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FOR ten years after her graduation, in 1912, Ann had a wild medley of jobs. For a year she studied nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital, in New York, as a basis for social work, which was to lead to politics on the inevitable day when women should have the vote. Her friends told her that she ought to be in a graduate school, or a school for social workers, to read books and hear lectures about the downtrodden; but she preferred to learn with eyes and hands and nose, decidedly with nose, something of the agonized bodies of the people with whom she would have to deal.

With the campaign for woman suffrage booming, she became an organizer, in the New York Headquarters, whence she was sent to a certain city in Ohio—call it Clateburn, for disguise. She was the best of the young women of that piratical crew, and they were pirates. Years before the organization of the aggressive National Woman’s Party, with its cheerful rioting and its pestering of senators in their sacred offices, there were in several American cities groups of young devils who made miserable the lives of the congressmen that for years had enjoyed the sunniest seats on the fence, from which they purred that women were the saviors and life-givers of the race, the conservers of culture and good breeding, the inspirers of all that was noble in the male, but that their delicate bloom (though proof against washtubs, diapers, and minding the chickens) would be rubbed off in the awful sordidness of polling-booths; that certainly women ought to have the vote some time, but not quite yet. This “some time” was apparently of exactly the same date as the “some time” when Britain would find hoary India, and America find the Philippines, capable of self-government, when employers would clap their heels in joy at giving non-union employees wages equal to union members, when married couples, universally, would cease quarreling, when prostitution and love of hard liquor would disappear, when college professors would have a knowledge of life equal to that of the average truck-driver, when farmers would know the rudiments of agriculture, when atheists would rationalize all the pious into happy materialism, when dogs would be born house-broken, and cats would play tenderly with mice.

Suffrage Headquarters in Clateburn were in an 1880 residence known as the Old Fanning Mansion. It was a large and hideous pile, covered with brown plaster crossed with white lines not so much to imitate stone as to symbolize it. The surly portico had Ionic pillars of wood covered with brown paint over which sand had been scattered, so that they resembled brown sandpaper and greatly vexed the finger-tips of Western Union boys waiting with messages at the door—suffragists always, in idle moments, send agitated telegrams to one another. The roof was flat, with a pressed zinc cornice.

The Fanning Mansion resembled an aged hospital, except that it was less sympathetic.

Inside, the high-ceiled, flatly echoing, immense parlors were crammed with desks and tables which were piled with dreary suffrage tracts and envelopes to be addressed. On the third floor were slant-roofed bedrooms, once belonging to the Fanning servants, occupied now by four of the suffrage workers, including Ann.

The Empress and Lady High Executioner of the Clateburn Headquarters, whether because of the large contributions with which she had bought importance, or because of her heavy-handed energy, was Mrs. Ethelinda St. Vincent, a large, determined lady with purple hats and a bosom like a sack of wheat. Eleanor Crevecoeur, of Headquarters, said that Mrs. St. Vincent had been Miss Ethel Peterson, daughter of a plumbing corporation, till she had married Mr. St. Vincent who, though he manufactured binding-twine, was an aristocrat, which meant that he had gone East to college, that his family had been in Clateburn for two and a half generations, and that the twine factory had been founded not by himself but by his father.

Mrs. St. Vincent was given to dropping into Headquarters after the theater—she called it “after the theater,” though the ribald Eleanor said that it meant “after the movies”—and if she found the young workers idle and chattering, at 11 p.m., she blared, “Do you ladies feel that suffrage is merely a job, like working in an office, and that you must watch the clock?”

But she never was assaulted, for the suffragists had read Luke VI:37: “Give and ye shall be forgiven.”

Mrs. St. Vincent had entertained, in her Georgian house on St. Botolph Avenue, the more prominent suffrage speakers, including an Englishwoman with a genuine title, who had been shipped to Clateburn, and this intellectual atmosphere had won her her election to the Phoenix Musical Club of Clateburn.

But the real executive and boss of Headquarters was the paid secretary, Miss Mamie Bogardus, known to all the workers and to much of Clateburn outside as “The Battleaxe,” and to the Ohio press as “The Carrie Nation of Suffrage.”

