Title: Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
Author: Anderson, Sherwood
Language: English
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Winesburg, Ohio

by Sherwood Anderson


Contents

 INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe

 THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
 THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
 HANDS, concerning Wing Biddlebaum
 PAPER PILLS, concerning Doctor Reefy
 MOTHER, concerning Elizabeth Willard
 THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival
 NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion
 GODLINESS (Parts I), concerning Jesse Bentley
 GODLINESS (Parts II), concerning Jesse Bentley
 SURRENDER (Part III), concerning Louise Bentley
 TERROR (Part IV), concerning David Hardy
 A MAN OF IDEAS, concerning Joe Welling
 ADVENTURE, concerning Alice Hindman
 RESPECTABILITY, concerning Wash Williams
 THE THINKER, concerning Seth Richmond
 TANDY, concerning Tandy Hard
 THE STRENGTH OF GOD, concerning the Reverend Curtis Hartman
 THE TEACHER, concerning Kate Swift
 LONELINESS, concerning Enoch Robinson
 AN AWAKENING, concerning Belle Carpenter
 “QUEER,” concerning Elmer Cowley
 THE UNTOLD LIE, concerning Ray Pearson
 DRINK, concerning Tom Foster
 DEATH, concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard
 SOPHISTICATION, concerning Helen White
 DEPARTURE, concerning George Willard



INTRODUCTION


by Irving Howe

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first
chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches of
Sherwood Anderson’s small-town “grotesques,” I felt that he was opening
for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which
nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York City boy who
never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay
sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of
wasted life, wasted love—was this the “real” America?—that Anderson
sketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to
offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the
Obscure.

Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I
spent my last week-end pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde,
Ohio, the town upon which Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I
suppose, not very different from most other American towns, and the few
of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed quite
uninterested. This indifference would not have surprised him; it
certainly should not surprise anyone who reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in
1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly
after Lionel Trilling’s influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack
from which Anderson’s reputation would never quite recover. Trilling
charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of
vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual
solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling’s attack, at least
with regard to Anderson’s inferior work, most of which he wrote after
Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, to bring
together the kinds of judgment Trilling had made with my still keen
affection for the best of Anderson’s writings. By then, I had read
writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his
muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and the book I wrote
might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light—a glow of darkness,
you might say—that he had brought to me.

Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps fearing I might have
to surrender an admiration of youth. (There are some writers one should
never return to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say a
few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I have again fallen
under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio, again responded to the half-spoken
desires, the flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I now
have some changes of response: a few of the stories no longer haunt me
as once they did, but the long story “Godliness,” which years ago I
considered a failure, I now see as a quaintly effective account of the
way religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can become
intertwined in American experience.


Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His childhood and youth in
Clyde, a town with perhaps three thousand souls, were scarred by bouts
of poverty, but he also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial
American society. The country was then experiencing what he would later
call “a sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old
handicrafts towards our modern life of machines.” There were still
people in Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America itself,
the town lived by a mixture of diluted Calvinism and a strong belief in
“progress,” Young Sherwood, known as “Jobby”—the boy always ready to
work—showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde respected:
folks expected him to become a “go-getter,” And for a time he did.
Moving to Chicago in his early twenties, he worked in an advertising
agency where he proved adept at turning out copy. “I create nothing, I
boost, I boost,” he said about himself, even as, on the side, he was
trying to write short stories.

In 1904 Anderson married and three years later moved to Elyria, a town
forty miles west of Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold
paint. “I was going to be a rich man…. Next year a bigger house; and
after that, presumably, a country estate.” Later he would say about his
years in Elyria, “I was a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely
one.” Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless
hungers—a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic
kind of experience?—that would become a recurrent motif in his fiction.

And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in Anderson’s life.
Plainly put, he suffered a nervous breakdown, though in his memoirs he
would elevate this into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned
the sterility of commerce and turned to the rewards of literature. Nor
was this, I believe, merely a deception on Anderson’s part, since the
breakdown painful as it surely was, did help precipitate a basic change
in his life. At the age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to
Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians
in the group that has since come to be called the “Chicago
Renaissance.” Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated
spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a
sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in
the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles
of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but
also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. The
dream of an unconditional personal freedom, that hazy American version
of utopia, would remain central throughout Anderson’s life and work. It
was an inspiration; it was a delusion.

In 1916 and 1917 Anderson published two novels mostly written in
Elyria, Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, both by now largely
forgotten. They show patches of talent but also a crudity of thought
and unsteadiness of language. No one reading these novels was likely to
suppose that its author could soon produce anything as remarkable as
Winesburg, Ohio. Occasionally there occurs in a writer’s career a
sudden, almost mysterious leap of talent, beyond explanation, perhaps
beyond any need for explanation.

In 1915-16 Anderson had begun to write and in 1919 he published the
stories that comprise Winesburg, Ohio, stories that form, in sum, a
sort of loosely-strung episodic novel. The book was an immediate
critical success, and soon Anderson was being ranked as a significant
literary figure. In 1921 the distinguished literary magazine The Dial
awarded him its first annual literary prize of $2,000, the significance
of which is perhaps best understood if one also knows that the second
recipient was T. S. Eliot. But Anderson’s moment of glory was brief, no
more than a decade, and sadly, the remaining years until his death in
1940 were marked by a sharp decline in his literary standing. Somehow,
except for an occasional story like the haunting “Death in the Woods,”
he was unable to repeat or surpass his early success. Still, about
Winesburg, Ohio and a small number of stories like “The Egg” and “The
Man Who Became a Woman” there has rarely been any critical doubt.


No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appearance than a number of
critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the
espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such
tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and
stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always
ambivalent) has faded into history. The espousal of sexual freedom
would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the
effort to place Winesburg, Ohio in a tradition of American realism,
that now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of Anderson’s stories
social verisimilitude, or the “photographing” of familiar appearances,
in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a novel by Theodore
Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Only occasionally, and then with a very
light touch, does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements of
his imaginary town—although the fact that his stories are set in a
mid-American place like Winesburg does constitute an important
formative condition. You might even say, with only slight
overstatement, that what Anderson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be
described as “antirealistic,” fictions notable less for precise locale
and social detail than for a highly personal, even strange vision of
American life. Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a
book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who
have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at
the edge of the little community in which they live. It would be a
gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we were to
take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of “the typical small town”
(whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed landscape in
which lost souls wander about; they make their flitting appearances
mostly in the darkness of night, these stumps and shades of humanity.
This vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow
truth—but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorial
voice and the mode of composition forming muted signals of the book’s
content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are
not, nor are they meant to be, “fully-rounded” characters such as we
can expect in realistic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed
for a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of
them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness, trying to reach out
to companionship and love, driven almost mad by the search for human
connection. In the economy of Winesburg these grotesques matter less in
their own right than as agents or symptoms of that “indefinable hunger”
for meaning which is Anderson’s preoccupation.

Brushing against one another, passing one another in the streets or the
fields, they see bodies and hear voices, but it does not really
matter—they are disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the
particular circumstances of small-town America as Anderson saw it at
the turn of the century? Or does he feel that he is sketching an
inescapable human condition which makes all of us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story “Adventure” turns her face to
the wall and tries “to force herself to face the fact that many people
must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.” Or especially in
Winesburg? Such impressions have been put in more general terms in
Anderson’s only successful novel, Poor White:

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have
themselves built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the
walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the
peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that
is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried
over the walls.


