit. The doctor came andgave 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 afashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrongnotes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought thesubstance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore histeachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired anyfinish. He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously andwonderfully. As piano playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music itwas something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger thanhis other physical senses,--that not only filled his dark mind, but worriedhis body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a negroenjoying himself as only a negro can. It was as if all the agreeablesensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up onthose black and white keys, and he were gloating over them and tricklingthem 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, "Somebodydancing in there." He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room. "Ihear little feet,--girls, I 'spect."

  Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springingdown, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tinyand Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of thefloor. 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 onthe 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 ifyou was to come out here and dance with us."

  "Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl. Now, you're Lena, are you?--and you'reTony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight?"

  O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. JohnnieGardener ran in from the office.

  "Easy, boys, easy!" he entreated them. "You'll wake the cook, and there'llbe the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be downthe minute anything's moved in the dining-room."

  "Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bringanother. Come along, nobody'll tell tales."

  Johnnie shook his head. "'S a fact, boys," he said confidentially. "If Itake a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!"

  His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, we'll make it allright with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie."

  Molly was Mrs. Gardener's name, of course. "Molly Bawn" was painted inlarge 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 hisheart, too. He was an affectionate little man, and he thought his wife awonderful woman; he knew that without her he would hardly be more than aclerk 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 shoneon his short wool and on his uplifted face. He looked like some glisteningAfrican god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood. Whenever thedancers paused to change partners or to catch breath, he would boom outsoftly, "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 Lenaand Tiny over Willy O'Reilly's shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim andslender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles--she wore her dressesvery short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and manner thanthe other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightlymarked by smallpox, but handsome for all that. She had beautiful chestnuthair, coils of it; her forehead was low and smooth, and her commandingdark eyes regarded the world indifferently and fearlessly. She looked boldand resourceful and unscrupulous, and she was all of these. They werehandsome girls, had the fresh color of their country up-bringing, and intheir eyes that brilliancy which is called,--by no metaphor, alas!--"thelight of youth."

  D'Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he leftus, 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, andhad heard d'Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he tapped his wayupstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I walked home withAntonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed. We lingered along while at the Harlings' gate, whispering in the cold until therestlessness was slowly chilled out of us.