Ann Vickers E-Book

Sinclair Lewis

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

First published in 1933, Sinclair Lewis's "Ann Vickers" is a masterpiece that tells the story of a extremely complex character. Ann Vickers is a strong-minded prison superintendent dedicated to enlightened social reform, she also seeks to fulfil herself as a sexual being. The protagonist is in all respects her own person, standing up to the confining rules of her society.

Some reviewers were outraged by "Ann Vickers" when it first appeared in 1933. " Persons unused to horrid and filthy things had better stay at a safe distance from this book," wrote one.

The controversy provoked by his works (such as "Babbitt" and "Ann Vickers") was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930.

Leseprobe

Table of contents

ANN VICKERS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

ANN VICKERS

Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 1

SLOW yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play. Four children, sharp–voiced and innocent and eager, and blessedly unaware that compromise and weariness will come at forty–five.

* * * * *

The three boys, Ben, Dick, and Winthrop, having through all the past spring suffered from history lessons, sought to turn them to decent use by playing Queen Isabella and Columbus. There was dissension as to which of them should be Isabella. While they debated, there came into that willow grove, that little leaf–littered place holy to boyhood, a singing girl.

“Jiminy, there’s Ann Vickers. She’ll be Iserbella,” said Winthrop.

“Ah, no, gee, she’ll hog the whole thing,” said Ben. “But I guess she can play Iserbella better than anybody.”

“Ah, she can not! She’s no good at baseball.”

“No, she ain’t much good at baseball, but she threw a snowball at Reverend Tengbom.”

“Yes, that’s so, she threw that snowball.”

The girl stopped before them, arms akimbo—a chunk of a girl, with sturdy shoulders and thin legs. Her one beauty, aside from the fresh clarity of her skin, was her eyes, dark, surprisingly large, and eager.

“Come on and play Iserbella ’n’ Columbus,” demanded Winthrop.

“I can’t,” said Ann Vickers. “I’m playing Pedippus.”

“What the dickens is Pedippus?”

“He was an ole hermit. Maybe it was Pelippus. Anyway, he was an ole hermit. He was a great prince and then he left the royal palace because he saw it was wicked, and he gave up all the joys of the flesh and he went and lived in the desert on—oh, on oatmeal and peanut butter and so on and so forth, in the desert, and prayed all the time.”

“That’s a rotten game. Oatmeal!”

“But the wild beasts of the desert, they were all around him, catamounts and everything, and he tamed them and they used to come hear him preach. I’m going to go preach to them now! And enormous big bears!”

“Aw, come on play Iserbella first,” said Winthrop. “I’ll let you take my revolver while you’re Iserbella—but I get it back—I get the revolver while I’m Columbus!”

He handed it over, and she inspected it judiciously. She had never had the famous weapon in her hand, though it was notorious through all of childland that Winthrop owned so remarkable a possession. It was a real revolver, a .22, and complete in all its parts, though it is true that the barrel was so full of rust that a toothpick could not have been inserted at the muzzle. Ann waved it, fascinated and a little nervous. To hold it made her feel heroic and active; it is to be feared that she lost immediately the chaste austerity of Pedippus.

“All right,” she said.

“You’re Iserbella and I’m Columbus,” said Winthrop, “and Ben is King Ferdinand, and Dick is a jealous courtesan. You see all the guys in the court are crabbing me, and you tell ’em to lay off and——”

Ann darted to a broken willow bough. She held it drooping over her head with her left hand—always her right clutched the enchanted revolver—and mincing back to them she demanded, “Kneel down, my lieges. No, you Ferdinand, I guess you got to stand up, if you’re my concert—no, I guess maybe you better kneel, too, just to make sure. Now prithee, Columbus, what can I do for you today?”

The kneeling Winthrop screamed, “Your Majesty, I want to go discover America…. Now you start crabbing, Dick.”

“Ah, gee, I don’t know what to say…. Don’t listen to him, Queen, he’s a crazy galoot. There ain’t any America. All his ships will slide off the edge of the earth.”

“Who’s running this, courtesan? I am! Certainly he can have three ships, if I have to give him half of my kingdom. What thinkest thou, concert?—you Ben, I mean you?”

“Who? Me? Oh, it’s all right with me, Queen.”

“Then get thee to the ships.”

Moored to the river bank was an old sand barge. The four children raced to it, Ann flourishing the revolver. She led them all, fastest and most excited. At the barge, she cried, “Now, I’m going to be Columbus!”

“You are not,” protested Winthrop. “I’m Columbus! You can’t be Iserbella and Columbus! And you’re only a girl. You gimme that revolver!”

“I am, too, Columbus! I’m the best Columbus. So now! Why, you can’t even tell me the names of Columbus’s ships!”

“I can too!”

“Well, what were they?”

“Well, I can’t just——Neither can you, smarty!”

“Oh, I can’t, can’t I!” crowed Ann. “They were the Pinto and the Santa Lucheea and—and the Armada!”

“Gee, that’s right. I guess she better be Columbus,” marveled the dethroned King Ferdinand, and the great navigator led her faithful crew aboard the Santa Lucia, nor was the leap across that three feet of muddy water any delicate and maidenly exhibition.

Columbus took her station in the bow—as much as a double–ender scow possesses a bow—and, shading her eyes, looking over the thirty feet of creek, she cried, “A great, terrible storm is coming, my men! Closehaul the mainsail! Reef all the other sails! My cats, how it thunders and lightens! Step lively, my brave men, and your commander will lend a hand!”

Between them they got down all the sails before the hurricane struck the gallant vessel. The hurricane (perhaps assisted by the crew, standing on one side of the barge and jumping up and down) threatened to capsize the unfortunate caravel, but the crew cheered nobly. They were encouraged, no doubt, by the example of their commander, who stood with her right leg boldly thrust forward, one hand on her breast and the other holding out the revolver, while she observed, loudly, “Bang, bang, bang!”

But the storm continued, viciously.

“Let’s sing a chantey to show we have stout hearts!” commanded Columbus, and she led them in her favorite ballad:

“ Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way.

Oh! What fun it is to ride,

In a one–horse open sleigh!”

The storm gave up.

They were approaching Watling’s Island now. Peering across the turbulent water, often broken by the leap of a pickerel, Ann perceived savage bands roaming the shore.

“See, yonder, among the palms and pagodas! Pesky redskins!” warned Columbus. “We must prepare to sell our lives dearly!”

“That’s right,” agreed her crew, gaping at the dread row of mullen weeds across the creek.

“What d’you kids think you’re doing?”

The voice was perfectly strange.

They turned to see, standing on the bank, a new boy. Ann stared with lively admiration, for this was a hero out of a story book. Toward such mates as Ben and Winthrop, she had no awe; except in the arts of baseball and spitting, she knew herself as good a man as they. But the strange boy, perhaps two years older than herself, was a god, a warrior, a leader, a menace, a splendor: curly–headed, broad–shouldered, slim–waisted, smiling cynically, his nose thin and contemptuous.

