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| INTRODUCTION |
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| LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat,
and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden--Jim
Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends--we grew up
together in the same Nebraska town--and we had much to say to each other. While the train
flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered
pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the
woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat,
the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to
spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under
stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and
billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color
and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the
whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not
grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of
freemasonry, we said. |
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| Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see
much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is
sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do
not often meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. |
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| When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York,
his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only
daughter of a distinguished man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp
comment at the time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland
Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from the West out of
bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish
her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something unexpected. She gave
one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the
Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers' strike,
etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to
which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive,
but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of
enthusiasm. Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it
worth while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas
and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For some
reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden. |
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| As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic
and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very
funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves
with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and
branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part
in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or
Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber
and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to
accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new
canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to
lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people
and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him. He
never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and
quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous
interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American. |
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| During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a
central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired.
More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the
conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call
up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain. I had lost
sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a
friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy life had set apart time
enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full of her that day. He made me
see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her. |
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| "I can't see," he said impetuously, "why you have never written
anything about Antonia." |
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| I told him I had always felt that other people--he himself, for one knew her much
better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on
paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get
a picture of her. |
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| He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a
new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of
him. "Maybe I will, maybe I will!" he declared. He stared
out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the
sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. "Of course," he
said, "I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about
myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice
in any other form of presentation." |
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| I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know
about Antonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched
her come and go, had not. |
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| Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with
a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the
sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands. |
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| "I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said. "Now,
what about yours?" |
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| I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes. |
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| "Notes? I didn't make any." He drank his tea all at
once and put down the cup. "I didn't arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote
down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia's name recalls to
me. I suppose it hasn't any form. It hasn't any title,
either." He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote on the
pinkish face of the portfolio the word, "Antonia." He frowned at this
a moment, then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia." That seemed to
satisfy him. |
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| "Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it
influence your own story." |
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| My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript,
substantially as he brought it to me. |
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| NOTES: [1] The Bohemian name Antonia is strongly accented on the first
syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the `i' is, of course, given the sound of
long `e'. The name is pronounced An'-ton-ee-ah. |