These “walls” of misunderstanding are only seldom due to physical
deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands”) or oppressive social
arrangements (Kate Swift in “The Teacher.”) Misunderstanding,
loneliness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as
virtually a root condition, something deeply set in our natures. Nor
are these people, the grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at
some point in their lives they have known desire, have dreamt of
ambition, have hoped for friendship. In all of them there was once
something sweet, “like the twisted little apples that grow in the
orchards in Winesburg.” Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some
rigid notion or idea, a “truth” which turns out to bear the stamp of
monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out
but unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to
life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting
a mild glow over the entire book. “Words,” as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, “are nets through which all truth escapes.” Yet what do
we have but words?

They want, these Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to
release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain
his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley “tried to talk but
could say nothing”; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world,
inventing “his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he
explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.”

In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great
themes of American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle for speech
as it entails a search for the self. Perhaps the central Winesburg
story, tracing the basic movements of the book, is “Paper Pills,” in
which the old Doctor Reefy sits “in his empty office close by a window
that was covered with cobwebs,” writes down some thoughts on slips of
paper (“pyramids of truth,” he calls them) and then stuffs them into
his pockets where they “become round hard balls” soon to be discarded.
What Dr. Reefy’s “truths” may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and
thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral signature.

After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a
recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a
little courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the
dark, there to establish some initiatory relationship with George
Willard, the young reporter who hasn’t yet lived long enough to become
a grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent
rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to their stories in
the hope that perhaps they can find some sort of renewal in his
youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their
desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that George Willard “will
write the book I may never get written,” and for Enoch Robinson, the
boy represents “the youthful sadness, young man’s sadness, the sadness
of a growing boy in a village at the year’s end [which may open] the
lips of the old man.”

What the grotesques really need is each other, but their estrangement
is so extreme they cannot establish direct ties—they can only hope for
connection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is
more than he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is
sympathetic to their complaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his
own dreams. The grotesques turn to him because he seems
“different”—younger, more open, not yet hardened—but it is precisely
this “difference” that keeps him from responding as warmly as they
want. It is hardly the boy’s fault; it is simply in the nature of
things. For George Willard, the grotesques form a moment in his
education; for the grotesques, their encounters with George Willard
come to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.

The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first
glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary,
uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style
in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried
to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has
an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even
oral narration. What Anderson employs here is a stylized version of the
American language, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical patterns
and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But at its best,
Anderson’s prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument,
yielding that “low fine music” which he admired so much in the stories
of Turgenev.

One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is that of
self-imitation: the effort later in life, often desperate, to recapture
the tones and themes of youthful beginnings. Something of the sort
happened with Anderson’s later writings. Most critics and readers grew
impatient with the work he did after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he
was constantly repeating his gestures of emotional “groping”—what he
had called in Winesburg, Ohio the “indefinable hunger” that prods and
torments people. It became the critical fashion to see Anderson’s
“gropings” as a sign of delayed adolescence, a failure to develop as a
writer. Once he wrote a chilling reply to those who dismissed him in
this way: “I don’t think it matters much, all this calling a man a
muddler, a groper, etc…. The very man who throws such words as these
knows in his heart that he is also facing a wall.” This remark seems to
me both dignified and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was
some justice in the negative responses to his later work. For what
characterized it was not so much “groping” as the imitation of
“groping,” the self-caricature of a writer who feels driven back upon
an earlier self that is, alas, no longer available.

But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of
its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued
pathos—pathos marking both the nature and limit of Anderson’s talent.
(He spoke of himself as a “minor writer.”) In a few stories, however,
he was able to reach beyond pathos and to strike a tragic note. The
single best story in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, “The Untold Lie,” in
which the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign of a tragic element
in the human condition. And in Anderson’s single greatest story, “The
Egg,” which appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded in
bringing together a surface of farce with an undertone of tragedy. “The
Egg” is an American masterpiece.

Anderson’s influence upon later American writers, especially those who
wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of
feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story.
As Faulkner put it, Anderson’s “was the fumbling for exactitude, the
exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary
controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of
simplicity … to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.”
And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson
influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of his voice.

Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon
Swinburne once said: “If he touches you once he takes you, and what he
takes he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and
parcel of your spiritual furniture forever.” So it is, for me and many
others, with Sherwood Anderson.



To the memory of my mother,
EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,


whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the
hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.



THE TALES AND THE PERSONS



THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE


The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in
getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high
and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A
carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the
window.

Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a
soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to
talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The
writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.

For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they
talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The
writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a
prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother
had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that
subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and
when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and
down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous.
The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and
later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past
sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.

In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For
years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a
hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind
that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into
bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was
quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive,
there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his
body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was
altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing
inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a
woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd,
you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his
high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get
at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was
thinking about.

The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during
his long life, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite
handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of
course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly
intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know
people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought
pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before
his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was
driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before
the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and
women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost
beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by
her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog
whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old
man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the
old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out
of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book
which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published,
but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The
book had one central thought that is very strange and has always
remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many
people and things that I was never able to understand before. The
thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something
like this:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many
thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and
each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in
the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and
the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and
of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were
the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of
the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had
quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that
the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called
it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque
and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life
writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages
concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind
that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t,
I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was
the young thing inside him that saved the old man.

Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only
mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common
people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable
of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.



HANDS


Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near
the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old
man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been
seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow
mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon
filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers,
youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a
blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of
the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in
the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the
departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. “Oh, you
Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,”
commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little
hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass
of tangled locks.

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of
doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of
the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of
Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of
Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed
something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the
_Winesburg Eagle_ and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the
highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the old man walked up and
down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping
that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After
the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the
field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered
anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus,
rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then,
fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own
house.

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty
years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and
his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to
look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in
the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety
front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had
been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure
straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook
by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put
into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long
years of silence.

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive
fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his
pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of
his machinery of expression.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless
activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had
given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it.
The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and
looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who
worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on
country roads.

When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and
beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action
made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the
two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board
of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.
Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful
qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the
hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With
them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts
of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the
source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque
and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing
Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s
new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won
the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.

As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands.
At times an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. He
felt that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their
inclination to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing
Biddlebaum kept him from blurting out the questions that were often in
his mind.

Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were walking in the
fields on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank.
All afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he
had stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had
shouted at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much
influenced by the people about him, “You are destroying yourself,” he
cried. “You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are
afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear
them talk and you try to imitate them.”

On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point
home. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh of
contentment he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost
in a dream.

Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In
the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a
green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some
mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the
feet of an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who
talked to them.

Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands.
Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard’s shoulders.
Something new and bold came into the voice that talked. “You must try
to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to
dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the
voices.”

Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at
George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress
the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.

With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his
feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Tears came to
his eyes. “I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you,”
he said nervously.

Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and
across a meadow, leaving George Willard perplexed and frightened upon
the grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along
the road toward town. “I’ll not ask him about his hands,” he thought,
touched by the memory of the terror he had seen in the man’s eyes.
“There’s something wrong, but I don’t want to know what it is. His
hands have something to do with his fear of me and of everyone.”

