So Big (A Novel) E-Book

Edna Ferber

• Herausgeber: Cheapest Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 459

Beschreibung

So Big is a 1924 novel written by Edna Ferber. The book was inspired by the life of Antje Paarlberg in the Dutch community of South Holland, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925. The story follows the life of a young woman, Selina Peake De Jong, who decides to be a school teacher in farming country. During her stay on the Pool family farm, she encourages the young Roelf Pool to follow his interests, which include art. Upon his mother's death, Roelf runs away to France. Meanwhile, Selina marries a Dutch farmer named Pervus. They have a child together, Dirk, whom she nicknames "So Big," from the common question and answer "How big is baby? " "So-o-o-o big!". Pervus becomes ill and dies, and Selina is forced to take over working on the farm to give Dirk a future. As Dirk gets older, he works as an architect but is more interested in making money than creating buildings and becomes a stock broker, much to his mother's disappointment. His love interest, Dallas O'Mara, an acclaimed artist, echoes this sentiment by trying to convince Dirk that there is more to life than money. Much later in life, Selina is visited by Roelf Pool, who has since become a famous sculptor. Dirk grows very distressed when, after visiting his mother's farm, he realizes that Dallas and Roelf love each other and he cannot compete with the artistically minded sculptor. In the end, Dirk comes to appreciate the wisdom of his mother, who always valued aesthetics and beauty even as she scraped out a living in a stern Dutch community. Ultimately, Dirk is left alone in his sumptuous apartment, saddened by his abandonment of artistic values.

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So Big

“Winner of the Pulitzer Prize”

 - a nOVEL -

Edna Ferber

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ISBN: 978-625-7120-01-2

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About the Book & Author

Edna Ferber (1885 –1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1930; adapted into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; made into the 1956 film of the same name) and Ice Palace (1958), which also received a film adaptation in 1960.

In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, So Big. Ferber initially believed her draft of what would become So Big lacked a plot, glorified failure, and had a subtle theme that could easily be overlooked. When she sent the book to her usual publisher, Doubleday, she was surprised to learn that he strongly enjoyed the novel. This was reflected by the several hundreds of thousands of copies of the novel sold to the public. Following the award, the novel was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same year. An early talkie movie remake followed in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, with Bette Davis in a supporting role. A 1953 remake of So Big starring Jane Wyman is the most popular version to modern audiences.

Riding off the popularity of So Big, Ferber's next novel, Show Boat, was just as successful and shortly after its release, the idea of turning it into a musical was brought up. When composer Jerome Kern proposed this, Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a typical light entertainment of the 1920s. It was not until Kern explained that he and Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights and it premiered on Broadway in 1927, and has been revived 8 times following its first run.

* * *

So Big is a 1924 novel written by Edna Ferber. The book was inspired by the life of Antje Paarlberg in the Dutch community of South Holland, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925.

The story follows the life of a young woman, Selina Peake De Jong, who decides to be a school teacher in farming country. During her stay on the Pool family farm, she encourages the young Roelf Pool to follow his interests, which include art. Upon his mother's death, Roelf runs away to France. Meanwhile, Selina marries a Dutch farmer named Pervus. They have a child together, Dirk, whom she nicknames "So Big," from the common question and answer "How big is baby? " "So-o-o-o big!".

Pervus becomes ill and dies, and Selina is forced to take over working on the farm to give Dirk a future. As Dirk gets older, he works as an architect but is more interested in making money than creating buildings and becomes a stock broker, much to his mother's disappointment. His love interest, Dallas O'Mara, an acclaimed artist, echoes this sentiment by trying to convince Dirk that there is more to life than money.

Much later in life, Selina is visited by Roelf Pool, who has since become a famous sculptor. Dirk grows very distressed when, after visiting his mother's farm, he realizes that Dallas and Roelf love each other and he cannot compete with the artistically minded sculptor. In the end, Dirk comes to appreciate the wisdom of his mother, who always valued aesthetics and beauty even as she scraped out a living in a stern Dutch community. Ultimately, Dirk is left alone in his sumptuous apartment, saddened by his abandonment of artistic values.

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Table of Contents

About the Book & Author

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XXI

EDNA FERBER

By

Rogers Dickinson

Edna Ferber is an arresting personality. In speech, in appearance, and in manner she stands out clear against the mass.

Anyone who really knows her realizes why her stories, both long and short, reach the understanding and touch the hearts of the readers. One is very likely to say, “Why, I know somebody like that,” or “I knew she would do that.”

She knows folks, all sorts of people, but she is interested chiefly in people who do things: not the men who run great corporations and control the destinies of thousands of men and women, but the men and women who have jobs, and under that classification come that vast number who run modest households, who struggle to bring up children, who, in fact, form the permanent solid stratum on which our society is built.

She has the large-minded sympathy that makes for understanding of the under dog. She will take French lessons, not only because she wants to study the language, but because a cultivated Frenchman needs money and will not accept charity.

Edna Ferber enjoys a talk with a washwoman and the woman enjoys the talk too. Her colored maid adores her—and imposes on her (as is the way with colored maids).

She hates pretension and is very likely to speak her mind not only to her intimates but straight to the face of the objectionable person. Sometimes she speaks more strongly than she should, for she is impulsive and quick-tempered, but no one is more generous than she in the acknowledgment of mistakes.

