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Page 55
Often the mothers brought their fancywork and sat on the shady side of the
tent during the lesson. The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under the
big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good 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. Some ragged
little boys from the depot sold pop and iced lemonade under a white
umbrella at the corner, and made faces at the spruce youngsters who came to
dance. That vacant lot soon became the most cheerful place in town. Even
on the hottest afternoons the cottonwoods made a rustling shade, and the
air smelled of popcorn and melted butter, and Bouncing Bets wilting in the
sun. Those hardy flowers had run away from the laundryman's garden, and
the grass in the middle of the lot was pink with them.
The Vannis kept exemplary order, and closed every evening at the hour
suggested by the city council. When Mrs. Vanni gave the signal, and the
harp struck up `Home, Sweet Home,' all Black Hawk knew it was ten o'clock.
You could set your watch by that tune as confidently as by the roundhouse
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 the
boys and girls tramped and tramped the board sidewalks-- northward to the
edge of the open prairie, south to the depot, then back again to the
post-office, the ice-cream parlour, the butcher shop. Now there was a
place where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could
laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence
seemed to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black
maple trees with the bats and shadows. Now it was broken by lighthearted
sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni's harp came in silvery ripples
through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night; then the violins fell
in--one of them was almost like a flute. They called so archly, so
seductively, that our feet hurried toward the tent of themselves. Why
hadn't we had a tent before?
Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer
before. The Progressive Euchre Club arranged with the Vannis for the
exclusive use of the floor on Tuesday and Friday nights. At other times
anyone could dance who paid his money and was orderly; the railroad men,
the roundhouse mechanics, the delivery boys, the iceman, the farm-hands who
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 midnight
then. The country boys came in from farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and the
Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who found
these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to the
Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with their
sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with `the hired girls.'
IX
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 meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls,
who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from
poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia,
been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an
old country to a new.
I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black
Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something
unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a
race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour which, when they
got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive
carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black
Hawk women.
That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk
more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis-court
in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the
daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high-school girls were jolly
and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in
summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their bodies never
moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not
to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom,
gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like
cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put
there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
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