“What d’you kids think you’re doing?”

“We’re playing Columbus. Want to play?” The crew were surprised at Ann’s meekness.

“Nah! Playing!” The stranger leaped aboard—a clean leap where the others had panted and plumped. “Let’s see that gun.” He took the revolver from Columbus, casually, and worshipingly she yielded it. He snapped it open and looked into the barrel. “It’s no blame good. I’ll throw it overboard.”

“Oh, please don’t!” It was Ann who wailed, before Winthrop, the owner, could make warlike noises.

“All right, kid. Keep it. Who are you? What’s your name? My name is Adolph Klebs. My dad and I just come to town. He’s a shoemaker. He’s a Socialist. We’re going to settle here, if they don’t run us out. They run us out of Lebanon. Haa! I wasn’t scared of ’em! ‘You touch me and I’ll kick you in the eye,’ that’s what I told the policeman. He was scared to touch me. Well, come on, if we’re going to play Columbus. I’ll be Columbus. Gimme that gun again. Now you kids get busy and line the side of the boat. There’s a whole slew of redskins coming off in canoes.”

And it was Adolph–Columbus who now observed, “Bang, bang, bang!” as he introduced European culture to primitive Americans by shooting them down, and of all his followers none was more loyal, or noisy, than Ann Vickers.

She had never before encountered a male whom she felt to be her superior, and in surrender she had more joy than in her blithe and cocky supremacy of old.

* * * * *

In this town of Waubanakee, Illinois, a little south of the center of the state, Ann Vickers’s father was Superintendent of Schools, known always as “Professor.” His position made him one of the local gentry, along with three doctors, two bank presidents, three lawyers (one of them justice of the peace), the proprietor of the Boston Store, and the Episcopal, Congregational, and Presbyterian ministers.

Physically, Waubanakee does not much enter Ann’s story. Like most Americans who go from Main Street to Fifth Avenue or Michigan Avenue or Market Street, and unlike most Britons and Continentals from the provinces, after childhood she kept no touch with her native soil; never returned to it after the death of her parents; had no longing to acquire a manor there, as a climax to careers and grandeurs, or, like an Anglo–Indian pro–consul, to be buried in the village cemetery.

Her mother died when she was but ten, her father a year before Ann went to college. She had no brothers or sisters. When she was middle–aged, Waubanakee was a memory, a little humorous, a little touching—a picture she had seen in youth, unreal, romantic, and lost.

Yet that small town and its ways, and all her father’s principles of living, entered into everything she was to do in life. Sobriety, honest work, paying his debts, loyalty to his mate and to his friends, disdain of unearned rewards—he once refused a tiny legacy from an uncle whom he had despised—and a pride that would let him neither cringe nor bully, these were her father’s code, and in a New York where spongers and sycophants and gayly lying people, pretty little people, little playing people, were not unknown even among social workers and scientists, that code haunted her, and she was not sorry or Freudian about it … and, though she laughed at herself, if she had not paid all her bills by the fourth of the month, she was uneasy.

She once heard Carl Van Doren say in a lecture that before he had left his native village of Hope, Illinois, he had met, in essence, everyone whom he was ever to meet. Ann agreed. The Swedish carpenter at Waubanakee, who talked of Swedenborg, differed only in accent from the Russian grand duke whom thirty years after she was to meet in New York and hear amiably flounder through a froth of metaphysics.

Yes, so deep was Waubanakee in her heart that all her life Ann caught herself naïvely classifying acquaintances as Good People and Bad People, as implicitly as had her Sunday–school teacher in the Waubanakee Presbyterian Church. Here was a Charming Chap, witty, smiling, belonging to the best circles of New York, and never repaying the money he “borrowed,” never keeping his dinner engagements. Well! To the little Ann Vickers of Waubanakee, who was never quite extinguished in that Great Reformer, Dr. Ann Vickers (Hon. LL. D.), this man was Bad—he was Bad just as the village drunk of Waubanakee was Bad to her father, the Professor.

It was a prejudice she could never much regret.

She came far enough along in American tradition to be as little ashamed of an American provincial origin as a British Prime Minister is of his Scottish village birth, or a French Premier of Provence. Till her day and moment, it had been fashionable among most Americans with a keen awareness and some experience of the world either to sigh that pride in Arkansas is insular and chauvinistic or, with a reverse humility, to boast of its rustic perfections. But Ann had the extraordinary luck (along with some 120,000,000 other Americans) to live in the magnificent though appalling moment when the United States began awkwardly to see itself not as an illegitimate child of Europe but as the master of its own proud house.

There are but frayed cords binding such ambitious, out–stepping American girls as Ann, not only to their native villages, but even to their families, unless they are of recent Jewish or German or Italian origin. If they thus lose the richness and security of European family solidarity, equally they are free from the spiritual and social incest of such nagging relationships.

But in Manhattan, Ann was some day to be mildly glad that through her father and Waubanakee she was related to the bourgeois colony which, up to 1917, was the only America.

Chapter 2

WAUBANAKEE did not vastly care for the newly come cobbler, Oscar Klebs, father of the dashing Adolph. In Ann’s childhood, the prairie towns, from Zanesville to Dodge City, still had no notion that they were part of the Great World. They felt isolated—they were isolated.

Oh, it was all right to be German (only they said “Dutch”) like Oscar Klebs.

“There’s some darn’ good Dutchmen, by golly—just as good as you and me. Take the priest of the German Catholic Church. Course a lot of his congregation are dumm Dutch farmers, but he’s a real guy, he certainly is, and they say he’s studied in Rome, Italy, and a lot of these places. But believe me, he hasn’t got any more use for these darn Europeans than I have. But now this Dutch shoemaker, this fellow Klebs, they say he’s a Socialist, and I want to tell you, we haven’t got any room in this country for a bunch of soreheads that want to throw a lot of bombs and upset everything. No sir, we haven’t!”

But it chanced that the only other cobbler in town was a drunken Yankee who could never be trusted to half–sole shoes in time for the I. O. O. F. dance on Saturday evening, and, regretfully, irritably, the reigning burghers of Waubanakee took their work to a man who was so anarchistic as to insist, even right at the bar of the Lewis & Clarke Tavern, that the Stokeses and Vanderbilts had no right to their fortunes.

They were cross with him.

Mr. Evans, president of the Lincoln and Douglas Bank, said testily, “Now I’ll tell you, Klebs. This is a land of opportunity, and we don’t like these run–down and I might say degenerate Europeans telling us where we get off. In this country, a man that can do his work gets recognition, including financial, and if I may say so, sir, without being rude, you can’t hardly say it’s our fault if you haven’t made good!”