Her letters are characteristic. They just begin. No salutation, no sparring for an opening—they begin at the beginning and when she is through she stops. She just adds her initials.

She stands on her own small feet. If you say to her, “The mantle of O. Henry has fallen on your shoulders” (it has been said with complimentary intent), you will get a flash from her black eyes that will scorch you and a rush of words that will make you wish you were elsewhere. She does not want anyone’s else mantle or footgear for that matter—she is herself, Edna Ferber.

Her earlier picturesque, sometimes flippant style, the surprise climaxes, and the short pithy sentences, come from her newspaper experience and not from any influence of O. Henry. The newspaper editor’s command is to “tell the story and make it snappy,” and it has affected Edna Ferber’s style, as it has affected the work of many other writers who grew out of newspaper offices.

Her style has changed as all thoughtful readers must have noticed. The literary form of the Emma McChesney stories is quite different from that of the stories in “Cheerful by Request” and “Gigolo.” Read a story in “Roast Beef Medium” and then read “Old Man Minick.”

There is a depth and richness, a dignity and soundness, that the earlier works lacked. Yet there is no loss of strength and vital freshness in her later books.

There is a vitality about Edna Ferber that is recognizable the moment she comes into a room. She enters almost with a rush, with a quick, firm step; though she is short, scarcely more than five feet three, I should think, she dominates most groups. Her rather large head with its thick black hair, cropped so one may see the admirable shape of the skull, is held erect. She greets one with a cordiality that is sometimes disarming and she speaks with a curious drawl that seems quite out of character with her forthright nature. What she says is worth listening to, for even the most commonplace occasions bring forth unbromidic speech from Edna Ferber.

As she talks in private conversation so she talks in public. She is a good speech-maker, a good lecturer. Her spoken words have the pungent vitality of her writing and the reading of her own stories makes the characters come alive startlingly.

It may seem strange to those of us who do not make our own living by creative writing that a woman who has made her mark as a reporter and who still occasionally reports a national convention, finds it so hard to write fiction. Edna Ferber has written for newspapers about all sorts of things under every sort of difficult handicap of time and place, and has produced good “copy.” Yet her short stories, novels and plays, are slowly and laboriously produced. And when the job is done, so closely has she held her nose to the grindstone, that she is unable to perceive the work as a whole, and realize how good it is.

She once rented an apartment on the lake front in Chicago, her desk facing the blue waters. She was in the midst of her novel, “The Girls.” She complained that she could not get on with it, it was hard labor, so hard that in spite of her best efforts she would look at the lake and the trees and the children playing in the street below. Her anxious publisher besought her to turn her typewriter table so she faced the blank wall. She did; and the book was speedily born.

In an article in The American Magazine, under the characteristic title of “The Joy of the Job,” she tells of her methods of work.

“At the risk of being hated I wanted to state that I’ve always felt sorry for any woman who could play whenever she wanted to. She never will know how sweet play can be. Chocolate is no treat for a girl in a candy factory. Play is no treat for an idler. My work is such that morning engagements and festive luncheoning are forbidden. On those rare occasions, two or three times a year, perhaps, when I deliberately, and for the good of my soul, break the rule and sneak off down-town for luncheon, the affair takes on the proportions of an orgy. No college girls’ midnight fudge spree could be more thrilling. To my unaccustomed eyes the girls in their new hats all look pretty. The matrons appear amazingly well dressed. The men, chatting over their after-luncheon cigarettes, are captains of finance, discussing problems of national import. I refuse to believe what my vis-à-vis says about their being cloak-and-suit salesmen whose conversation probably runs thus:

“‘I come into his place at ten this morning and he wouldn’t look at my stuff till twelve, and finally I goes up to him, and I says to him, I says, “Looka here, Marx.”’

“The very waiters interest me. The ’bus boys are deft, and I refuse to be bothered by their finger nails. The chicken salad is a poem, the coffee a dream, the French pastry a divine concoction.

“When you work three hundred and fifty mornings in the year, a game of golf on the three hundred and fifty-first is a lark. That’s one reason why I play so atrociously, I suppose. They who say that work hardens one, or wearies, or dulls, have chosen the wrong occupation, or have never really tasted the delights of it. It’s the finest freshener in the world. It’s an appetizer. It’s a combination cocktail and hors d’œuvre, to be taken before playing. It gives color to the most commonplace of holidays. It makes a run through the park a treat. There’s very little thrill in a brisk walk if you can brisk-walk from morning until night. But after having sat before a typewriter, or desk, or table, for hours together, to be able to stretch one’s legs for a swing of two or three miles—that’s living.

“The entire output of my particular job depends upon me. By that I mean that when I put the cover on my typewriter the works are closed. The office equipment consists of one flat table, rather messy; one typewriter, much abused, and one typewriter table; a chunk of yellow copy paper, and one of white. All the wheels, belts, wires, bolts, files, tools—the whole manufacturing scheme of things—has got to be contained in the space between my chin and my topmost hairpin. And my one horror, my nightmare of nightmares, is that some morning I’ll wake up and find that space vacant, and the works closed down, with a mental sign over the front door reading:

“‘For Rent. Fine, large empty head. Inquire within.’