Miss Bogardus was to the eye and ear the comic journal picture of a suffrage war-horse: a tall, scraggly spinster with ferocious eyes and a loud, shrill, ragged voice. (What has become of them, the haggard Amazons, the “shrieking sisters,” of before-the-war?) She was impudently aggressive or completely fearless, depending on your interpretation. If she thought the aldermen were grafting, no decent awe of their magisterial dignity restrained her; she went to their meetings and rebuked them, very audibly, with figures. If she saw a man mistreating a child, a horse, or a fiddle, she up and told him so. She was presumably a virgin, at fifty; she neither smoked nor drank; and she said often and publicly that all males (of seven and upwards) were clumsy as dogs, dirty as monkeys, tyrannical as grizzlies, and dull as guinea pigs. She wore the most astonishing garments in Ohio. With a mannish suit and flat mannish shoes, she combined canary-yellow blouses with scarlet buttons—such buttons as were not missing—turbans of golden Chinese fabrics, always raveled and awry, and at least a dozen necklaces of cheap glass beads or wooden disks. Her infrequent frocks for afternoon or evening were of crêpe de Chine, in violent crimson or fainting lavender, always mussy, the skirts hiked up above her toes and dragging behind and askew over the hips. Everyone asked where she managed to find such dresses, since no sane dressmaker would make them and the Battleaxe herself was clumsy as a ditch-digger when she took a needle between her large, liver-spotted fingers.

She ran the junior suffrage workers ragged. She scolded them worse than did the voluptuous Mrs. Ethelinda St. Vincent, and she was at Headquarters more often for the scolding. She scratched them out of bed at seven, and yammered when they staggered off to sleep at midnight. She sniffed at the infrequent young men who came calling, and asked them in a voice like ammonia whether they smoked. She complained if her girls dressed decently, because that was wasting money that should go to the Cause, and she complained worse if they were not exquisitely neat, because that “might give the wrong impression.” Almost anything they did or didn’t do might, according to the Battleaxe, “give the wrong impression.”

When Ann Vickers arrived in Clateburn, she was so horrified by this embattled fury that she almost gave up the job.

And within a fortnight she had found that Miss Mamie Bogardus, the Battleaxe, was the bravest, the most honest, the kindliest, and the most wistful woman alive. If she was aggressive, it was because she was convinced that most men and women let themselves be misgoverned through cowardice or sloth; if she was slovenly, it was because all her acute thought was going to her work. Though she drove her lieutenants, she was the first to defend them, as Ann discovered when she heard the Battleaxe privately snarling, even at the rich and succulent Mrs. St. Vincent, “You quit picking on my girls; I’ll do all the picking necessary!” And when one of them was really sick, it was the Battleaxe who kept her in bed and brought up a bowl of beef tea—not particularly well seasoned.

The public, the press, even some of the suffrage sympathizers, and all men lively and full of moist wisdom in front of bars, said that Miss Bogardus was a suffragist because she had never caught a man; that she wanted something, but it wasn’t the vote.

It was true, Ann guessed, only to the extent that the Battleaxe had never found, and resented the fact that she had never been able to find, a man big enough to understand her loyalty, her piercing honesty, and a passion too tempestuous to wrap itself in little pink prettiness. Ann was presently certain that Miss Bogardus, if she were married and the mother of ten lusty sons, would be equally the fighter, would equally hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Ann remembered her American history (a topic not popular in the Clateburn press, save as it dealt with baseball batting-averages, George Washington, and the development of the automobile self-starter) and saw in Miss Bogardus the pioneer grandmother with a baby on one arm and a rifle for the Indians on the other.

Besides Miss Bogardus and Ann, there were two other paid agitators, Eleanor Crevecoeur and Patricia Bramble.

Both of them were to Ann romantic and endearing comrades-at-arms. To describe Pat Bramble, in any record, no matter how realistic, the word “dainty” would have to be fetched forth from the boarding-house of shabby and pensioned words. Dainty. Out of a Victorian novel. Kin to Little Nell and Miss Nickleby and Harry Maylie’s Rose, with the difference that she had the vocabulary of a fo’c’sle hand, the cynicism of a fashionable priest, the joy of an Irish trooper, at least during suffrage riots, in fighting policemen, and the honesty of Mamie Bogardus. But she was small and willowy enough to please even the lickerish eyes of Dickens; she was golden of hair and her cheeks were petals; and in private she smoked only rose-petal-tipped cigarettes, where Eleanor flaunted a small pipe.