“By golly, sir, that’s right!” said the hired man for Lucas Bradley.

* * * * *

Professor Vickers was dimly astonished when Ann brought her everyday shoes to him and complained, “Papa, these need half–soling.” Customarily, Ann was unconscious of worn soles, missing buttons, or uncombed hair.

“Well, my little girl is beginning to look after her things! That’s fine! Yes, you take ’em around tomorrow. Have you done your Sunday school lesson?” he said, with the benign idiocy and inconsequentiality characteristic of parents.

This was on Sunday, the day after the miraculous appearance of Adolph Klebs, the king–Columbus. On Monday morning, at eight, Ann took the shoes to Oscar Klebs, in his new shop which had formerly been the Chic Jewelry Store (the first word to rhyme with Quick). On the shelf above his bench, there was already a row of shoes with that curiously human look that empty shoes maintain—the knobbly work–shoes of the farm–hand, with weariness in every thick and dusty crease, the dancing slippers of the slightly dubious village milliner, red and brave in the uppers but sleazy and worn below. Of these, Ann saw nothing. She stared at Oscar Klebs as she had stared at his son Adolph. He was quite the most beautiful old man she had ever seen—white–bearded, high and fine of forehead, with delicate pale blue veins in a delicate linen skin.

“Good–morning, young lady,” said Oscar. “And what can I do for you?”

“Please, I would like to get these shoes half–soled. They’re my everyday shoes. I got on my Sunday shoes!”

“And why do you wear a different pair for Sundays?”

“Because it is the Sabbath.”

“And isn’t every day the Sabbath for people that work?”

“Yes, I guess it is…. Where’s Adolph?”

“Did you ever stop to think, young lady, that the entire capitalist system is wrong? That you and I should work all day, but Evans, the banker, who just takes in our money and lends it back to us again, should be rich? I do not even know your name, young lady, but you have luffly eyes—I t’ink intelligent. T’ink of it! A new world! From each so much as he can give, to each so much as he needs. The Socialist state! From Marx. Do you like that, young lady? Hein? A state in which all of us work for each other?”

It was perhaps the first time in the life of Ann Vickers that a grown–up had talked to her as an equal; it was perhaps the first time in her life that she had been invited to consider any social problem more complicated than the question as to whether girls really ought to throw dead cats over fences. It was perhaps the beginning of her intellectual life.

The little girl—she was so small, so innocent, so ignorant!—sat with her chin tight in her hand, in the terrible travail of her first abstract thinking.

“Yes,” she said, and “Yes.” Then, thought like lightning in her brain, “That is what we must have! Not some rich and some poor. All right! But, Mr. Klebs, what do we do? What shall I start doing now?”

Oscar Klebs smiled. He was not a smiling man—he suffered, as always the saints have suffered, because Man has not become God. But now he almost grinned, and betrayed himself, chuckling:

“ Do? Do, my young lady? Oh, I suppose you’ll just go on talking, like me!”

“No,” she said pitifully. “I don’t want to just talk! I want Winthrop Zeiss to have as nice a house as Mr. Evans. Golly! He’s lots nicer, Winthrop is. I want to——Gee, Mr. Klebs, I’d like to do things in life!”

The old man stared at her, silently. “You will, my dear, God bless your soul!” said he—the atheist. And Ann forgot to ask again about the glorious Adolph.

* * * * *

But she did see Adolph, and often.

Oscar Klebs’s shop became her haunt, more thrilling even than the depot, where every afternoon at five all detachable children gathered to watch the Flyer go through to Chicago. Oscar told her of a world that hitherto had been colored but flat, a two–dimensional mystery in the geography; of working in 1871 in a lumber camp in Russia—where some day there would be a revolution, he said—of the Tyrol (he combined with atheism an angry belief that in the stables of the Tyrol the cows do talk aloud at Christmas midnight)—of carp that come up and ask you for crumbs in the pool at Fontainebleau—of the walls of Cartagena, which are ten feet thick and filled with gold hidden there by pirates—of the steamers on which he had sailed as mess–boy, and what scouse is like in the fo’c’sle—of the lone leper who sits forever on the beach in Barbados, looking out to sea and praying—of what sort of shoes the Empress Eugénie wore—of prime ministers and tavarishes and yogis and Iceland fishermen and numismatists and Erzherzogen and all manner of men unknown to Waubanakee, Illinois, till the Socialism to which Oscar converted her was not very clearly to be distinguished from the romance of Kipling.

And while he talked to the ruddy girl, on her stool, her eyes exalted, Oscar Klebs kept up a tat–tat–tat, tat–tat–tat, like a little drum.

And Adolph came in.

He never sat down. It was hard to think of that steel spring of a boy ever sitting. He belonged not to the sedentary and loquacious generation of his father, but to a restless new age of machinery, of flashing cam–shafts, polished steel, pistons ramming gayly into a hell of exploding gas, dynamos humming too deep for words. Had he been a boy in 1931 instead of 1901, he would have responded to all his father’s ponderous propositions with “Oh, yeah?” But in 1901 his “Yuh, sure!” was equally impertinent, sharp, and antagonistic to fuzzy philosophizing. Tall, mocking, swift, leaning against doors and walls as though he were about to leap, his hands ever in his pockets, he was to Ann Vickers the one perfect hero she had ever known.

Now the theory was that Ann was being respectably educated by her father and mother, by the Waubanakee public schools, and the Sunday school of the First (and only) Waubanakee Presbyterian Church, with the select and frilly children of Banker Evans for social guidance. Actually it was from the cobbler and his son, and from her father’s vices of paying debts and being loyal, that she learned most of what she was ever to know, and all this was dual and contradictory, so that she was herself to be dual and contradictory throughout her life. From old Oscar she learned that all of life was to foresee Utopia; from Adolph she learned that to be hard, self–contained, and ready was all of life.

Sitting by the Waubanakee River (which was no river, but a creek) she once or twice tried to tell Adolph what she regarded as her ideas:

That Oscar was right, and we must, preferably immediately, have a Socialist state in which, like monks, we labor one for another.

That it wasn’t a bit nice to drink beer, or to appear in certain curious revelations, behind barns, of the differences between little boys and little girls.

That algebra was pretty slick, once you got onto it.

That the Idylls of the King by Mr. Lord Tennyson was awful exciting.

That if Jesus died for us—as, of course, He did—it was simply horrid of us to sleep late on Sunday, and not take our baths in time to get to Sunday school.

Adolph smiled always while she was earnestly talking. He smiled while his father was talking. All his life he was to smile while people were talking. But it cut Ann and made her a little timid. She did mean, so intently, the “ideas” which she babbled forth—on a sand barge, by a slow river flowing in the shadow of willows that slowly waved in the tepid August airs.