And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the
hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell
the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but
fluttering pennants of promise.

In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher in a town in
Pennsylvania. He was not then known as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the
less euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved
by the boys of his school.

Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one
of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that
it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under
their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their
love of men.

And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the
boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat
talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream.
Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys,
playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and
musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the
hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were
a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young
minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He
was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused,
not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went
out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.

And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school became enamored
of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things
and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange,
hideous accusations fell from his loosehung lips. Through the
Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been
in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.

The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and
questioned. “He put his arms about me,” said one. “His fingers were
always playing in my hair,” said another.

One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon,
came to the schoolhouse door. Calling Adolph Myers into the school yard
he began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down
into the frightened face of the school-master, his wrath became more
and more terrible. Screaming with dismay, the children ran here and
there like disturbed insects. “I’ll teach you to put your hands on my
boy, you beast,” roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating the
master, had begun to kick him about the yard.

Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With
lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the door of the house where
he lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was
raining and one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had intended
to hang the school-master, but something in his figure, so small,
white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he
ran away into the darkness they repented of their weakness and ran
after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at
the figure that screamed and ran faster and faster into the darkness.

For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but
forty but looked sixty-five. The name of Biddlebaum he got from a box
of goods seen at a freight station as he hurried through an eastern
Ohio town. He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who
raised chickens, and with her he lived until she died. He had been ill
for a year after the experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery
worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly about and striving
to conceal his hands. Although he did not understand what had happened
he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of
the boys had talked of the hands. “Keep your hands to yourself,” the
saloon keeper had roared, dancing, with fury in the schoolhouse yard.

Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued
to walk up and down until the sun had disappeared and the road beyond
the field was lost in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut
slices of bread and spread honey upon them. When the rumble of the
evening train that took away the express cars loaded with the day’s
harvest of berries had passed and restored the silence of the summer
night, he went again to walk upon the veranda. In the darkness he could
not see the hands and they became quiet. Although he still hungered for
the presence of the boy, who was the medium through which he expressed
his love of man, the hunger became again a part of his loneliness and
his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes
soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screen
door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few
stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table;
putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs,
carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In
the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked
like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous
expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have
been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through
decade after decade of his rosary.



PAPER PILLS


He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long
before the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and
drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of
Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a
large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and
dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in
Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the
marriage she died.

The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When the
hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls
as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob
pipe and after his wife’s death sat all day in his empty office close
by a window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window.
Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after
that he forgot all about it.

Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the
seeds of something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner
Block above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly,
building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of
truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he
might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten
years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at
the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with
huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After
some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when
the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten
years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who
owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy
took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at
the nursery man. “That is to confound you, you blathering old
sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.

The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who
became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It
is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards
of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is
hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by
the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities
where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books,
magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled
apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of
Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into
a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of
its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground
picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them.
Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon.
He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling
his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were
thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind
the jaded white horse and went slowly along country roads. On the
papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.

One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many
of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth
clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the
little thoughts began again.

The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the
family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because
of a series of circumstances also curious.

The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had
come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years
she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike.
They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in
their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who
were different were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender
young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked
continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the
subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at
all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to
kiss her.

For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler’s
son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and
then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity
she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At
times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his
hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and
staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body
and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then
she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who
in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for
days the marks of his teeth showed.

After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her
that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one
morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had
happened to her.

In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country
practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held
a handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and
when the tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on
the woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention.
When the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. “I will take you
driving into the country with me,” he said.

For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together
almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in
an illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of
the twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the
round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments. In the fall
after the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor
Reefy and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read
to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the
bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away
in his pockets to become round hard balls.



MOTHER


Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and
her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but
forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure.
Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded
wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about,
doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of
fat traveling men. Her husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man
with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a black mustache
trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out of
his mind. The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly
through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. When he thought of
her he grew angry and swore. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on
the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. He thought of the
old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and
done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a
mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he went spruce and
business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped
and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel
and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. “Damn such a
life, damn it!” he sputtered aimlessly.

Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been
the leading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. Some day, he
told himself, the tide of things political will turn in my favor and
the years of ineffectual service count big in the bestowal of rewards.
He dreamed of going to Congress and even of becoming governor. Once
when a younger member of the party arose at a political conference and
began to boast of his faithful service, Tom Willard grew white with
fury. “Shut up, you,” he roared, glaring about. “What do you know of
service? What are you but a boy? Look at what I’ve done here! I was a
Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the
old days they fairly hunted us with guns.”

Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed
bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In
the son’s presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he
hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into
his room and closing the door knelt by a little desk, made of a kitchen
table, that sat near a window. In the room by the desk she went through
a ceremony that was half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the
skies. In the boyish figure she yearned to see something half forgotten
that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned
that. “Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you,” she
cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her
eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead and see him
becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back,” she
declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will
pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that
may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us
both.” Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about the boy’s room. “And
do not let him become smart and successful either,” she added vaguely.

The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a
formal thing without meaning. When she was ill and sat by the window in
her room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat
by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into
Main Street. By turning their heads they could see through another
window, along an alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and
into the back door of Abner Groff’s bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus
a picture of village life presented itself to them. At the back door of
his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or an empty milk bottle in
his hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker and a grey
cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. The boy and his
mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently
emerge followed by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The
baker’s eyes were small and red and his black hair and beard were
filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the
cat had disappeared, he hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even
some of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at the
back of Sinning’s Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched
behind barrels filled with torn paper and broken bottles above which
flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she was alone, and after
watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker,
Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept.
After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to
forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like
a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the
silence made them both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening
train came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and
down upon a board sidewalk. In the station yard, after the evening
train had gone, there was a heavy silence. Perhaps Skinner Leason, the
express agent, moved a truck the length of the station platform. Over
on Main Street sounded a man’s voice, laughing. The door of the express
office banged. George Willard arose and crossing the room fumbled for
the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked against a chair, making it scrape
along the floor. By the window sat the sick woman, perfectly still,
listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless, could be seen drooping
over the ends of the arms of the chair. “I think you had better be out
among the boys. You are too much indoors,” she said, striving to
relieve the embarrassment of the departure. “I thought I would take a
walk,” replied George Willard, who felt awkward and confused.

One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard
House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted
only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth
Willard had an adventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and
her son had not come to visit her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of
life that remained in her body was blown into a flame by her anxiety
and she crept out of bed, dressed and hurried along the hallway toward
her son’s room, shaking with exaggerated fears. As she went along she
steadied herself with her hand, slipped along the papered walls of the
hall and breathed with difficulty. The air whistled through her teeth.
As she hurried forward she thought how foolish she was. “He is
concerned with boyish affairs,” she told herself. “Perhaps he has now
begun to walk about in the evening with girls.”

Elizabeth Willard had a dread of being seen by guests in the hotel that
had once belonged to her father and the ownership of which still stood
recorded in her name in the county courthouse. The hotel was
continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought
of herself as also shabby. Her own room was in an obscure corner and
when she felt able to work she voluntarily worked among the beds,
preferring the labor that could be done when the guests were abroad
seeking trade among the merchants of Winesburg.