Eleanor Crevecoeur was the mystery of the Fanning Mansion. Ann Vickers was complex only as environment clashed with her simple desires for frankness, efficiency, kindness, and sexual freedom; Miss Bogardus was as obvious as any other woman of the frontier; Pat Bramble had a sound foundation of commonness under her airy daintiness; but Eleanor Crevecoeur was always a divided personality, and divided not merely into two recognizable factions, but into three or four or a dozen.

She was twenty-eight, now, to Ann’s twenty-three and Pat’s nineteen. She was tall and rapier-thin; thin legs, thin tapping feet, thin veined hands at the end of arms so frail that it seemed the wind would snap them, with a brown eager face and a nose too large and hooked. But she was not at all ugly; there were in her too much fire and will; men drifted to her and laughed with her where first they had smiled at her.

The chief mystery about her was her origin. She could ape Pat Bramble’s blasphemy and wholesome commonness, but it never seemed altogether natural. In Clateburn suffrage circles it was whispered that Eleanor was from a noble French family; that there had been a Marquis de Crevecoeur who had married a wild, blown-haired wench who was the daughter of an Indian princess (whatever an Indian “princess” may be) and an English general.

Neither Ann nor Pat ever had the truth. Of Eleanor’s childhood they knew only that she came from Canada and had for some time gone to a convent school. They suspected that the legend of her nobility grew from the fact that, in a city like Clateburn, composed of Smiths and Browns and Robinsons, of Müllers and Schwartzes and Hauptschnagels, of Joneses and Lewises and Thompsons, and of Cohens and Levys and Ginsbergs, the name Crevecoeur sounded aristocratic. Ann looked it up in the dictionary, and announced to Pat, impressively, that it really meant “heartbreak” and was guaranteed to be romantic. But Pat looked it up in a larger dictionary and bawdily announced to Ann that crèvecœur also meant “a French variety of the domestic fowl, heavily crested and bearded, and having a comb formed like two horns—see Fowl.”

One other girl, though she did not live in the Fanning Mansion, was with them nearly every evening: Maggie O’Mara, organizer for the Waitresses’ and Lady Dish-washers’ Union, and herself of late a waitress and lady dish-washer. She was ruddy and bright-eyed; she had arms like a washerwoman; she was a whooping and successful soap-box speaker; and she was, she pointed out, all the vulgar things that Pat and Eleanor pretended to be.

And these four, Ann, Pat, Eleanor, and Maggie O’Mara, made up the group which, for causes presently to be stated, came to be known throughout Ohio suffrage as the “Ball and Chain Squad.”

Their private life—not that they had much private life, aside from six or seven hours of sleep in cold lone beds, with a theater perhaps once a week and a dance sanitarily flavored with liberal conversation once a month—was never free from the itching topic of Woman and women; Woman’s rights and Woman’s duties and Woman’s superiority to man both in constructive mentality—whatever that might mean—and in physical endurance of weariness and pain.

They cooked and dined in the old kitchen of the Fanning Mansion, a stone-floored cavern looking out on a yard decorated with chickweed, sunflowers, and archaic heaps of ashes and tin-cans. They were supposed to take turns cooking, but usually it was Ann, assisted by Maggie O’Mara, who came as guest and remained as amateur hostess, who got the dinner; and always it was she, or Maggie and she, who wiped the sink and the linoleum strips on the stone floor, and washed out the dish towels.

Ann whistled then. She liked using her hands, as she had in nursing-school, and as a child, when she had cared for her casual father. And, as half-trained nurse, it was she who understood bedmaking, and night after night she remade the aristocratic but tumbled couch of Eleanor Crevecoeur, whose idea of domesticity was to shake the sheets and blankets, yank the top coverings straight, pat them once, and call it a job.

In these moments of housework only was Ann an individual at the Fanning Mansion. Otherwise she was a Worker in the Movement, a private in a jammed barracks, a conjunction in a particularly long and complicated sentence.

The others, even Maggie O’Mara, did not seem to mind being mere units in the collective mass; they did not seem to have, even, an ambition to be chief and most titled unit. But the Ann who made speeches when she was told to, addressed envelopes when she was commanded, ridiculed males when it sounded proper, was still the Ann Vickers of Waubanakee, free woman of the woods and river, lone bandit who had wanted to socialize crime in childhood, provided she remained dictator.