If his supercilious smile was really from a higher wisdom, fitted to the steel of the machine age, or if it was only a splendidly total lack of intellect, neither Ann nor any one else will ever know. Some day he was to be the manager of a fairly good garage in Los Angeles, and Oscar to sleep irritably in the Catholic Cemetery of Waubanakee, Illinois.

* * * * *

Even without old Oscar, Ann would never have been completely a conformist. In Sunday school in the Girls’ Intermediate Class (teacher, Mrs. Fred Graves, wife of the owner of the lumber yard) she first exploded as a feminist.

The lesson was of the destruction of Sodom, with the livelier portions of the tale omitted. Mrs. Graves was droning, drowsy as a bumblebee, “But Lot’s wife looked back at the awful city instead of despising it; and so she was turned into a pillar of salt, which is a very important lesson for us all, it shows us the penalty of disobedience, and also how we hadn’t ought to even look at or hanker for wicked things and folks. That’s just as bad as if we actually had something to do with them or indulged——”

“Please, Mrs. Graves!” Ann’s voice, a little shrill. “Why shouldn’t Mrs. Lot look back at her own hometown? She had all her neighbors there, and maybe she’d had some lovely times with them. She just wanted to say good–bye to Sodom!”

“Now, Annie, when you get wiser than the Bible——! Lot’s wife was disobedient; she wanted to question and argue, like some little girls I know! See, it says in Verse 17: ‘Look not behind thee.’ That was a divine command.”

“But couldn’t the Lord change her back into a lady again, after He’d been so cranky with her?”

Mrs. Graves was becoming holy. Her eyes glittered, her eyeglasses quivered on their hook on her righteous brown–silk bosom. The other girls crouched with the beginnings of fear—and giggling. Ann felt the peril, but she simply had to understand these problems over which she had fretted in “getting” the Sunday school lesson.

“Couldn’t the Lord have given her another chance, Mrs. Graves? I would, if I was Him!”

“I have never in my life heard such sacrilegious——”

“No, but—Lot was awful mean! He never sorrowed and carried on about Mrs. Lot a bit! He just went off and left her there, a lonely pillar of salt. Why didn’t he speak to the Lord about it? In those days folks were always talking to the Lord; it says so, right in the Bible. Why didn’t he tell the Lord to not be so mean and go losing His temper like that?”

“Ann Emily Vickers, I shall speak to your father about this! I have never heard such talk! You can march yourself right out of this class and out of this Sunday school, right now, and later I’ll talk to your father!”

Stunned, anarchistic with this early discovery of Injustice yet too amazed to start a riot, Ann crawled down the church aisle, through an innumerable horde of children giggling and sharpening their fingers at her shame, into a world where no birds sang; a Sabbath world of terrible and reproving piety. Her indignation was stirring, though, and when she reached home, to find her father just dressed for church, shoe–shined, bathed, and wearing the Prince Albert, she burst out with the uncensored story of her martyrdom.

He laughed. “Well, it doesn’t sound very serious to me, Annie. Don’t worry about what Sister Graves will say.”

“But it’s very important about how that nasty man Lot acted! I got to do something!”

He was opening the front door, still laughing.

She fled through the kitchen, past the hired girl, astonished in her cooking of the regulation fricasseed chicken, through the back yard, to the path up Sycamore Hill. She scolded to herself, “Yes, it’s men like Lot and the Lord and my Dad—laughing!—that make all the trouble for us women!” She did not look around; she kept her sturdy back toward the village till she had dog–trotted halfway up the hillock.

She swung about, held out her hands to the roofs of Waubanakee, and cried, “Farewell, farewell! Sodom, I adore thee! All right, God!” And she raised expectant eyes to Heaven.

Chapter 3

FROM eleven to fifteen Ann cuddled to her a romantic affection for Adolph Klebs. It is not to be supposed that she made herself more than normally and wholesomely ridiculous by mooning over him, or that she had nothing else to do. She was busy—like a puppy. There were adventures every day, then: skating, sliding, fishing, swimming, trapping a rabbit—just once, and releasing it afterward with screams of pity; nursing dogs and cats and ducklings, often to their great distress and inconvenience; discovering Vergil and Lord Macaulay and Hamlet and the vast new art of motion pictures and the automobile. Hearing a lovely elocutionist gentleman with black wavy hair recite Kipling at the entertainment of the Order of the Eastern Star. Baking and sweeping and ironing—she loved ironing; it made things so crisp and smooth. Doing all the housework in the not infrequent hiatuses between hired girls. Always, caring for her other–worldly father, who seemed far more of an orphan, more bewildered and disorganized than herself: laying out his handkerchief, putting his muffler on him, hustling him out for a Sunday afternoon walk. She came to look on the race of males so protectively that it was questionable whether she would ever love one whom she could not bully and nurse.

But daily she saw Adolph and his mighty ways.

They were in the same class in school, and though all his scholarship consisted in smiling condescendingly when he didn’t know the answer, he seemed superior. He could swim better, fight better, skate better, and pitch better than any boy in the gang. He was not afraid of the town policeman, even on Hallowe’en, when the gang perilously stole certain outhouses and arranged them as a miniature street in the school yard, with signs from the Main Street stores upon them, to the delight of the ribald next morning. And he could dance better—but other girls besides Ann had learned this, and sometimes at a party of the young set, she ached for his “Mave honor thdance thyou?” all through a barren evening.

Perhaps the grandest party Ann had yet seen was given by Mrs. Marston T. Evans, wife of the president of the Lincoln & Douglas Bank, president of the Midstate Plow & Wagon Works—the Lorenzo de’ Medici, the J. P. Morgan, the Baron Rothschild of Waubanakee—for their daughter Mildred, on her fifteenth birthday, which happened to be two months after the fifteenth birthday of Ann Vickers.

Ann had always admired, had envied a little, the Evans mansion. It was white, with a green turret, very tall; it had both a parlor and a library. The parlor had a parquet floor, dark and much polished, with a genuine tigerskin rug, and on the wall two genuine hand–painted paintings, very ancient, perhaps seventy–five years old, said to be worth hundreds of dollars apiece. In the library there were rows of books in gilt and leather bindings, behind locked glass doors.

All that Saturday in May, while the hired girl helped prepare her party dress, Ann wondered whether Adolph Klebs would be at the party. She had not dared to ask him, and rumors differed. Adolph did not answer personal questions; he had a witty way of retorting, always, “Who stole the fish–pole?”

It was hard to think of a socialistic cobbler’s son invited by Mr. and Mrs. Marston T. Evans. But Mildred was believed to be “crazy about him.”

“I’ll die if he isn’t there—and my dress so pretty!” agonized Ann, seemingly so sturdy and independent over the ironing–board.

