My Antonia, Page 28

  VIII

  THE HARLING CHILDREN and I were never happier, never felt more contentedand 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 Tonybreak the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard trees, tieup vines and clip the hedges. Every morning, before I was up, I couldhear Tony singing in the garden rows. After the apple and cherry treesbroke into bloom, we ran about under them, hunting for the new neststhe birds were building, throwing clods at each other, and playinghide-and-seek with Nina. Yet the summer which was to change everythingwas coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, lifecan't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and theyhave to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders arealways forgetting.

  It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Antonia were preservingcherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancingpavilion had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas andpainted poles up from the depot.

  That afternoon three cheerful-looking Italians strolled about BlackHawk, looking at everything, and with them was a dark, stout woman whowore a long gold watch-chain about her neck and carried a black laceparasol. They seemed especially interested in children and vacant lots.When I overtook them and stopped to say a word, I found them affable andconfiding. They told me they worked in Kansas City in the winter, and insummer they went out among the farming towns with their tent and taughtdancing. When business fell off in one place, they moved on to another.

  The dancing pavilion was put up near the Danish laundry, on a vacantlot surrounded by tall, arched cottonwood trees. It was very much likea merry-go-round tent, with open sides and gay flags flying from thepoles. Before the week was over, all the ambitious mothers were sendingtheir children to the afternoon dancing class. At three o'clock onemet little girls in white dresses and little boys in the round-collaredshirts of the time, hurrying along the sidewalk on their way to thetent. Mrs. Vanni received them at the entrance, always dressed inlavender with a great deal of black lace, her important watch-chainlying on her bosom. She wore her hair on the top of her head, built upin a black tower, with red coral combs. When she smiled, she showed tworows of strong, crooked yellow teeth. She taught the little childrenherself, and her husband, the harpist, taught the older ones.

  Often the mothers brought their fancywork and sat on the shady sideof the tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagonunder the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of agood 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. Someragged little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under awhite umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsterswho came to dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful placein town. Even on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustlingshade, and the air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and BouncingBets wilting in the sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from thelaundryman's garden, and the grass in the middle of the lot was pinkwith them.

  The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hoursuggested by the city council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, andthe harp struck up 'Home, Sweet Home,' all Black Hawk knew it was teno'clock. You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by theroundhouse 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 theboys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks--northward tothe edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to thepost-office, the ice-cream parlour, the butcher shop. Now there was aplace where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one couldlaugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silenceseemed to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the blackmaple trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by lightheartedsounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silveryripples through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then theviolins fell in--one of them was almost like a flute. They calledso archly, so seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent ofthemselves. Why hadn't we had a tent before?

  Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summerbefore. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for theexclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other timesanyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farm-handswho 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 midnightthen. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, andall the country girls were on the floor--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, andthe Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy whofound these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged tothe Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff withtheir sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with 'the hiredgirls.'