The Ball and Chain Squad got away from Woman only when, in whispered confidences at midnight, sitting cross-legged on beds or on the floor, with the Battleaxe asleep in the hall across the way, they talked about Man.

Even then, in 1914 and 1915, with the World War begun, though some anonymous genius had already invented Sex, it had not come into popular use and quantity production. Maggie and Eleanor might refer frankly to communal sleeping, Pat might use the sacred words as expletives, Ann might be free from the reticences of Waubanakee, yet none of them felt they could discuss Lesbianism, incest, or any of the other drawing-room topics of fifteen years later. But it is not recorded that their private emotions were different from those of 1930. It came out in anxious queries and uneasy desires for confession.

Pat, to whom flocked all of the rare males who were tabby enough, or venturesome enough, to invade the Fanning Mansion socially, was as cold sexually as any other rosebud, Ann guessed. Maggie O’Mara only laughed. “You’re all babies, with yer fine educations. What do I think of loving up the boys? Well, I’ll just say I’m no virgin!”

“Well, I am,” said Pat, “and I think it’s a lot less trouble!”

Eleanor cried, “You both make me tired! Sex! You neither of you know a damned thing about it. To you it’s guzzling corned-beef and cabbage. If you want to know, and I don’t suppose you do, I’m a nymphomaniac. If I let myself—only I’ve got a will like a steel trap; you can laugh if you want to, but it’s true!—if I let myself go, I’d be diving into men’s beds all the time. Like a crazy woman. I’m not a virgin either, my proud Maggie! Twice I’ve tried it, and I had to quit—I just ceased to exist, then—my whole body was like flame, with skyrockets shooting off at the center. I never will again, unless I meet a giant, and wenches like us, that try to untie our brains, just don’t meet giants. But if I go to the movies with any male between the ages of eight and eighty and see a film about catching herrings or making glass, and the back of his hand brushes mine once—why, when I get back here, I snap ‘good-night’ so he thinks I’m cold as a frozen axe, and run upstairs, and all night I pace the floor. We suffragists that hate men! Sure! And I bet that when the Battleaxe was young, she was bad as I am! Oh, nice young ladies don’t feel passionately, like men. No indeed! We mustn’t experiment; we must fold our gentle hands and wait till some male mouse comes up and flicks his whiskers at us. Hell! Well, Ann, what’s your confession? Vulgar like Mag, or inhuman like Pat, or crazy like me?”

“I—don’t—know! Honestly, I don’t!” stammered Ann.

Since Glenn Hargis, she had longed to escape any mania that would obscure her clear and cheerful eyes. So when men came calling at the Fanning Mansion, to sip chilly tea and eat bakery cakes, or in the evening to help address envelopes and confer about raising funds—worthy males, unexplained business-man husbands dragged in by feminist wives, liberal clergymen, usually unmarried, very young or very old faculty-members from Clateburn University, and back-patting politicians gambling on these probable future feminine votes—it was Pat and Maggie and college girls come in as part-time helpers who talked with them, occasionally danced with them to the phonograph, down aisles between desks and tables, while Ann and Eleanor vanished away, or sat in corners.

“Some day, some man that I want to kiss, like Adolph, is going to want to kiss me, like Glenn Hargis, and then I’m going to forget all the statistics on the underpayment of woman workers, and kiss him back so hard the world will go up in smoke. Or am I just an icicle, like Pat?” fretted Ann.

They worked; they worked like sailors in a gale, like students before a final examination. It was a life of perpetual midnights. They smiled when bedraggled house-wives said, “If you girls were married, like me, and had to cook and wash and take care of the kids, if you had to work, like me, you wouldn’t have no time to think about the vote, no more’n I do!”

They were sent out to address meetings—women’s clubs, men’s church clubs, the W. C. T. U., the D. A. R., and incessant suffrage rallies in narrow halls where you got sniffly colds from lack of ventilation. Alone, or commanding flying squadrons of amateur workers, frequently smart flappers who darted and giggled and did not greatly increase the dignity of the Cause, they went canvassing for funds and political support, among handsome houses and poor tenements, in Chinese laundries and grain elevators and the offices of millionaire brokers, where occasionally some weak-chinned underling wriggled playfully at them and cooed, “Come on and give us a kiss and then you won’t want a vote!”