Her new party dress was not a new party dress. Last summer it had been a new white organdy with a red sash, noble for summer evenings. Now she had with her own hands (which for a week looked like those of a Solomon Islander) dyed it pale blue, and all day the cook and she had been sewing on little white cuffs and collar, and ironing the frock till it flared out fresh as new.

She had a lace shawl of her mother’s for her head, and her father had voluntarily bought for her cobalt–blue dancing slippers. (Sometimes, years after, she wondered whether her father, the Professor, so sober over his school records and Carlyle and Educational Review, had really been so incurably adult a parent as she had thought him. She missed him, when he was dead and she would never hear again the chuckle that once had infuriated her.)

The party was to be late—some of the gang said they were expected to stay till eleven, and they were summoned for eight o’clock, not seven or seven–thirty, like an ordinary bourgeois party in Waubanakee.

There was no moon as she scampered to the party, a little late after her dressmaking. But there was an afterglow warmer and more tender than moonlight, which, for all its celebrity, is a somewhat chill and mocking illumination, made of the breath of dying lovers. The thick sycamores along Nancy Hanks Street showed sculptured blocks of leafage against the afterglow, and the bark–stripped gashes on their trunks were mysterious blanks in the dusk. The air was full of village murmur, of distant laughter and clopping horses and the barking of a farm–yard dog—a shadow of noise. And Ann was happy.

She was excited, a little startled, as she came round the corner and saw afar the exceeding glory of the party. There were lighted Japanese lanterns on the Evans lawn, and not just a string or two, as at a church festival, but lanterns hung from the box–elders along the front picket fence, lanterns in every spruce and rosebush scattered on the lawn, lanterns entirely across the immense front porch! It was Paris! And, nearer, Ann saw that on the lawn—right outside, outdoors, in the evening!—was a Refreshment Table heaped with every known delicacy in the world: several kinds of cake, innumerable pitchers of lemonade and other delicate drinks, with three visible freezers of ice cream, while a girl help—not the regular Evans hired girl but an extra one, for the evening—was already serving ice cream from these freezers to young ladies and gentlemen palpitatingly holding out saucers.

Refreshments right from the beginning of the party, maybe all through it, and not just at the end!

But, fretted the conscientious spirit that was always nagging at the adventurous in Ann, wouldn’t maybe some of them get sick to their stomachs, with so much rich food all evening?

Sudden and brilliant as a skyrocket the music flashed, and she saw that there was dancing—on the porch, outside, outdoors!—and to no mere phonograph, but a full, complete orchestra: piano (moved right out on the porch!), fiddle, and clarinet; and the clarinet was played by no less a one than Mr. Bimby of the Eureka Dry Goods Store, leader of the Waubanakee Band!

It was too much. Ann fled. She—the diver, the walker on ridgepoles—had social panic; she dashed into darkness and stood biting the end of her forefinger. (She was later to feel just so when, after blandly presiding over a large meeting of wealthy, high–minded, and complacently dull ladies, importantly gathered for impossible reforms, she was suddenly escorted into a screaming night club in New York.)

With no more exhilaration but with aching dutifulness she marched back to the Evans mansion and through the gate. It got worse. She felt herself dressed in old calico. The other girls were so dainty: Mildred Evans in lace over pink satin; Mabel McGonegal (the doctor’s eldest) in ruby velvet with a rhinestone necklace; Faith Durham in airy Japanese silk—so dainty, so feminine, so winsome, so light; herself so ordinary and stodgy!

(She did not note that most of the twenty other girls displayed even more familiar and less exotic frocks than her own. At any party Mildred and Mabel and Faith managed to preen and giggle and arch themselves into the foreground. They were not very good at Latin or cooking, but they were born to be brilliant, to marry Lithuanian counts, to be movie stars, or to live gloriously on alimony and cocktails.)

Like a sturdy old farm dog amazed by a high–stepping greyhound, Ann stared at them as they revolved to the heavenly strains. But Mrs. Evans sailed up to her so graciously, she so benevolently cackled, “Why, Annie dear, we’ve missed you—we did hope you wouldn’t fail us—you must come and have a nice fruit lemonade before you dance!” that Ann was restored. And what a lemonade that was! The great soda fountain had not yet in its morning splendor dawned on the Western World; at the drug store you took vanilla ice cream soda or you took vanilla ice cream. The fruit lemonade which Mrs. Evans introduced to Ann (without explaining just what a non–fruit lemonade might be) was seething with cracked ice, sliced pineapple, sliced orange, and two red cherries! Ann sipped as in paradise, until she realized that Mrs. Evans had left her.

Alone! She wanted to sneak away.

She saw then that, shadowed by a spruce, sitting on a camp stool and also drinking a fruit lemonade, was Adolph Klebs.

“Hello, Annie. Come on over and sit down,” he called, and he was actually wheedling.

It was a tribute Adolph was not likely to have again in this life that Ann set her lemonade down on the refreshment table not only unfinished but with one of the cherries unsecured. Beside Adolph was another canvas stool, and Ann squatted on it, her chin on her hands.

“Why aren’t you dancing?” she said.

“Oh, the hell with ’em! They’re too tony for me. I’m the crazy old shoemaker’s kid! Why aren’t you? Your old man is rich, like them!”

She did not stoop to the false modesty of denying this; it was true, of course—her father made twenty–eight hundred a year. But: “Oh, you’re crazy! They’re all crazy about you! Why, Dolph, you’re the best dancer in town! The girls are all crazy to dance with you!”

“Hell with ’em! Lookit, Ann, you and me are the only square kids here. Those girls, they’re just a bunch of flirts. They can’t go hunting and swim and everything like what you can, and they ain’t half as smart in school, and—and you never lie, and they’re all a bunch of liars and so on. But you’re a dandy kid, Annie. You’re my girl!”

“Am I? Am I honest your girl?”

“You bet your sweet life you are!”

“Oh, Dolph, that’s dandy! I’d like to be your girl!”

She held his hand. He awkwardly kissed her cheek. That was all of their caressing. Long kisses and greater intimacies did exist, in this evening of the Age of Innocence, but “necking” was not yet a public and accepted sport.

“Let’s go and dance. We’ll show ’em!” she said stoutly.

As they crossed the lawn into more brilliant light, she realized that her Man was as magnificently clad as Morgan Evans—a real blue serge suit, an enormously high collar, an elegant green bow–tie with figures of tiny white clover leaves and, fashionably matching it, a green silk handkerchief drooping out of his breast pocket.

Though it was curious that he, the shoemaker’s son, had no pumps, like some of the aristocrats, but only his high thick black shoes.

A square dance was just finished; a two–step starting as Ann and Adolph defiantly mounted to the porch. Oh, that foaming, moonlight music, to which the entranced romantics sang:

“ Oh, this is the day they give babies away

With a half—a–pound—o’ teeeeea!”