“There was one year when there was a sign reading, ‘Closed for repairs.’ The horror of it is still with me.”

In another place she says: “No autobiographical sketch is complete without a statement of ambitions. I have two. I want to be allowed to sit in a rocking chair on the curb at the corner of State and Madison streets and watch the folks go by. And I would fain live on a houseboat in the Vale of Cashmere. I don’t know where the Vale of Cashmere is, nor whether it boasts a water course or not.”

What a lot she would get out of her view of life from a rocking chair at State and Madison streets!

She complained bitterly once that a certain writer, now opulent and lazy, who knew Chicago from the stockyards to the North Shore, did not use the stuff he had in his head. She felt not so much that he was missing an opportunity, but that he had buried the talent of experience that should have been passed on to others after he had gone.

Though Edna Ferber lives in New York—her apartment faces Central Park—she is not of New York. She knows Chicago, she thinks Chicago, just as Booth Tarkington thinks and knows Indianapolis and would not live wholly away from it. The author of “The Girls,” that masterpiece of Chicago, frequently visits the Windy City and sits, metaphorically, at the corner of State and Madison and soaks in the spirit of the city, that city so recently a pioneer town, so lately an effete city. No wonder she finds it fascinating and inexhaustible.

Edna Ferber’s apartment is the place where she meets her friends, breakfasts, lunches, dines, and sleeps. It is her rest house, her relaxation. The furnishing of it was an adventure. The choosing of draperies for the windows (there are many facing east), the tints for the walls, and the fabrics for the upholstery, she found an exhilarating venture into the unknown. She has been a hotel dweller, a renter of the homes of other people. But here she is rioting in her own home with her own furniture and hers is the sole responsibility for the color scheme, the style, and the composition. And it is good. Her taste in furnishing as in writing is to be relied upon. It is also most comfortable, too comfortable. It would be hard enough to break away from this interesting woman if one were standing talking in a windy street, but when surrounded by all the comforts it is almost impossible not to overstay one’s welcome.

But she works in a bare studio, close by, away from the telephone and too friendly visitors. Every morning she sits down at the typewriter and works—and most afternoons. No writer produces good work without wearying effort, long hours of concentration, and at times great discouragement.

What Miss Ferber wears while she works, whether dress, sweater, or smock, I do not know, for she does not do her writing in public as a prize fighter trains for a battle. Her battles are fought out alone.

One of her old and understanding friends, William Allen White, has written a most illuminating account of her life, her struggles, and her achievement. Mr. White being a Middle Westerner himself, quite understands Edna Ferber’s point of view. The following extract is taken from an introduction by the famous editor of the Emporia Gazette for an edition of “Cheerful by Request”:

“Edna Ferber’s pasture is long and narrow geographically; ranging from a thin pennant running westward to the mountains, to a slim tatter as far east as Vienna. But it is close clipped around Chicago, in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and well cropped in and about New York. In its social boundaries her field is more compact; chiefly lying in the middle class, sometimes taking in those who are just climbing out of poverty, and often considering those who are happily wiggling into our plutocracy. But one thread will string every character she ever conceived; all her people do something for a living. She is the goddess of the worker. And from her typewriter keys spring hard-working bankers, merchants, burglars, garage-helpers, stenographers, actors, traveling salesmen, hotel clerks, porters and reporters, wholesalers, pushcart men, wine touts, welfare workers, farmers, writers—always doers of things: money makers, men and women who pull their weight in the boat. And her stories chiefly tell what a fine time these hardworking Americans have with their day’s work.

“In the Great American Short Story, which must tell of American life rather than our Great American Novel, Edna Ferber’s section will be among the workers. Mrs. Wharton and Henry Fuller and Sherwood Anderson can have the loafers, in high life and low life. But Miss Ferber’s people will come from the stores and offices and workshops. They will, as the Gospel Hymn has it, come rejoicing, bringing home the bacon. Their dramatic moments are oftenest in aprons, shirt-sleeves, overalls, at desks, behind counters, in kitchens, behind stage curtains, in the midst of the business of earning a living. Precious little is done in the Ferber stories ‘in God’s great out of doors—in the wide open spaces.’ When anything has to be open in Miss Ferber’s work it is a lively and festive wide-open town.

“So let us consider who she is and how she happened to be a writing woman. In the middle or late ’eighties of the nineteenth century she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish parents. Her father was a Hungarian. Her mother an American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her father was the owner of a general merchandise store, first in Iowa, then in Appleton, Wisconsin. Miss Ferber at seventeen was graduated from the Ryan High School in Appleton. For her graduating essay she wrote an account of the life of the women workers in a local mill. The local editor saw it: recognized that it was good reporting and gave her a job as local reporter at $3.00 a week—a rather princely salary twenty years ago for a new girl reporter in a country town. She wrote local items, from the court house, the city hall, the fire department, the home of the village Crœsus, and the police court. Then she was graduated from the Appleton paper to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee also she was a reporter. And while she was earning a living as a reporter she wrote ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ her first novel. It sold well. While it was in the press and selling during 1911 and ’12, the magazines began telling the story of ‘Emma McChesney.’ Here was something new; the traveling saleswoman—who was rather more woman than merchant, but who was altogether human. The character appealed to the public, and Edna Ferber had her knee in the door of success. In 1913 the stories were collected under the title ‘Roast Beef Medium,’ and that book sold well. Two years later appeared more McChesney stories under the title ‘Emma McChesney & Co.’ Then came the play ‘Emma McChesney,’ and Edna Ferber was well in the ante-room of the hall of fame, with her card going to posterity. In the meantime, a book of short stories, ‘Buttered Side Down,’ had been written and sold to the magazines and successfully published. In 1917 Miss Ferber’s second novel appeared, ‘Fanny, Herself,’ and in 1918 came ‘Cheerful by Request.’

