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...
Long Stories - Post by : justintime - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 2121
WHEN I AWOKE IN THE morning, long bands of sunshine were coming in at the window and reaching back under the eaves where the two boys lay. Leo was wide awake and was tickling his brother's leg with a dried cone-flower he had pulled out of the hay. Ambrosch kicked at him and turned over. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Leo lay on his back, elevated one foot, and began exercising his toes. He picked up dried flowers with his toes and brandished them in the belt of sunlight. After he...
Long Stories - Post by : Darshana - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 2038
I TOLD ANTONIA I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise. I heard of her from time to time; that she married, very soon after I last saw her, a young Bohemian, a cousin of Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a large family. Once when I was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from Prague I sent Antonia some photographs of her native village. Months afterward came a letter from her, telling me the names and ages of her many children, but little else; signed, `Your...
Long Stories - Post by : freebird - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 2702
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.'...
Long Stories - Post by : Janie - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 2193
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 threshing-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...
Long Stories - Post by : David_C_H - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3034
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 farm-house parlours, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short dresses. The photographer came out and...
Long Stories - Post by : nextup - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 2778
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...
Long Stories - Post by : Noel_Springer - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3759
HOW WELL I REMEMBER the stiff little parlour where I used to wait for Lena: the hard horsehair furniture, bought at some auction sale, the long mirror, the fashion-plates on the wall. If I sat down even for a moment, I was sure to find threads and bits of coloured silk clinging to my clothes after I went away. Lena's success puzzled me. She was so easygoing; had none of the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business. She had come to Lincoln, a country girl, with no introductions except to some cousins of Mrs. Thomas...
Long Stories - Post by : Jim_mitchell - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1164
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 wouldn'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...
Long Stories - Post by : roweis - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1718
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 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...
Long Stories - Post by : Joe_Tucci - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 997
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...
Long Stories - Post by : Planning_Guy - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1905
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 couldn't sleep much last night.' She hesitated, and then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went away....
Long Stories - Post by : natagiousnet - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3201
THE DAY AFTER COMMENCEMENT I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an empty room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in earnest. I worked off a year's trigonometry that summer, and began Virgil alone. Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room, looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures between, scanning the `Aeneid' aloud and committing long passages to memory. Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I passed her gate, and asked me to come in and...
Long Stories - Post by : PitCrew - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3535
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 didn't feel well, and if I couldn'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....
Long Stories - Post by : JoeKumar - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1080
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...
Long Stories - Post by : crochet50 - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 772
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...
Long Stories - Post by : magichearts - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1121
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...
Long Stories - Post by : successcoach - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3805
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...
Long Stories - Post by : vanyon - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 1351
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...
Long Stories - Post by : Ace_Of_Shirts - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3331
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...
Long Stories - Post by : DonPaul - Date : March 2011 - Author : Willa Cather - Read : 3055
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My Antonia - BOOK V - Cuzak's Boys - Chapter 3