In Adolph’s arms she was not earnest. Her strength flowed into his and she was borne effortless round and round. She was a soap–bubble, a butterfly, an evening swallow. She forgot her rivals with their elegancies; she hadn’t even to dodge them in dancing. Adolph led her, with magic sureness. Though they danced morally, eight inches apart, his dear, strong, nervous hand was against her back, electric as a battery.

Then the music ceased, she tumbled from Heaven, she stood bewildered, while Mrs. Evans shrieked in her clear, strong, Christian voice, “Now, children, let’s play ‘Skip to Malloo’!”

Ann and her Beau were separated. His shyness before the grandeurs of this new Fête of Versailles seemed to have waned. No one bounced more blithely in the game, sang louder. Adolph was older than the others, but he was adaptable. Last night he had been surreptitiously drinking beer with worldly men of twenty; tonight he dominated the children. When they danced again, Ann looked for Adolph, her glance toward him like outreaching arms, but he danced first with Faith, then with Mabel McGonegal, courtly daughter of the doctor (she could play the banjo and recite French Canuck dialect poems), and at last with Mildred Evans herself.

Mrs. Evans, looking on, clucked to her lord, “You see, the Klebs boy is quite a gentleman.”

“Yes. After all, this is a democracy. After all, I was born on a farm myself,” marveled Mr. Marston T. Evans.

But Ann Vickers watched that swaying waltz of Adolph and Mildred with the eyes again of a hurt old farm dog.

She was “sitting out.” She had danced a two–step with her faithful comrade–at–arms, Winthrop, but after the quicksilver of Adolph, it was agony. She had seemed to be dragging Winthrop like a cart. They bumped into every one. And though Winthrop’s hearty and irritating humming followed the music, his honest feet protested against all frivolity and walked right on through the nonsense.

They played Post Office.

When the Postmaster, stationed at the door of the darkened library, with Adolph within as the fortunate receiver of kisses, inspected the girls to see which he should choose, they looked more than commonly self–conscious. Adolph was at once an outcast and king of the party; he was a Robin Hood fluttering the provincial court.

“Uh—uh—Ann!” called the Postmaster.

Giggles.

“She’s crazy about um!” Mabel whispered to Mildred.

Ann did not hear, which was well for Mabel. Ann’s vengeance was in a modest way terrible as the Lord’s.

She did not hear. On wings she sailed into the darkened room. It had ceased to be an elegant library and became a cave of wonder and exaltation. She knocked against things that surely had not been there. She was lost and joyous. She held out her hands to—what? Of bodily ardors she had in her innocence no idea. It was the essence of love she wanted, now, not its husk … however realistically she was some day to know that flesh is not the foe but the interpreter of love.

“Come on!” she heard Adolph grunt.

He dabbled at her; his kiss licked the corner of her jaw; he muttered, “Now it’s your turn!” and her knight was hastily opening the door, and gone.

It was Ben who came in then. Since babyhood he had adored Ann, followed her, brought her apples, and never kissed her. Now that he was turning man, it would mean something to him to kiss her. So he giggled rather idiotically as he groped for her. “Gee, I’m scared!” he snickered. He found her in an armchair, and as he diffidently embraced her he cried, “Why, golly, Annie, you’re crying!”

“Oh, oh, please don’t kiss me, Ben!”

“But you’re crying! Was Adolph mean to you?”

“Oh, no, no, it’s just—I ran against a table in the dark.”

Quietly they sat, Ben monotonously patting her shoulder, till she whispered, “I’m all right now. I better go out.”

As she appeared in the door, there was a storm of laughter from the young people, in a circle facing the library door. “Oh, what you an’ Ben been up to! Oh, I guess that was some kissing, Annie!”

And Adolph leered at her.

Only by the sternest and most conscious will did she keep from marching out and going home. She had a definite desire to kill; kill all of them. She made herself sit down, saying nothing. She never did know which girl it was who now went into the library to submit herself to the tepid caresses of Ben.

But she was aware enough when Adolph was summoned to entertain Mabel McGonegal in the dark.

It had often been whispered in the gang that Mabel was a flirt, that she was “awful sweet on the boys.” The party, all save Ann, watched the library door with embarrassed giggles, with all the stirrings of puberty, for five minutes.

“And he stayed with me for five seconds!” Ann raged to herself.

Mabel came out, tossing her slightly ruffled head. But she was, unlike Ann, worldly wise. Before they could mock her, she screamed, “And maybe I didn’t get kissed right!”

In Ann’s heart was cold death.

But when Adolph, in his turn, reappeared, swaggering, proud, she did not agonize as she had expected, but suddenly laughed, as she thought, “Why! He’s just a tomcat! He walks like one!”

And in that instant her love for the hero was gone, so that she did not suffer when she heard Adolph mutter to Mabel McGonegal a canonical, “May see y’ home?”

Herself she was “seen home” by Ben, stumbling foolishly beside her and prefacing all his observations by “Aw, gee,” or “Lookit.”

The afterglow was gone.

At Ann’s gate, Ben complained, “Aw, gee, Ann, why haven’t you got a fellow? You never did have a fellow. Gee, I wish you were my girl!”

Ben was profoundly astonished and embarrassed by being smacked with a hearty kiss, and more astonished that Ann followed it up with, “You’re sweet, but I’ll never be anybody’s girl!” and dashed into the house.

Chapter 4

“I HATE that Evans house! All shiny! I like it here!” raged Ann, when she had left Ben and come into the brown and comfortable dowdiness of the Vickers sitting room…. Gritty Brussels carpet; Hoffmann pictures of Christ; old college textbooks, and Walter Scott and Dickens and Washington Irving and the “English Men of Letters” series and The Jungle and The Birds’ Christmas Carol and Cruden’s Concordance; a highly tufted sofa with an autograph sofa–cushion; and Father’s slippers in a wall–case worked with his initials.

“I like it here. It’s safe!” said Ann, and trudged up to bed.

She took off her splendor of organdy frock scornfully. But she was too neat a soul to do anything so melodramatic as to tear it, to hurl it regally on the floor. She hung it up precisely, smoothing out the skirt, her fingers conscious of the cool crispness.

She brushed her hair, she patted her pillow, but she did not go to bed. She put on her little mackintosh (the Vickers household did not, in 1906, run to dressing–gowns) and sat in a straight chair, looking about the room solemnly, as though she had never seen it before.

It was of only hall–bedroom size, yet there was about it a stripped cleanness which made it seem larger. Ann hated what she called “clutter.” Here were no masses of fly–spotted dance–programs, with little pencils, hanging by the mirror on the bureau; no snapshots of bathing parties on the beach during that wonderful camping party; and not a single Yale or University of Illinois banner!