By the door of her son’s room the mother knelt upon the floor and
listened for some sound from within. When she heard the boy moving
about and talking in low tones a smile came to her lips. George Willard
had a habit of talking aloud to himself and to hear him doing so had
always given his mother a peculiar pleasure. The habit in him, she
felt, strengthened the secret bond that existed between them. A
thousand times she had whispered to herself of the matter. “He is
groping about, trying to find himself,” she thought. “He is not a dull
clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something
that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself.”

In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and
started again toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would
open and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance
and was about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and
bracing herself with her hands waited, thinking to shake off a
trembling fit of weakness that had come upon her. The presence of the
boy in the room had made her happy. In her bed, during the long hours
alone, the little fears that had visited her had become giants. Now
they were all gone. “When I get back to my room I shall sleep,” she
murmured gratefully.

But Elizabeth Willard was not to return to her bed and to sleep. As she
stood trembling in the darkness the door of her son’s room opened and
the boy’s father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed
out at the door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he
said infuriated the woman.

Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself
as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out
successfully. However, when he was out of sight of the New Willard
House and had no fear of coming upon his wife, he swaggered and began
to dramatize himself as one of the chief men of the town. He wanted his
son to succeed. He it was who had secured for the boy the position on
the _Winesburg Eagle_. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he
was advising concerning some course of conduct. “I tell you what,
George, you’ve got to wake up,” he said sharply. “Will Henderson has
spoken to me three times concerning the matter. He says you go along
for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky
girl. What ails you?” Tom Willard laughed good-naturedly. “Well, I
guess you’ll get over it,” he said. “I told Will that. You’re not a
fool and you’re not a woman. You’re Tom Willard’s son and you’ll wake
up. I’m not afraid. What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper
man had put the notion of becoming a writer into your mind that’s all
right. Only I guess you’ll have to wake up to do that too, eh?”

Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a flight of stairs
to the office. The woman in the darkness could hear him laughing and
talking with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by
dozing in a chair by the office door. She returned to the door of her
son’s room. The weakness had passed from her body as by a miracle and
she stepped boldly along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When
she heard the scraping of a chair and the sound of a pen scratching
upon paper, she again turned and went back along the hallway to her own
room.

A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of
the Winesburg hotel keeper. The determination was the result of long
years of quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. “Now,” she told
herself, “I will act. There is something threatening my boy and I will
ward it off.” The fact that the conversation between Tom Willard and
his son had been rather quiet and natural, as though an understanding
existed between them, maddened her. Although for years she had hated
her husband, her hatred had always before been a quite impersonal
thing. He had been merely a part of something else that she hated. Now,
and by the few words at the door, he had become the thing personified.
In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists and glared
about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she took
out a long pair of sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a
dagger. “I will stab him,” she said aloud. “He has chosen to be the
voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him something
will snap within myself and I will die also. It will be a release for
all of us.”

In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had
borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been
what is called “stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with
traveling men guests at her father’s hotel, wearing loud clothes and
urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had
come. Once she startled the town by putting on men’s clothes and riding
a bicycle down Main Street.

In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much
confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in
two ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big
definite movement to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her
mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering
over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of
herself to all people. Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself
with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter to the
members of the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg and stopped
at her father’s hotel, she got nowhere. They did not seem to know what
she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed, they
only laughed. “It’s not like that,” they said. “It’s as dull and
uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.”

With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with
Tom Willard, it was quite different. Always they seemed to understand
and sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the
darkness under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought
that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of
an unexpressed something in them.

And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that
came she felt for a time released and happy. She did not blame the men
who walked with her and later she did not blame Tom Willard. It was
always the same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild
emotions, with peace and then sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she
put her hand upon the face of the man and had always the same thought.
Even though he were large and bearded she thought he had become
suddenly a little boy. She wondered why he did not sob also.

In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House,
Elizabeth Willard lighted a lamp and put it on a dressing table that
stood by the door. A thought had come into her mind and she went to a
closet and brought out a small square box and set it on the table. The
box contained material for make-up and had been left with other things
by a theatrical company that had once been stranded in Winesburg.
Elizabeth Willard had decided that she would be beautiful. Her hair was
still black and there was a great mass of it braided and coiled about
her head. The scene that was to take place in the office below began to
grow in her mind. No ghostly worn-out figure should confront Tom
Willard, but something quite unexpected and startling. Tall and with
dusky cheeks and hair that fell in a mass from her shoulders, a figure
should come striding down the stairway before the startled loungers in
the hotel office. The figure would be silent—it would be swift and
terrible. As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear,
coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the
long wicked scissors in her hand.

With a little broken sob in her throat, Elizabeth Willard blew out the
light that stood upon the table and stood weak and trembling in the
darkness. The strength that had been as a miracle in her body left and
she half reeled across the floor, clutching at the back of the chair in
which she had spent so many long days staring out over the tin roofs
into the main street of Winesburg. In the hallway there was the sound
of footsteps and George Willard came in at the door. Sitting in a chair
beside his mother he began to talk. “I’m going to get out of here,” he
said. “I don’t know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going
away.”

The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. “I
suppose you had better wake up,” she said. “You think that? You will go
to the city and make money, eh? It will be better for you, you think,
to be a business man, to be brisk and smart and alive?” She waited and
trembled.

The son shook his head. “I suppose I can’t make you understand, but oh,
I wish I could,” he said earnestly. “I can’t even talk to father about
it. I don’t try. There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I
just want to go away and look at people and think.”

Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together. Again,
as on the other evenings, they were embarrassed. After a time the boy
tried again to talk. “I suppose it won’t be for a year or two but I’ve
been thinking about it,” he said, rising and going toward the door.
“Something father said makes it sure that I shall have to go away.” He
fumbled with the doorknob. In the room the silence became unbearable to
the woman. She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had
come from the lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become
impossible to her. “I think you had better go out among the boys. You
are too much indoors,” she said. “I thought I would go for a little
walk,” replied the son stepping awkwardly out of the room and closing
the door.



THE PHILOSOPHER


Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a
yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the
pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known
as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something
strange about his eyes. The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down
and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a
window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with
the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard. It began when
George had been working for a year on the _Winesburg Eagle_ and the
acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor’s own making.

In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor of the _Eagle_,
went over to Tom Willy’s saloon. Along an alleyway he went and slipping
in at the back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made of a
combination of sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a sensualist
and had reached the age of forty-five. He imagined the gin renewed the
youth in him. Like most sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and
for an hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy. The saloon
keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with peculiarly marked hands.
That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints with red the faces
of men and women had touched with red Tom Willy’s fingers and the backs
of his hands. As he stood by the bar talking to Will Henderson he
rubbed the hands together. As he grew more and more excited the red of
his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had been dipped in
blood that had dried and faded.

As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red hands and talking
of women, his assistant, George Willard, sat in the office of the
_Winesburg Eagle_ and listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.

Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will Henderson had
disappeared. One might have supposed that the doctor had been watching
from his office window and had seen the editor going along the
alleyway. Coming in at the front door and finding himself a chair, he
lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs began to talk. He
seemed intent upon convincing the boy of the advisability of adopting a
line of conduct that he was himself unable to define.