“In 1922 all the promise of ten years of conscientious work was fulfilled, when Miss Ferber wrote ‘The Girls,’ a novel of Chicago. The humor of it, the strength of it, the art of it, must make posterity give more than a glance at Edna Ferber’s card. She has something to tell posterity about America.

“And so we must tell posterity something about her—about Edna Ferber, herself. The best description of her family life ever written, she wrote in the dedication of ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ to Julia Ferber, her ‘dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to Sister Fannie who says Sh-Sh-Sh- outside my door.’ Some shadowy hint of the life of the Ferbers after the husband and father died, and before the family moved to Chicago, may be found in the earlier chapters of ‘Fanny, Herself’—at least it is a good picture of Julia Ferber, the mother, a strong, devoted, capable woman who is a credit to her country.

“All around Edna Ferber is an atmosphere of work. She works hard and all the time. Her friends work hard, and all the time. So when she takes her typewriter in hand to tell of the world she knows, she describes a working world. It is a world deeply American. For whatever else we Americans are, we are workers. Here and there a man lives without work, a white rich man’s son or a black washerwoman’s son. We have no leisure classes. But the world of Edna Ferber’s people in its economic status is the real world of America. And she, a working woman, is typical of the modern American woman. If for any reason posterity is interested in this American world of the first three decades of the twentieth century, posterity will do well—indeed posterity probably can do no better than to tell the butler to bring Edna Ferber for a few moments and let her read ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ and ‘The Eldest.’”

Since Mr. White wrote the foregoing, Edna Ferber has made two big steps forward. In the volume, “Gigolo,” is to be found that masterpiece, “Old Man Minick,” to mention but one of a group of eight. The play from this story, written by her in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, has become an artistic and a financial success. The story, “Old Man Minick,” together with the play, “Minick,” have been published in a separate volume, so one can see how a short story can be turned into a successful play. It is interesting to compare the fictional use of an idea with the dramatic, especially when the work is done by the same hand.

Edna Ferber has always been interested in plays and play-writing. She has written three that I know of, and two have been highly successful. “$1,200 a Year,” written with Newman Levy, deserved a greater success than it won. As a piece of literature it deserves more than one rereading.

Of course “So Big” has done more to interest people in Edna Ferber than anything else, yet the quality that has made such a success of that book lies also in most of her earlier work. That she herself was not too sure about it is made clear in an interview, titled “How it Feels to be a Best Seller”:

“There are people who write Best Sellers as a matter of business. That is, they are in the Best Seller business. They write them, I am told, deliberately and mathematically, using a formula as a cook uses a recipe. You hear a name and you say, in your ignorance, ‘Who? ... Who’s he?’ And the answer is, ‘He’s Whosis. You don’t mean to say you’ve never read him! He writes Best Sellers.’

“I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know. I suppose they have some peculiar thermometer or mechanism by which they gauge that fickle phenomenon known as the public pulse. But occasionally some one comes along who commits a Best Seller in all innocence, and with no such intent. Of such am I.

“Not only did I not plan to write a Best Seller when I wrote ‘So Big’ but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it. And that’s the literal truth.

“It was this way. I had worked on it, day after day, day after day, for many months, starting at nine each morning and working until four in the afternoon. I knew where I was going and why I wanted to get there, but after a time I became like a patient plodder who must travel weary miles along a lonely road before he arrives at the city of his destination. Mile after mile I covered the distance, sometimes traveling fairly swiftly, sometimes scarcely able to lift one tired foot after the other. When it was finished I was so dulled by contact with it that I scarcely could see it. The last stretch of the work, during June and July, had been written in Chicago. That June and July in Chicago I recall as a period during which the thermometer hovered gracefully between 90 and 96 in the shade.

“As the work of final correction began and progressed I began to dole out sheaves of copy to the typist. She used to call for a chunk of the story every day or two. She would appear at about four in the afternoon when I had finished work for the day, and when I was at my limpest, dampest and lowest. I remember her as a nice fresh-looking red-haired girl in crisp cool orchid organdie. She would make four copies of each fresh sheaf as she received it, return these, and call for more. No other soul except myself had seen a line of that story.

“Each time she called I waited eagerly, hopefully, for her to make some comment. I wanted her to say she liked Selina. I wanted her to say she didn’t care for Dirk. I wanted her to say she thought the story should have ended this way, or that. I wanted her to evince some interest in the novel; to show some liking for it, or even to show dislike. She never did.