One shelf of books—Hans Christian Andersen, Water Babies, Lays of Ancient Rome, David Copperfield (stolen from the set downstairs), Le Gallienne’s Quest of the Golden Girl, her mother’s Bible, a book about bees, Hamlet, and Kim, its pages worn black with reading. A bureau with the comb and brush and buttonhook in exact parallels. (Like many rackety and adventurous people, Ann was far more precise in arranging her kit, wherever she was, than the steady folk whose fear of living is matched by their laziness in organizing their dens.)

A prim cot–bed with one betraying feminine sentimentality: a tiny lace–insertion pillow. The straight chair. A reasonably bad carbon print of Watts’s reasonably bad view of Sir Galahad. A wide window, usually open. A rag carpet. And peace.

It was Ann herself, this room. Since the death of her mother, there had been no one to tell her what the room of a well–bred young lady should be. She had made it. Yet she looked at it now, and looked at herself, as alien and strange and incredible.

She talked to herself.

Now it is true that Ann Vickers, at fifteen, was all that she would ever be at forty, except for the trimmings. But it is also true that she could not talk to herself so acidly sharp as she would at forty. Her monologue was cloudy; it was inarticulate emotion. Yet could that emotion have been translated into words, there where she sat, huddled in her little mackintosh, her nails bitter against her palms, it would have run:

“I loved Dolph. Oh, dear Lord, I did love him. Maybe even not quite nice. When that funny thing happened to me, that Father told me not to worry about, I wanted him to kiss me. Oh, darling, I did love you. You were so wonderful—you had such a thin hard body, and you dived—dove?—so beautifully. But you weren’t kind. I thought you meant it, what you said to me tonight under the spruce tree. I thought you meant it! That I wasn’t just a husky girl that could do athletics but nobody could love her.

“I shan’t ever have a real Beau. I guess I’m too vi’lent. Oh, I don’t want to be! I know I plan all the games. I don’t want to. I just can’t keep my mouth shut, I guess…. And all the rest are so damn stupid! …Dear Lord, forgive me that I said ‘damn,’ but they are so damn stupid!

“Ben. He would love me. He is so kind.

“I don’t want to be loved by any spaniels! I am me! I’m going to see the whole world—Springfield and Joliet and maybe Chicago!

“I guess if I ever love anybody that’s as husky as I am, he’ll always be scared of me——

“No, Dolph wasn’t scared. He despised me!”

* * * * *

Suddenly—and there is no clear reason why she should have done so—she was reading the Twenty–fourth Psalm from her mother’s Bible, which was worn along the edges of the black, limp–leather binding, and her voice now, articulate and loud, rose as she chanted:

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

“He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.”

Her father was knocking, with a worried, “Ann! Annie! What is it? Are you sick?”

She hated men then, save the King of glory, for whom she would sacrifice all the smirking Adolphs and complaisant fathers of this world. She felt savage. But she said civilly:

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Daddy. I was just reading—uh—rehearsing something we thought we’d do. I’m terribly sorry I woke you up. Good–night, dear.”

“Did you have a nice party?”

Ann was always to lie like a gentleman, and she caroled:

“Oh, it was lovely. Good–night!”

* * * * *

“Yes, I’ll have to give it up. The boys, the ones I want, they’ll never like me. And golly, I do like them! But I just got to be satisfied with being a boy myself.

“And I don’t want to.

“But I’ll do something! ‘Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors!’

“He was so strong. And slim!

“Oh, him!

“I’ll never be cheap again and want anybody.

“That picture doesn’t hang straight, not quite.

“Girls like Mabel! That hang around the boys!

“I won’t ever give ’em, I won’t ever give the boys another chance to make fun of me for being square with them!

“‘Be ye lift up!’ I’m going to sleep.”

* * * * *

Though often she saw him in the grocery to which he tranquilly retired from the arduous life of learning in the high school, though it was the period when her gang was definitely aligning itself into Girls and Fellows, Ann showed no more interest in Adolph Klebs.

“Jiminy, Ann Vickers is funny,” observed Mildred Evans. “She’s crazy! She says she don’t want to get married. She wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or somethin’, I dunno. She’s crazy!”

Oh, Mildred, how wise you were, how wise you are! Today, married to Ben, have you not the best radio in town? Can you not hear Amos ’n’ Andy, or the wisdom of Ramsay MacDonald relayed from London? Have you not a Buick, while Dr. Ann Vickers jerks along in a chipped Ford? Do you not play bridge, in the choicest company, while she plays pinochle with one silent man? Good Mildred, wise Mildred, you never tackled the world, which will always throw you.

Good–night, Mildred. You are ended.

* * * * *

That Christmas Eve, when Ann was seventeen, was a postcard Christmas Eve. As she scampered to the church for the Sunday school exercises, the kind lights of neighbors’ houses shone on a snowy road where the sleigh tracks were like two lines of polished steel. The moon was high and frosty, and the iced branches of the spruce trees tinkled faintly, and everywhere in the good dry cold was a feeling of festivity.

Ann was absorbed and busy—too busy to have given such attention to clothes and elegance as she had in her days of vanity, at fifteen. She did wish she had something more fashionable than her plaid silk blouse, and she a little hated the thick union suit which her sensible father had bought for her but—oh, well, her days of frivolity were done.

She was teacher of the Girls’ Intermediate Class of the First Presbyterian Church, which had once been taught by Mrs. Fred Graves, now asleep in Greenwood Cemetery, and from which a girl named Annie Vickers had been driven for flippancy about the necessity of disciplining women. The Girls’ Intermediate Class was to present the cantata “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” at the Sunday school exercises, and Ann was hurrying—hurrying—because it was so important that she should be there, that she should take charge of things, that her class should impress the audience.

The church was a very furnace of festivity as she came up to it. The windows were golden, the door was jollily framed in a wooden Gothic arch. On the church porch were all the small boys who, though perhaps neglectful of their Sabbath duties for fifty weeks out of the year, had been edifyingly attendant the past two weeks.

Inside, the church was a cave of green and crystal. Even the helpful mottoes painted on the side walls, “Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” and “Are you saved?” were almost hidden by holly wreaths. But the splendor of it all was the Christmas tree on the platform. Ten good feet it rose, with candles and papier–mâché angels—for on Christmas Eve the Presbyterian Church permitted itself to be so Roman as to admit angels, along with the Christ Child. Candles against the deep green; candles and white angels and silver balls and plentiful snow made of rich cotton batting. And at the foot of the tree were the stockings, one for each of the Presbyterian children, even those who had been convincedly Calvinistic only for the last two weeks; stockings of starchy net, each containing an orange, a bag of hard candy, including peppermints printed in red with such apt mottoes as “Come on, baby!”, three Brazil nuts (better known in Waubanakee as “niggertoes”), a pamphlet copy of the Gospel According to St. John, and a Gift—a tin trumpet or a whistle or a cotton monkey.