“If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a
doctor I have mighty few patients,” he began. “There is a reason for
that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much
of medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The reason, you
see, does not appear on the surface. It lies in fact in my character,
which has, if you think about it, many strange turns. Why I want to
talk to you of the matter I don’t know. I might keep still and get more
credit in your eyes. I have a desire to make you admire me, that’s a
fact. I don’t know why. That’s why I talk. It’s very amusing, eh?”

Sometimes the doctor launched into long tales concerning himself. To
the boy the tales were very real and full of meaning. He began to
admire the fat unclean-looking man and, in the afternoon when Will
Henderson had gone, looked forward with keen interest to the doctor’s
coming.

Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years. He came from
Chicago and when he arrived was drunk and got into a fight with Albert
Longworth, the baggageman. The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the
doctor’s being escorted to the village lockup. When he was released he
rented a room above a shoe-repairing shop at the lower end of Main
Street and put out the sign that announced himself as a doctor.
Although he had but few patients and these of the poorer sort who were
unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money for his needs. He
slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at Biff
Carter’s lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroad
station. In the summer the lunch room was filled with flies and Biff
Carter’s white apron was more dirty than his floor. Doctor Parcival did
not mind. Into the lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents
upon the counter. “Feed me what you wish for that,” he said laughing.
“Use up food that you wouldn’t otherwise sell. It makes no difference
to me. I am a man of distinction, you see. Why should I concern myself
with what I eat.”

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and
ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a
pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the
very essence of truth.

“I was a reporter like you here,” Doctor Parcival began. “It was in a
town in Iowa—or was it in Illinois? I don’t remember and anyway it
makes no difference. Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity and
don’t want to be very definite. Have you ever thought it strange that I
have money for my needs although I do nothing? I may have stolen a
great sum of money or been involved in a murder before I came here.
There is food for thought in that, eh? If you were a really smart
newspaper reporter you would look me up. In Chicago there was a Doctor
Cronin who was murdered. Have you heard of that? Some men murdered him
and put him in a trunk. In the early morning they hauled the trunk
across the city. It sat on the back of an express wagon and they were
on the seat as unconcerned as anything. Along they went through quiet
streets where everyone was asleep. The sun was just coming up over the
lake. Funny, eh—just to think of them smoking pipes and chattering as
they drove along as unconcerned as I am now. Perhaps I was one of those
men. That would be a strange turn of things, now wouldn’t it, eh?”
Again Doctor Parcival began his tale: “Well, anyway there I was, a
reporter on a paper just as you are here, running about and getting
little items to print. My mother was poor. She took in washing. Her
dream was to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying with
that end in view.

“My father had been insane for a number of years. He was in an asylum
over at Dayton, Ohio. There you see I have let it slip out! All of this
took place in Ohio, right here in Ohio. There is a clew if you ever get
the notion of looking me up.

“I was going to tell you of my brother. That’s the object of all this.
That’s what I’m getting at. My brother was a railroad painter and had a
job on the Big Four. You know that road runs through Ohio here. With
other men he lived in a box car and away they went from town to town
painting the railroad property-switches, crossing gates, bridges, and
stations.

“The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color. How I hated
that color! My brother was always covered with it. On pay days he used
to get drunk and come home wearing his paint-covered clothes and
bringing his money with him. He did not give it to mother but laid it
in a pile on our kitchen table.

“About the house he went in the clothes covered with the nasty orange
colored paint. I can see the picture. My mother, who was small and had
red, sad-looking eyes, would come into the house from a little shed at
the back. That’s where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing
people’s dirty clothes. In she would come and stand by the table,
rubbing her eyes with her apron that was covered with soap-suds.

“‘Don’t touch it! Don’t you dare touch that money,’ my brother roared,
and then he himself took five or ten dollars and went tramping off to
the saloons. When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more.
He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he had
spent it all, a little at a time. Then he went back to his job with the
painting crew on the railroad. After he had gone things began to arrive
at our house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there would be a
dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.

“Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother much more than she did me,
although he never said a kind word to either of us and always raved up
and down threatening us if we dared so much as touch the money that
sometimes lay on the table three days.

“We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister and prayed. I was
a regular ass about saying prayers. You should have heard me. When my
father died I prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother
was in town drinking and going about buying the things for us. In the
evening after supper I knelt by the table where the money lay and
prayed for hours. When no one was looking I stole a dollar or two and
put it in my pocket. That makes me laugh now but then it was terrible.
It was on my mind all the time. I got six dollars a week from my job on
the paper and always took it straight home to mother. The few dollars I
stole from my brother’s pile I spent on myself, you know, for trifles,
candy and cigarettes and such things.

“When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I went over there. I
borrowed some money from the man for whom I worked and went on the
train at night. It was raining. In the asylum they treated me as though
I were a king.

“The men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was a newspaper
reporter. That made them afraid. There had been some negligence, some
carelessness, you see, when father was ill. They thought perhaps I
would write it up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do
anything of the kind.

“Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed the
dead body. I wonder what put that notion into my head. Wouldn’t my
brother, the painter, have laughed, though. There I stood over the dead
body and spread out my hands. The superintendent of the asylum and some
of his helpers came in and stood about looking sheepish. It was very
amusing. I spread out my hands and said, ‘Let peace brood over this
carcass.’ That’s what I said.”

Jumping to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor Parcival began to
walk up and down in the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ where George
Willard sat listening. He was awkward and, as the office was small,
continually knocked against things. “What a fool I am to be talking,”
he said. “That is not my object in coming here and forcing my
acquaintanceship upon you. I have something else in mind. You are a
reporter just as I was once and you have attracted my attention. You
may end by becoming just such another fool. I want to warn you and keep
on warning you. That’s why I seek you out.”

Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard’s attitude toward men.
It seemed to the boy that the man had but one object in view, to make
everyone seem despicable. “I want to fill you with hatred and contempt
so that you will be a superior being,” he declared. “Look at my
brother. There was a fellow, eh? He despised everyone, you see. You
have no idea with what contempt he looked upon mother and me. And was
he not our superior? You know he was. You have not seen him and yet I
have made you feel that. I have given you a sense of it. He is dead.
Once when he was drunk he lay down on the tracks and the car in which
he lived with the other painters ran over him.”


One day in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg. For a
month George Willard had been going each morning to spend an hour in
the doctor’s office. The visits came about through a desire on the part
of the doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book he was in the
process of writing. To write the book Doctor Parcival declared was the
object of his coming to Winesburg to live.

On the morning in August before the coming of the boy, an incident had
happened in the doctor’s office. There had been an accident on Main
Street. A team of horses had been frightened by a train and had run
away. A little girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown from a
buggy and killed.

On Main Street everyone had become excited and a cry for doctors had
gone up. All three of the active practitioners of the town had come
quickly but had found the child dead. From the crowd someone had run to
the office of Doctor Parcival who had bluntly refused to go down out of
his office to the dead child. The useless cruelty of his refusal had
passed unnoticed. Indeed, the man who had come up the stairway to
summon him had hurried away without hearing the refusal.

All of this, Doctor Parcival did not know and when George Willard came
to his office he found the man shaking with terror. “What I have done
will arouse the people of this town,” he declared excitedly. “Do I not
know human nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word of my refusal
will be whispered about. Presently men will get together in groups and
talk of it. They will come here. We will quarrel and there will be talk
of hanging. Then they will come again bearing a rope in their hands.”