“‘Well,’ said I to Miss E. Ferber, ‘that settles it. There you are, Edna! I told you so! Who would be interested in a novel about a middle-aged woman in a calico dress and with wispy hair and bad teeth, grubbing on a little truck farm south of Chicago! Nobody. Who cares about cabbages! Nobody. Who would read the thing if it came out as a novel! A dull plodding book, written because I was interested; because I wanted intensely to write it; because I had carried the thought of it around in my head for five years or more.’

“The story was to be serialized in the Woman’s Home Companion before being published in novel form. Well, that was all right. It might go well enough as a serial. But as a novel! Never.

“I wrote Mr. Russell Doubleday, of Doubleday, Page & Company, telling him that I had finished the book but that it was not, in my opinion, a book that would sell. No one, I wrote him, would read it. I thought it would be better for his firm, as publishers, and for me, as author, if we gave up the idea of publishing this story as a novel. It would be a flat failure, receiving bad reviews, having no sale.

“Mr. Doubleday replied that I might be right, but that perhaps I should let some one besides myself have a chance to judge its merits and faults. Perhaps, he said, I had been too close to it. Would I let him read it before deciding against it?

“He read it. He wrote me a letter. I keep that letter to read on rainy days when I’m not feeling well.

“‘So Big’ has, for some reason I can’t explain, been a best seller since it was published in February, selling on an average of a thousand a day. I know how the ugly duckling felt who turned into a swan.”

And so, unlike Dirk de Jong, who thought he was so big and wasn’t, the novel is so very big, when the author thought it of much less importance.

It is safe to say that at least seven million people read “So Big” in its serial and book form. All these people will be looking forward hopefully to her next book. That there will be no disappointment can be confidently predicted because Edna Ferber has built upon so sure a foundation.

I believe that big work cannot come of small people. Edna Ferber is a big person (not in stature nor avoirdupois) in mind, in heart, in soul, and in vision. A study of her work shows her growth and she is still growing, and will keep on growing as long as she lives. She will keep on growing because she sees so much farther than she has been able to reach. Her vision is so big.

* * *

I

Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him. He had literally to fight his way free of it. From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all its consonantal disharmony, he had remained until he was a ten-year-old schoolboy in that incredibly Dutch district southwest of Chicago known first as New Holland and later as High Prairie. At ten, by dint of fists, teeth, copper-toed boots, and temper, he earned the right to be called by his real name, Dirk DeJong. Now and then, of course, the nickname bobbed up and had to be subdued in a brief and bitter skirmish. His mother, with whom the name had originated, was the worst offender. When she lapsed he did not, naturally, use schoolyard tactics on her. But he sulked and glowered portentously and refused to answer, though her tone, when she called him So Big, would have melted the heart of any but that natural savage, a boy of ten.

The nickname had sprung from the early and idiotic question invariably put to babies and answered by them, with infinite patience, through the years of their infancy.

Selina DeJong, darting expertly about her kitchen, from washtub to baking board, from stove to table, or, if at work in the fields of the truck farm, straightening the numbed back for a moment’s respite from the close-set rows of carrots, turnips, spinach, or beets over which she was labouring, would wipe the sweat beads from nose and forehead with a quick duck of her head in the crook of her bent arm. Those great fine dark eyes of hers would regard the child perched impermanently on a little heap of empty potato sacks, one of which comprised his costume. He was constantly detaching himself from the parent sack heap to dig and burrow in the rich warm black loam of the truck garden. Selina DeJong had little time for the expression of affection. The work was always hot at her heels. You saw a young woman in a blue calico dress, faded and earth-grimed. Between her eyes was a driven look as of one who walks always a little ahead of herself in her haste. Her dark abundant hair was skewered into a utilitarian knob from which soft loops and strands were constantly escaping, to be pushed back by that same harried ducking gesture of head and bent arm. Her hands, for such use, were usually too crusted and inground with the soil into which she was delving. You saw a child of perhaps two years, dirt-streaked, sunburned, and generally otherwise defaced by those bumps, bites, scratches, and contusions that are the common lot of the farm child of a mother harried by work. Yet, in that moment, as the woman looked at the child there in the warm moist spring of the Illinois prairie land, or in the cluttered kitchen of the farmhouse, there quivered and vibrated between them and all about them an aura, a glow, that imparted to them and their surroundings a mystery, a beauty, a radiance.

“How big is baby?” Selina would demand, senselessly. “How big is my man?”

The child would momentarily cease to poke plump fingers into the rich black loam. He would smile a gummy though slightly weary smile and stretch wide his arms. She, too, would open her tired arms wide, wide. Then they would say in a duet, his mouth a puckered pink petal, hers quivering with tenderness and a certain amusement, “So-o-o-o big!” with the voice soaring on the prolonged vowel and dropping suddenly with the second word. Part of the game. The child became so habituated to this question that sometimes, if Selina happened to glance round at him suddenly in the midst of her task, he would take his cue without the familiar question being put and would squeal his “So-o-o-o big!” rather absently, in dutiful solo. Then he would throw back his head and laugh a triumphant laugh, his open mouth a coral orifice. She would run to him, and swoop down upon him, and bury her flushed face in the warm moist creases of his neck, and make as though to devour him. “So big!”

