My Ántonia - Willa Cather (i read books txt) 📗

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, Ántonia 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 wouldn’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 sides 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?”

Ántonia 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 upbringing, 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 Ántonia. 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.

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