Doctor Parcival shook with fright. “I have a presentiment,” he declared
emphatically. “It may be that what I am talking about will not occur
this morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged.
Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main
Street.”

Going to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival looked timidly
down the stairway leading to the street. When he returned the fright
that had been in his eyes was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming
on tiptoe across the room he tapped George Willard on the shoulder. “If
not now, sometime,” he whispered, shaking his head. “In the end I will
be crucified, uselessly crucified.”

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. “You must pay
attention to me,” he urged. “If something happens perhaps you will be
able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very
simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is
this—that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
That’s what I want to say. Don’t you forget that. Whatever happens,
don’t you dare let yourself forget.”



NOBODY KNOWS


Looking cautiously about, George Willard arose from his desk in the
office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ and went hurriedly out at the back
door. The night was warm and cloudy and although it was not yet eight
o’clock, the alleyway back of the _Eagle_ office was pitch dark. A team
of horses tied to a post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the
hard-baked ground. A cat sprang from under George Willard’s feet and
ran away into the night. The young man was nervous. All day he had gone
about his work like one dazed by a blow. In the alleyway he trembled as
though with fright.

In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going
carefully and cautiously. The back doors of the Winesburg stores were
open and he could see men sitting about under the store lamps. In
Myerbaum’s Notion Store Mrs. Willy the saloon keeper’s wife stood by
the counter with a basket on her arm. Sid Green the clerk was waiting
on her. He leaned over the counter and talked earnestly.

George Willard crouched and then jumped through the path of light that
came out at the door. He began to run forward in the darkness. Behind
Ed Griffith’s saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the
ground. The runner stumbled over the sprawling legs. He laughed
brokenly.

George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been
trying to make up his mind to go through with the adventure and now he
was acting. In the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ he had been sitting
since six o’clock trying to think.

There had been no decision. He had just jumped to his feet, hurried
past Will Henderson who was reading proof in the printshop and started
to run along the alleyway.

Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people
who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street
lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In
his mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid
the adventure on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would
lose courage and turn back.

George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father’s
house. She was washing dishes by the light of a kerosene lamp. There
she stood behind the screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the
back of the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried
to control the shaking of his body. Only a narrow potato patch
separated him from the adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt
sure enough of himself to call to her. “Louise! Oh, Louise!” he called.
The cry stuck in his throat. His voice became a hoarse whisper.

Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth
in her hand. “How do you know I want to go out with you,” she said
sulkily. “What makes you so sure?”

George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness
with the fence between them. “You go on along,” she said. “Pa’s in
there. I’ll come along. You wait by Williams’ barn.”

The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise
Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the _Winesburg
Eagle_. The letter was brief. “I’m yours if you want me,” it said. He
thought it annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended
there was nothing between them. “She has a nerve! Well, gracious sakes,
she has a nerve,” he muttered as he went along the street and passed a
row of vacant lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had
been planted right down to the sidewalk.

When Louise Trunnion came out of the front door of her house she still
wore the gingham dress in which she had been washing dishes. There was
no hat on her head. The boy could see her standing with the doorknob in
her hand talking to someone within, no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her
father. Old Jake was half deaf and she shouted. The door closed and
everything was dark and silent in the little side street. George
Willard trembled more violently than ever.

In the shadows by Williams’ barn George and Louise stood, not daring to
talk. She was not particularly comely and there was a black smudge on
the side of her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose with
her finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.

The young man began to laugh nervously. “It’s warm,” he said. He wanted
to touch her with his hand. “I’m not very bold,” he thought. Just to
touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided, be an
exquisite pleasure. She began to quibble. “You think you’re better than
I am. Don’t tell me, I guess I know,” she said drawing closer to him.

A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that
had lurked in the girl’s eyes when they had met on the streets and
thought of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered
tales concerning her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He
became wholly the male, bold and aggressive. In his heart there was no
sympathy for her. “Ah, come on, it’ll be all right. There won’t be
anyone know anything. How can they know?” he urged.

They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the cracks of
which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks were missing and the sidewalk
was rough and irregular. He took hold of her hand that was also rough
and thought it delightfully small. “I can’t go far,” she said and her
voice was quiet, unperturbed.

They crossed a bridge that ran over a tiny stream and passed another
vacant lot in which corn grew. The street ended. In the path at the
side of the road they were compelled to walk one behind the other. Will
Overton’s berry field lay beside the road and there was a pile of
boards. “Will is going to build a shed to store berry crates here,”
said George and they sat down upon the boards.


When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o’clock
and had begun to rain. Three times he walked up and down the length of
Main Street. Sylvester West’s Drug Store was still open and he went in
and bought a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door
with him he was pleased. For five minutes the two stood in the shelter
of the store awning and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had
wanted more than anything else to talk to some man. Around a corner
toward the New Willard House he went whistling softly.

On the sidewalk at the side of Winney’s Dry Goods Store where there was
a high board fence covered with circus pictures, he stopped whistling
and stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as
though for a voice calling his name. Then again he laughed nervously.
“She hasn’t got anything on me. Nobody knows,” he muttered doggedly and
went on his way.



GODLINESS

A TALE IN FOUR PARTS

PART ONE

There were always three or four old people sitting on the front porch
of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three
of the old people were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a
colorless, soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with thin
white hair who was Jesse’s uncle.

The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outer-covering over a
framework of logs. It was in reality not one house but a cluster of
houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner. Inside, the place
was full of surprises. One went up steps from the living room into the
dining room and there were always steps to be ascended or descended in
passing from one room to another. At meal times the place was like a
beehive. At one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open, feet
clattered on stairs, a murmur of soft voices arose and people appeared
from a dozen obscure corners.

Besides the old people, already mentioned, many others lived in the
Bentley house. There were four hired men, a woman named Aunt Callie
Beebe, who was in charge of the housekeeping, a dull-witted girl named
Eliza Stoughton, who made beds and helped with the milking, a boy who
worked in the stables, and Jesse Bentley himself, the owner and
overlord of it all.

By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that
part of Northern Ohio where the Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge
from pioneer life. Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain. He
had built modern barns and most of his land was drained with carefully
laid tile drain, but in order to understand the man we will have to go
back to an earlier day.

The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for several generations
before Jesse’s time. They came from New York State and took up land
when the country was new and land could be had at a low price. For a
long time they, in common with all the other Middle Western people,
were very poor. The land they had settled upon was heavily wooded and
covered with fallen logs and underbrush. After the long hard labor of
clearing these away and cutting the timber, there were still the stumps
to be reckoned with. Plows run through the fields caught on hidden
roots, stones lay all about, on the low places water gathered, and the
young corn turned yellow, sickened and died.