But of course he wasn’t. He wasn’t as big as that. In fact, he never became as big as the wide-stretched arms of her love and imagination would have had him. You would have thought she should have been satisfied when, in later years, he was the Dirk DeJong whose name you saw (engraved) at the top of heavy cream linen paper, so rich and thick and stiff as to have the effect of being starched and ironed by some costly American business process; whose clothes were made by Peter Peel, the English tailor; whose roadster ran on a French chassis; whose cabinet held mellow Italian vermouth and Spanish sherry; whose wants were served by a Japanese houseman; whose life, in short, was that of the successful citizen of the Republic. But she wasn’t. Not only was she dissatisfied: she was at once remorseful and indignant, as though she, Selina DeJong, the vegetable pedler, had been partly to blame for this success of his, and partly cheated by it.

When Selina DeJong had been Selina Peake she had lived in Chicago with her father. They had lived in many other cities as well. In Denver during the rampant ’80s. In New York when Selina was twelve. In Milwaukee briefly. There was even a San Francisco interlude which was always a little sketchy in Selina’s mind and which had ended in a departure so hurried as to bewilder even Selina who had learned to accept sudden comings and abrupt goings without question. “Business,” her father always said. “Little deal.” She never knew until the day of his death how literally the word deal was applicable to his business transactions. Simeon Peake, travelling the country with his little daughter, was a gambler by profession, temperament, and natural talents. When in luck they lived royally, stopping at the best hotels, eating strange, succulent sea-viands, going to the play, driving in hired rigs (always with two horses. If Simeon Peake had not enough money for a two-horse equipage he walked). When fortune hid her face they lived in boarding houses, ate boarding-house meals, wore the clothes bought when Fortune’s breath was balmy. During all this time Selina attended schools, good, bad, private, public, with surprising regularity considering her nomadic existence. Deep-bosomed matrons, seeing this dark-eyed serious child seated alone in a hotel lobby or boarding-house parlour, would bend over her in solicitous questioning.

“Where is your mamma, little girl?”

“She is dead,” Selina would reply, politely and composedly.

“Oh, my poor little dear!” Then, with a warm rush, “Don’t you want to come and play with my little girl? She loves little girls to play with. H’m?” The “m” of the interrogation held hummingly, tenderly.

“No, thank you very much. I’m waiting for my father. He would be disappointed not to find me here.”

These good ladies wasted their sympathy. Selina had a beautiful time. Except for three years, to recall which was to her like entering a sombre icy room on leaving a warm and glowing one, her life was free, interesting, varied. She made decisions usually devolving upon the adult mind. She selected clothes. She ruled her father. She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily. Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand’s ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the result of Selina’s mode of living, and were loaned her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York.

Her three dark years—from nine to twelve—were spent with her two maiden aunts, the Misses Sarah and Abbie Peake, in the dim, prim Vermont Peake house from which her father, the black sheep, had run away when a boy. After her mother’s death Simeon Peake had sent his little daughter back east in a fit of remorse and temporary helplessness on his part and a spurt of forgiveness and churchly charity on the part of his two sisters. The two women were incredibly drawn in the pattern of the New England spinster of fiction. Mitts, preserves, Bible, chilly best room, solemn and kittenless cat, order, little-girls-mustn’t. They smelled of apples—of withered apples that have rotted at the core. Selina had once found such an apple in a corner of a disorderly school-desk, had sniffed it, regarded its wrinkled, sapless pink cheek, and had bitten into it adventuresomely, only to spit out the mouthful in an explosive and unladylike spray. It had been all black and mouldy at its heart.

Something of this she must have conveyed, in her desperation, to her father in an uncensored letter. Without warning he had come for her, and at sight of him she had been guilty of the only fit of hysteria that marked her life, before or after the episode.

So, then, from twelve to nineteen she was happy. They had come to Chicago in 1885, when she was sixteen. There they remained. Selina attended Miss Fister’s Select School for Young Ladies. When her father brought her there he had raised quite a flutter in the Fister breast—so soft-spoken was he, so gentle, so sad-appearing, so winning as to smile. In the investment business, he explained. Stocks and that kind of thing. A widower. Miss Fister said, yes, she understood.

Simeon Peake had had nothing of the look of the professional gambler of the day. The wide slouch hat, the flowing mustache, the glittering eye, the too-bright boots, the gay cravat, all were missing in Simeon Peake’s makeup. True, he did sport a singularly clear white diamond pin in his shirt front; and his hat he wore just a little on one side. But then, these both were in the male mode and quite commonly seen. For the rest he seemed a mild and suave man, slim, a trifle diffident, speaking seldom and then with a New England drawl by which he had come honestly enough, Vermont Peake that he was.

Chicago was his meat. It was booming, prosperous. Jeff Hankins’s red plush and mirrored gambling house, and Mike McDonald’s, too, both on Clark Street, knew him daily. He played in good luck and bad, but he managed somehow to see to it that there was always the money to pay for the Fister schooling. His was the ideal poker face—bland, emotionless, immobile. When he was flush they ate at the Palmer House, dining off chicken or quail and thick rich soup and the apple pie for which the hostelry was famous. Waiters hovered solicitously about Simeon Peake, though he rarely addressed them and never looked at them. Selina was happy. She knew only such young people—girls—as she met at Miss Fister’s school. Of men, other than her father, she knew as little as a nun—less. For those cloistered creatures must, if only in the conning of their Bible, learn much of the moods and passions that sway the male. The Songs of Solomon alone are a glorious sex education. But the Bible was not included in Selina’s haphazard reading, and the Gideonite was not then a force in the hotel world.