And sometimes they found an illiterate husband (quaint word!) who admitted that he was all for the women having the vote, but entirely against “suffrage,” which he had identified as meaning teas at the Fanning Mansion, which would interrupt his wife’s labors for him. And once a housewife (yet quainter!) chased Ann with a broom when Ann asked to talk with the husband. “You get out of here! I know you an’ your kind! You ain’t going to get the mister away from me, with your sneaking and prying and—and——A bunch of chippies, that’s what you are! Beat it!”

Among the four girls and Miss Bogardus, it was Ann who was usually chosen to scrabble the publicity material which they were always sending to the newspapers: notes about the rare success of the meeting at Odd Fellows’ Hall, about the sympathy of Senator Juggins, about the coming to Clateburn of the celebrated Reverend Dr. Ira Weatherbee who had “accepted an invitation” (given at the muzzle of a shotgun) to address the ladies of the Sycamore Avenue Christian Church.

Eleanor Crevecoeur wrote more lucid and fetching prose than Ann but, probably for that reason, she could not scrawl publicity with the liveliness and false jollity suitable to the art. It may be that Ann’s debating had given her the proper glibness. Certainly she became a brisk and popular propagandist; and later, she was able to advance any cause by writing Sunday newspaper articles full of statistics selected with pious discrimination. She wrote with passion about the evils of the world, but she was never able to see why one adjective was juicier than another; and she was wistful and a little hurt, years afterward in New York, when newspaper friends hinted that she was a dear sweet woman but her journalism was atrocious.

Ann, Pat, and Eleanor were each of them sent out, alone, from Clateburn to help local Mothers in Zion organize suffrage associations; out to small, suspicious, masculine towns, where woman’s entire place was still in the home, which meant in the kitchen and the nursery. They were received by acid matrons who croaked, “Well! I’m kind o’ surprised Headquarters couldn’t find nobody but a young gal like you to send us, when we’ve worked so hard and all!” Supported only by three or four of these old war-horses—which support, since they were usually known as the local cranks, pests, and Mamie Bogarduses, was worse than nothing—they hired a grocer’s delivery wagon or a shaky automobile and spoke on street corners, while the slowly gathering audience catcalled and whistled and made sounds of kissing; and at night they slept in funereal black walnut beds in the unaired “spare-rooms” of the local Cassandras. For breakfast had fat bacon and chicory. And in the evening, when they came back to the Fanning Mansion, on the local train, often in the acrid smoking-car, came back discouraged and clean-beat, the Battleaxe yammered at them, “What are you sitting around for? We’re ’way behind on addressing envelopes!”

Envelopes, then, till another midnight, with another God-forsaken journey to the hinterland in view for next morning. If Ann had had time, in those days, to read Kipling, she would probably have rended the book for its assumption that it was only the male (and only the British male, at that) who could make punitive expeditions to the native tribesmen and with serenity face the hairy, horrid throng. Pat Bramble and she made such punitive expeditions twice a week, and did not return to any mess and whisky-soda or C-spring barouche at Simla, either.

Envelopes!

Envelopes to address!

Envelopes, with “N.A.W.S.A., 232 McKinley Ave., Clateburn, Ohio,” neatly printed in the upper left-hand corner in a watery blue. Envelopes. In piles. On tables, along with city directories, telephone books, blue books, and mimeographed sucker-lists, for addresses. Envelopes containing mimeographed appeals for funds, appeals to “Write your congressman and senator,” appeals to “Vote in the primaries only for candidates who understand that Women Are People”; envelopes with little four-leaved tracts reminiscent of Waubanakee—except that it was the vote and not the Blood of the Lamb that was to save and make perfect the entire world—and envelopes with thick little cards in which you could, if you longed to, insert a quarter, moisten the red wafer, and return to Suffrage Headquarters.

Ann believed—Ann and Pat and Eleanor and Maggie all believed—that the vote was necessary, both that women might enter public affairs, and that they might be freed from the humiliation of being classed (vide any of Ann’s hundreds of speeches of that period) with children, idiots, and criminals. But she did get tired of envelopes. She went insane over the thought of envelopes. For years after she had done with suffrage-organizing, she was to be plagued by the recollection of piles of yellow envelopes, printed in blue with “N.A.W.S.A., 232 McKinley Ave., Clateburn, Ohio,” and below it the oval union label, and the symbol F16. Envelopes that piled up mountainously in her dream till they toppled and smothered her. Faith, hope, envelopes, these three; and the greatest of these was envelopes.