When Jesse Bentley’s father and brothers had come into their ownership
of the place, much of the harder part of the work of clearing had been
done, but they clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals.
They lived as practically all of the farming people of the time lived.
In the spring and through most of the winter the highways leading into
the town of Winesburg were a sea of mud. The four young men of the
family worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse,
greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on beds of straw.
Into their lives came little that was not coarse and brutal and
outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal. On Saturday
afternoons they hitched a team of horses to a three-seated wagon and
went off to town. In town they stood about the stoves in the stores
talking to other farmers or to the store keepers. They were dressed in
overalls and in the winter wore heavy coats that were flecked with mud.
Their hands as they stretched them out to the heat of the stoves were
cracked and red. It was difficult for them to talk and so they for the
most part kept silent. When they had bought meat, flour, sugar, and
salt, they went into one of the Winesburg saloons and drank beer. Under
the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures,
kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were
released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession
of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted
at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other
times they broke forth into songs. Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of
the boys, struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a
teamster’s whip, and the old man seemed likely to die. For days Enoch
lay hid in the straw in the loft of the stable ready to flee if the
result of his momentary passion turned out to be murder. He was kept
alive with food brought by his mother, who also kept him informed of
the injured man’s condition. When all turned out well he emerged from
his hiding place and went back to the work of clearing land as though
nothing had happened.


The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes of the Bentleys and
was responsible for the rise of the youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward,
Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they
were all killed. For a time after they went away to the South, old Tom
tried to run the place, but he was not successful. When the last of the
four had been killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come
home.

Then the mother, who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and
the father became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm
and moving into town. All day he went about shaking his head and
muttering. The work in the fields was neglected and weeds grew high in
the corn. Old Tom hired men but he did not use them intelligently. When
they had gone away to the fields in the morning he wandered into the
woods and sat down on a log. Sometimes he forgot to come home at night
and one of the daughters had to go in search of him.

When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and began to take charge of
things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At
eighteen he had left home to go to school to become a scholar and
eventually to become a minister of the Presbyterian Church. All through
his boyhood he had been what in our country was called an “odd sheep”
and had not got on with his brothers. Of all the family only his mother
had understood him and she was now dead. When he came home to take
charge of the farm, that had at that time grown to more than six
hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and in the nearby town of
Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle the work that had
been done by his four strong brothers.

There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse
did not look like a man at all. He was small and very slender and
womanish of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a
long black coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were
amused when they saw him, after the years away, and they were even more
amused when they saw the woman he had married in the city.

As a matter of fact, Jesse’s wife did soon go under. That was perhaps
Jesse’s fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the
Civil War was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was
delicate. Jesse was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in
those days. She tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about
her did and he let her go on without interference. She helped to do the
milking and did part of the housework; she made the beds for the men
and prepared their food. For a year she worked every day from sunrise
until late at night and then after giving birth to a child she died.

As for Jesse Bentley—although he was a delicately built man there was
something within him that could not easily be killed. He had brown
curly hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times
wavering and uncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short
of stature. His mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very
determined child. Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of
his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer.
Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out of life and he did
not know what he wanted. Within a very short time after he came home to
the Bentley farm he made everyone there a little afraid of him, and his
wife, who should have been close to him as his mother had been, was
afraid also. At the end of two weeks after his coming, old Tom Bentley
made over to him the entire ownership of the place and retired into the
background. Everyone retired into the background. In spite of his youth
and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of his
people. He was so in earnest in everything he did and said that no one
understood him. He made everyone on the farm work as they had never
worked before and yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well
they went well for Jesse and never for the people who were his
dependents. Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the
world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong.
He could master others but he could not master himself. The running of
the farm as it had never been run before was easy for him. When he came
home from Cleveland where he had been in school, he shut himself off
from all of his people and began to make plans. He thought about the
farm night and day and that made him successful. Other men on the farms
about him worked too hard and were too fired to think, but to think of
the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its success was a
relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something in his passionate
nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to the
old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that
looked into the barnyard and other windows that looked off across the
fields. By the window he sat down to think. Hour after hour and day
after day he sat and looked over the land and thought out his new place
in life. The passionate burning thing in his nature flamed up and his
eyes became hard. He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his
state had ever produced before and then he wanted something else. It
was the indefinable hunger within that made his eyes waver and that
kept him always more and more silent before people. He would have given
much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing he
could not achieve.

All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his small frame was
gathered the force of a long line of strong men. He had always been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later
when he was a young man in school. In the school he had studied and
thought of God and the Bible with his whole mind and heart. As time
passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself
as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted
terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked
about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to
him that he could not bear to become also such a clod. Although in his
absorption in himself and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact
that his young wife was doing a strong woman’s work even after she had
become large with child and that she was killing herself in his
service, he did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the
farm and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death,
he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.

In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs. In the stables he could hear
the tramping of his horses and the restless movement of his cattle.
Away in the fields he could see other cattle wandering over green
hills. The voices of men, his men who worked for him, came in to him
through the window. From the milkhouse there was the steady thump,
thump of a churn being manipulated by the half-witted girl, Eliza
Stoughton. Jesse’s mind went back to the men of Old Testament days who
had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out
of the skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and to
talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness to in some way
achieve in his own life the flavor of significance that had hung over
these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his own words strengthened and fed
his eagerness.

“I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields,” he
declared. “Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors
and all the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me
another Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the
father of sons who shall be rulers!” Jesse grew excited as he talked
aloud and jumping to his feet walked up and down in the room. In fancy
he saw himself living in old times and among old peoples. The land that
lay stretched out before him became of vast significance, a place
peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung from himself. It
seemed to him that in his day as in those other and older days,
kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of men by
the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He longed to be
such a servant. “It is God’s work I have come to the land to do,” he
declared in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.


It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later
day to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last fifty years a vast change
has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact
taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and
rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have
come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth
of cities, the building of the inter-urban car lines that weave in and
out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the
coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives
and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly
imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are
in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies,
newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in
the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the
words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him
full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of
beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove
is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us
all.

In Jesse Bentley’s time and in the country districts of the whole
Middle West in the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored
too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words
printed upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed
thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God’s
power to control their lives. In the little Protestant churches they
gathered on Sunday to hear of God and his works. The churches were the
center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The figure of
God was big in the hearts of men.

And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly
toward God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God
in that. When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the
running of the farm, he took that also as a sign from God. In the city,
when the word came to him, he walked about at night through the streets
thinking of the matter and when he had come home and had got the work
on the farm well under way, he went again at night to walk through the
forests and over the low hills and to think of God.

As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew
in his mind. He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm
contained only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the
edge of some meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and
looking up he saw the stars shining down at him.

One evening, some months after his father’s death, and when his wife
Katherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth,
Jesse left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was
situated in a tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along
the banks of the stream to the end of his own land and on through the
fields of his neighbors. As he walked the valley broadened and then
narrowed again. Great open stretches of field and wood lay before him.
The moon came out from behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat
down to think.

Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his
possession. He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they
had not worked harder and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight
the tiny stream ran down over stones, and he began to think of the men
of old times who like himself had owned flocks and lands.

A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of
Jesse Bentley. He remembered how in the old Bible story the Lord had
appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to
where Saul and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the
Valley of Elah. Into Jesse’s mind came the conviction that all of the
Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were
Philistines and enemies of God. “Suppose,” he whispered to himself,
“there should come from among them one who, like Goliath the Philistine
of Gath, could defeat me and take from me my possessions.” In fancy he
felt the sickening dread that he thought must have lain heavy on the
heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to his feet, he began
to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His voice carried
far over the low hills. “Jehovah of Hosts,” he cried, “send to me this
night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last
all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to
Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth.”