Her chum was Julie Hempel, daughter of August Hempel, the Clark Street butcher. You probably now own some Hempel stock, if you’re lucky; and eat Hempel bacon and Hempel hams cured in the hickory, for in Chicago the distance from butcher of 1885 to packer of 1890 was only a five-year leap.

Being so much alone developed in her a gift for the make-believe. In a comfortable, well-dressed way she was a sort of mixture of Dick Swiveller’s Marchioness and Sarah Crewe. Even in her childhood she extracted from life the double enjoyment that comes usually only to the creative mind. “Now I’m doing this. Now I’m doing that,” she told herself while she was doing it. Looking on while she participated. Perhaps her theatre-going had something to do with this. At an age when most little girls were not only unheard but practically unseen, she occupied a grown-up seat at the play, her rapt face, with its dark serious eyes, glowing in a sort of luminous pallor as she sat proudly next her father. Simeon Peake had the gambler’s love of the theatre, himself possessing the dramatic quality necessary to the successful following of his profession.

In this way Selina, half-hidden in the depths of an orchestra seat, wriggled in ecstatic anticipation when the curtain ascended on the grotesque rows of Haverly’s minstrels. She wept (as did Simeon) over the agonies of The Two Orphans when Kitty Blanchard and McKee Rankin came to Chicago with the Union Square Stock Company. She witnessed that startling innovation, a Jewish play, called Samuel of Posen. She saw Fanny Davenport in Pique. Simeon even took her to a performance of that shocking and delightful form of new entertainment, the Extravaganza. She thought the plump creature in tights and spangles, descending the long stairway, the most beautiful being she had ever seen.

“The thing I like about plays and books is that anything can happen. Anything! You never know,” Selina said, after one of these evenings.

“No different from life,” Simeon Peake assured her. “You’ve no idea the things that happen to you if you just relax and take them as they come.”

Curiously enough, Simeon Peake said this, not through ignorance, but deliberately and with reason. In his way and day he was a very modern father. “I want you to see all kinds,” he would say to her. “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.”

“What whole thing?”

“Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much”—he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously—“just so much velvet.”

But Selina, somehow, understood. “You mean that anything’s better than being Aunt Sarah and Aunt Abbie.”

“Well—yes. There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.”

“Fanny Davenport’s an emerald,” said Selina, quickly, and rather surprised to find herself saying it.

“Yes. That’s it.”

“And—and Julie Hempel’s father—he’s wheat.”

“By golly, Sele!” shouted Simeon Peake. “You’re a shrewd little tyke!”

It was after reading “Pride and Prejudice” that she decided to be the Jane Austen of her time. She became very mysterious and enjoyed a brief period of unpopularity at Miss Fister’s owing to her veiled allusions to her “work”; and an annoying way of smiling to herself and tapping a ruminative toe as though engaged in visions far too exquisite for the common eye. Her chum Julie Hempel, properly enough, became enraged at this and gave Selina to understand that she must make her choice between revealing her secret or being cast out of the Hempel heart. Selina swore her to secrecy.

“Very well, then. Now I’ll tell you. I’m going to be a novelist.” Julie was palpably disappointed, though she said, “Selina!” as though properly impressed, but followed it up with: “Still, I don’t see why you had to be so mysterious about it.”

“You just don’t understand, Julie. Writers have to study life at first hand. And if people know you’re studying them they don’t act natural. Now, that day you were telling me about the young man in your father’s shop who looked at you and said——”

“Selina Peake, if you dare to put that in your book I’ll never speak——”

“All right. I won’t. But that’s what I mean. You see!”

Julie Hempel and Selina Peake, both finished products of Miss Fister’s school, were of an age—nineteen. Selina, on this September day, had been spending the afternoon with Julie, and now, adjusting her hat preparatory to leaving, she clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the sounds of Julie’s importunings that she stay to supper. Certainly the prospect of the usual Monday evening meal in Mrs. Tebbitt’s boarding house (the Peake luck was momentarily low) did not present sufficient excuse for Selina’s refusal. Indeed, the Hempel supper as sketched dish for dish by the urgent Julie brought little greedy groans from Selina.

“It’s prairie chickens—three of them—that a farmer west of town brought Father. Mother fixes them with stuffing, and there’s currant jell. Creamed onions and baked tomatoes. And for dessert, apple roll.”

Selina snapped the elastic holding her high-crowned hat under her chignon of hair in the back. She uttered a final and quavering groan. “On Monday nights we have cold mutton and cabbage at Mrs. Tebbitt’s. This is Monday.”

“Well then, silly, why not stay!”

“Father comes home at six. If I’m not there he’s disappointed.”

Julie, plump, blonde, placid, forsook her soft white blandishments and tried steel against the steel of Selina’s decision.

“He leaves you right after supper. And you’re alone every night until twelve and after.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Selina said, stiffly.

Julie’s steel, being low-grade, melted at once and ran off her in rivulets. “Of course it hasn’t, Selie dear. Only I thought you might leave him just this once.”

“If I’m not there he’s disappointed. And that terrible Mrs. Tebbitt makes eyes at him. He hates it there.”