They had been purchased by the new pastor, young Reverend Donnelly, out of his salary of $1,800 a year—when he got it. He was not altogether wise, this young man. He frightened adolescents, including Ann Vickers, by the spectacle of an angry old God watching them and trying to catch them in nasty little habits. And his sermons were dull, suffocatingly dull. But he was so kind, so eager! And it was Reverend Donnelly (not, locally, the Reverend Mister) who dashed down the aisle now to greet Ann.

“Miss Vickers! I’m so glad you’re early! We’re going to have a glorious Christmas Eve!”

“Oh I do hope so. Ismyclassready?” demanded the energetic Ann.

The exercises went superbly: the prayer, the singing by the choir and congregation of “Come All Ye Faithful,” the comic song by Dr. Brevers, the dentist, the cantata, with Ann leading, very brisk with her baton; and they came to the real point of the exercises—distribution of the Christmas stockings by Santa Claus, very handsome and benevolent in a red coat and snowy whiskers. Privately, Santa was Mr. Bimby, of the clarinet and the Eureka Dry Goods Store.

Mr. Bimby speaking:

“Now, boys and girls, I’ve, ur, come a long way, all the way from the ice and snow and, ur, the glaciers of the North Pole, because I’ve heard that the boys and girls of the Waubanakee Presbyterian Church was particularly good and done what their parents and teachers told them to, and so I’ve given up my dates with the Pope at Rome and the King of England and all those folks to be with you, myself, personally.”

Ann Vickers, as a participant, had a seat in one of the front pews. A little uneasily she watched a candle drooping on a lower bough of the Christmas tree. She rebuked herself for her phobia, but she could scarce attend to Mr. Bimby’s humor as he rollicked on:

“Now I guess there’s some of you that haven’t been quite as good as maybe you might of been, this past year. And maybe some of you ain’t gone to Sunday school as often as you might of. I know that in my class—I mean, I got a phone call from my friend Ted Bimby, the teacher of the Older Boys’ Class here, and he says sometimes on a nice summer morning——”

The candle was drooping like a tired hand. Ann’s fingers were tight.

“—some of the boys would rather go off fishing than hear the Word of the Lord, and all them lessons that you can learn from the example of Jacob and Abraham and all them old wise folks——”

The candle reached the cotton batting. Instantly the tree was aflame, a gusty and terrible flame. Reverend Donnelly and Santa Claus Bimby stood gaping. It was Ann Vickers who sprang onto the platform, pushing Bimby aside.

The children were screaming, in the utter reasonless terror of children, fighting toward the door.

Ann snatched up the grass rug which adorned the pulpit platform, threw it over the incandescent tree, and with her hands beat down the flames which the rug did not cover, while her whole scorched body hurt like toothache. She raged, she said, “Oh, dear!” in a tone which made it sound worse than “Oh, damn!”

Just as she dropped, she was conscious that the fire was quenched and that Dr. McGonegal was throwing his coonskin coat over the tree. She was hoping the coat would not be burned.

* * * * *

For two weeks Ann lay abed. She was, said Dr. McGonegal, to have no scars save a faint smirch or two on her wrists. And for that two weeks she was a heroine.

Reverend Donnelly called every day. Mr. Bimby brought her a valuable bead wreath. Her father read David Harum to her. The Waubanakee Intelligencer said that she was kin to Susan B. Anthony, Queen Elizabeth, and Joan of Arc.

But what excited her was the calling of Oscar Klebs—his Homeric brow, his white beard, his quiet desperation.

Rather fussily and somewhat incredulous at such a proletarian caller, Professor Vickers brought in the old man, with a falsely cheery, “Another visitor for you, dear.”

The authority of being a heroine gave Ann a courage toward her amiable but still parental parent that she had rarely shown before. She dared to drive him out with an almost wifely inclination of her head toward the door, and she was alone with Oscar.

The old man sat by her bed, patting her hand.

“You were very fine, my little lady. And I am not so bigoted I t’ink it all happened because it was in a church. No, maybe not! But I come——Little Ann, don’t let it make you t’ink that you are a herowine! Life, it is not heroism. It is t’ought. Bless you, my little lady! Now I go!”

It was much the shortest visit she had. And for a week, freed from the duty of being brisk and important about unimportant affairs, she lay abed, thinking—the one week in all her life so far when she had had time to think.

Oscar Klebs seemed always to be sitting beside her, demanding that she think.

“Um—huh. I enjoyed it too much,” she brooded. “Being a heroine! I put out that fire before I had time to realize it. Annie, that was nice of you, putting out that fire. Yes, it was, dear! Mr. Bimby was scared, and so was Reverend Donnelly. You weren’t! And what of that? You just move quicker than most folks. And yet you couldn’t make Adolph love you!

“Oh, dear God, make me solid! Don’t let me ever be too tickled by applause!

“‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.’

“But by golly I did put out that fire, while all those men stood goggling!”

Chapter 5

POINT ROYAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN is a pleasant place of Georgian brick buildings, of lawns and oaks and elms, on the slope of a hill above the Housatonic River, in Connecticut.

Ann Vickers’s father had left her, at his death—he died very quietly and decently, for he was that sort of man—a thousand dollars, all his estate. For the rest of her tuition she waited on table at Dawley Hall, the college dining–room, and corrected papers in sociology.

She was a Junior, now, in the autumn of 1910.

Ann Vickers, aged nineteen, was “appallingly wholesome–looking.” That was her own phrase for it. She was rather tall, large–boned, threatened by fat unless, as she always did, she fought it. Her hair was brown and only by savage attention did she keep it from being mutinous. Her best feature was her eyes, surprisingly dark for her pale skin, and they were eyes that were never blank; they flashed quickly into gayety or anger. Though she was threatened with plumpness about her hips, she had beautiful slim legs, and long hands, very strong. And she, who thought of herself as a quiet person, a field mouse among these splendorous shining girls from Fifth Avenue and Farmington and Brookline, was actually never still, never meek, even to the daughter of a Pittsburgh steel millionaire. She was always being indignant or joyful or deep in sorrow or depressed—in what Lindsay Atwell was later to call her “small mood.” When a play came to Point Royal, and the other girls said “That was a nice show” or “I didn’t think that was so swell,” Ann walked for hours—well, minutes—after it, hating the villain, glorying with the heroine, sometimes loving the hero.

She was, without particularly wanting to be, Important. She was on the basketball team, she was secretary of the cautious Socialist Club, she was vice president of the Y. W. C. A. and, next year, as a Senior, likely to be its president.

For two years she had roomed alone. But this year she was sharing a handsome apartment (it had running water) with Eula Towers, the pale and lovely Eula, given to low lights and delicate colors, to a pale and lovely leaf–green art—a fin de siècle