“Then I don’t see why you stay. I never could see. You’ve been there four months now, and I think it’s horrid and stuffy; and oilcloth on the stairs.”

“Father has had some temporary business setbacks.”

Selina’s costume testified to that. True, it was modish, and bustled, and basqued, and flounced; and her high-crowned, short-rimmed hat, with its trimming of feathers and flowers and ribbons had come from New York. But both were of last spring’s purchasing, and this was September.

In the course of the afternoon they had been looking over the pages of Godey’s Ladies’ Book for that month. The disparity between Selina’s costume and the creations pictured there was much as the difference between the Tebbitt meal and that outlined by Julie. Now Julie, fond though defeated, kissed her friend good-bye.

Selina walked quickly the short distance from the Hempel house to Tebbitt’s, on Dearborn Avenue. Up in her second-floor room she took off her hat and called to her father, but he had not yet come in. She was glad of that. She had been fearful of being late. She regarded her hat now with some distaste, decided to rip off the faded spring roses, did rip a stitch or two, only to discover that the hat material was more faded than the roses, and that the uncovered surface showed up a dark splotch like a wall-spot when a picture, long hung, is removed. So she got a needle and prepared to tack the offending rose in its accustomed place.

Perched on the arm of a chair near the window, taking quick deft stitches, she heard a sound. She had never heard that sound before—that peculiar sound—the slow, ominous tread of men laden with a heavy inert burden; bearing with infinite care that which was well beyond hurting. Selina had never heard that sound before, and yet, hearing it, she recognized it by one of those pangs, centuries old, called woman’s instinct. Thud—shuffle—thud—shuffle—up the narrow stairway, along the passage. She stood up, the needle poised in her hand. The hat fell to the floor. Her eyes were wide, fixed. Her lips slightly parted. The listening look. She knew.

She knew even before she heard the hoarse man’s voice saying, “Lift ’er up there a little on the corner, now. Easy—e-e-easy.” And Mrs. Tebbitt’s high shrill clamour: “You can’t bring it in there! You hadn’t ought to bring it in here like this!”

Selina’s suspended breath came back. She was panting now. She had flung open the door. A flat still burden partially covered with an overcoat carelessly flung over the face. The feet, in their square-toed boots, wobbled listlessly. Selina noticed how shiny the boots were. He was always very finicking about such things.

Simeon Peake had been shot in Jeff Hankins’s place at five in the afternoon. The irony of it was that the bullet had not been intended for him at all. Its derelict course had been due to feminine aim. Sped by one of those over-dramatic ladies who, armed with horsewhip or pistol in tardy defence of their honour, spangled Chicago’s dull ’80s with their doings, it had been meant for a well-known newspaper publisher usually mentioned (in papers other than his own) as a bon vivant. The lady’s leaden remonstrance was to have been proof of the fact that he had been more vivacious than bon.

It was, perhaps, because of this that the matter was pretty well hushed up. The publisher’s paper—which was Chicago’s foremost—scarcely mentioned the incident and purposely misspelled the name. The lady, thinking her task accomplished, had taken truer aim with her second bullet, and had saved herself the trouble of trial by human jury.

Simeon Peake left his daughter Selina a legacy of two fine clear blue-white diamonds (he had had the gambler’s love of them) and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash. Just how he had managed to have a sum like this put by was a mystery. The envelope containing it had evidently once held a larger sum. It had been sealed, and then slit. On the outside was written, in Simeon Peake’s fine, almost feminine hand: “For my little daughter Selina Peake in case anything should happen to me.” It bore a date seven years old. What the original sum had been no one ever knew. That any sum remained was evidence of the almost heroic self-control practised by one to whom money—ready money in any sum at all—meant only fuel to feed the flames of his gaming fever.

To Selina fell the choice of earning her own living or of returning to the Vermont village and becoming a withered and sapless dried apple, with black fuzz and mould at her heart, like her aunts, the Misses Sarah and Abbie Peake. She did not hesitate.

“But what kind of work?” Julie Hempel demanded. “What kind of work can you do?” Women—that is, the Selina Peakes—did not work.

“I—well, I can teach.”

“Teach what?”

“The things I learned at Miss Fister’s.”

Julie’s expression weighed and discredited Miss Fister. “Who to?” Which certainly justified her expression.

“To children. People’s children. Or in the public schools.”

“You have to do something first—go to Normal, or teach in the country, don’t you?—before you can teach in the public schools. They’re mostly old. Twenty-five or even thirty—or more!” with nineteen’s incapacity to imagine an age beyond thirty.

That Julie was taking the offensive in this conversation, and Selina the defensive, was indicative of the girl’s numbed state. Selina did not then know the iron qualities her friend was displaying in being with her at all. Mrs. Hempel had quite properly forbidden Julie ever to see the dead dissolute gambler’s daughter again. She had even sent a note to Miss Fister expressing her opinion of a school which would, by admitting such unselected ladies to its select circle, expose other pupils to contamination.

Selina rallied to Julie’s onslaught. “Then I’ll just teach a country school. I’m good at arithmetic. You know that.” Julie should have known it, having had all her Fister sums solved by Selina. “Country schools are just arithmetic and grammar and geography.”

“You! Teaching a country school!”

She looked at Selina.