GODLINESS

PART TWO

David Hardy of Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley farms. When he was twelve years old he went to the old
Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came
into the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying
to God that he be given a son, had grown to womanhood on the farm and
had married young John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise
and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that
she was to blame. She was a small woman with sharp grey eyes and black
hair. From childhood she had been inclined to fits of temper and when
not angry she was often morose and silent. In Winesburg it was said
that she drank. Her husband, the banker, who was a careful, shrewd man,
tried hard to make her happy. When he began to make money he bought for
her a large brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg and he was the first
man in that town to keep a manservant to drive his wife’s carriage.

But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of
temper during which she was sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and
quarrelsome. She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from
the kitchen and threatened her husband’s life. Once she deliberately
set fire to the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her
own room and would see no one. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave
rise to all sorts of stories concerning her. It was said that she took
drugs and that she hid herself away from people because she was often
so under the influence of drink that her condition could not be
concealed. Sometimes on summer afternoons she came out of the house and
got into her carriage. Dismissing the driver she took the reins in her
own hands and drove off at top speed through the streets. If a
pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead and the frightened
citizen had to escape as best he could. To the people of the town it
seemed as though she wanted to run them down. When she had driven
through several streets, tearing around corners and beating the horses
with the whip, she drove off into the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow
down to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed. She became
thoughtful and muttered words. Sometimes tears came into her eyes. And
then when she came back into town she again drove furiously through the
quiet streets. But for the influence of her husband and the respect he
inspired in people’s minds she would have been arrested more than once
by the town marshal.

Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well
be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood. He was too young
then to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was
difficult for him not to have very definite opinions about the woman
who was his mother. David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a
long time was thought by the people of Winesburg to be something of a
dullard. His eyes were brown and as a child he had a habit of looking
at things and people a long time without appearing to see what he was
looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or when he
overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and ran away to
hide. Sometimes he could not find a hiding place and that confused him.
Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the wall, he
closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything. He had a habit of
talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet sadness
often took possession of him.

On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished
that he would never have to go back to town and once when he had come
home from the farm after a long visit, something happened that had a
lasting effect on his mind.

David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the
street in which the Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall
evening and the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to
David. He could not bear to go into the house where his mother and
father lived, and on an impulse he decided to run away from home. He
intended to go back to the farm and to his grandfather, but lost his
way and for hours he wandered weeping and frightened on country roads.
It started to rain and lightning flashed in the sky. The boy’s
imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see and hear
strange things in the darkness. Into his mind came the conviction that
he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the
wind blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team of horses approached
along the road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a
fence. Through a field he ran until he came into another road and
getting upon his knees felt of the soft ground with his fingers. But
for the figure of his grandfather, whom he was afraid he would never
find in the darkness, he thought the world must be altogether empty.
When his cries were heard by a farmer who was walking home from town
and he was brought back to his father’s house, he was so tired and
excited that he did not know what was happening to him.

By chance David’s father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son’s
return to town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and
John Hardy with several men of the town went to search the country. The
report that David had been kidnapped ran about through the streets of
Winesburg. When he came home there were no lights in the house, but his
mother appeared and clutched him eagerly in her arms. David thought she
had suddenly become another woman. He could not believe that so
delightful a thing had happened. With her own hands Louise Hardy bathed
his tired young body and cooked him food. She would not let him go to
bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew out the lights and sat
down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour the woman sat in
the darkness and held her boy. All the time she kept talking in a low
voice. David could not understand what had so changed her. Her
habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most peaceful
and lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held him
more and more tightly. On and on went her voice. It was not harsh or
shrill as when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling on
trees. Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not
been found, but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them
away. He thought it must be a game his mother and the men of the town
were playing with him and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the
thought that his having been lost and frightened in the darkness was an
altogether unimportant matter. He thought that he would have been
willing to go through the frightful experience a thousand times to be
sure of finding at the end of the long black road a thing so lovely as
his mother had suddenly become.


During the last years of young David’s boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived.
Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older
it became more definite. When he was twelve years old he went to the
Bentley farm to live. Old Jesse came into town and fairly demanded that
he be given charge of the boy. The old man was excited and determined
on having his own way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the
Winesburg Savings Bank and then the two men went to the house on Elm
Street to talk with Louise. They both expected her to make trouble but
were mistaken. She was very quiet and when Jesse had explained his
mission and had gone on at some length about the advantages to come
through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet atmosphere of the
old farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval. “It is an atmosphere
not corrupted by my presence,” she said sharply. Her shoulders shook
and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. “It is a place for a
man child, although it was never a place for me,” she went on. “You
never wanted me there and of course the air of your house did me no
good. It was like poison in my blood but it will be different with
him.”

Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two men to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her
room for days. Even when the boy’s clothes were packed and he was taken
away she did not appear. The loss of her son made a sharp break in her
life and she seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John
Hardy thought it had all turned out very well indeed.

And so young David went to live in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two of the old farmer’s sisters were alive and still lived in the
house. They were afraid of Jesse and rarely spoke when he was about.
One of the women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she
was younger was a born mother and became the boy’s caretaker. Every
night when he had gone to bed she went into his room and sat on the
floor until he fell asleep. When he became drowsy she became bold and
whispered things that he later thought he must have dreamed.

Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his
mother had come to him and that she had changed so that she was always
as she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and
reaching out his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so
that she was ecstatically happy. Everyone in the old house became happy
after the boy went there. The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley
that had kept the people in the house silent and timid and that had
never been dispelled by the presence of the girl Louise was apparently
swept away by the coming of the boy. It was as though God had relented
and sent a son to the man.

The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all
the valley of Wine Creek, and who had wanted God to send him a sign of
approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think
that at last his prayers had been answered. Although he was at that
time only fifty-five years old he looked seventy and was worn out with
much thinking and scheming. The effort he had made to extend his land
holdings had been successful and there were few farms in the valley
that did not belong to him, but until David came he was a bitterly
disappointed man.

There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been a battleground for these influences. First there was the
old thing in him. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men
of God. His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had
brought him close to nature and there were forces in the passionately
religious man that ran out to the forces in nature. The disappointment
that had come to him when a daughter and not a son had been born to
Katherine had fallen upon him like a blow struck by some unseen hand
and the blow had somewhat softened his egotism. He still believed that
God might at any moment make himself manifest out of the winds or the
clouds, but he no longer demanded such recognition. Instead he prayed
for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful and thought God had
deserted the world. He regretted the fate that had not let him live in
a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some strange cloud
in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into the
wilderness to create new races. While he worked night and day to make
his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land, he
regretted that he could not use his own restless energy in the building
of temples, the slaying of unbelievers and in general in the work of
glorifying God’s name on earth.

That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the
Civil War and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the
deep influences that were at work in the country during those years
when modern industrialism was being born. He began to buy machines that
would permit him to do the work of the farms while employing fewer men
and he sometimes thought that if he were a younger man he would give up
farming altogether and start a factory in Winesburg for the making of
machinery. Jesse formed the habit of reading newspapers and magazines.
He invented a machine for the making of fence out of wire. Faintly he
realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that he had always
cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that
was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most
materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay
attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the
will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible
headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was
telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about
him. The greedy thing in him wanted to make money faster than it could
be made by tilling the land. More than once he went into Winesburg to
talk with his son-in-law John Hardy about it. “You are a banker and you
will have chances I never had,” he said and his eyes shone. “I am
thinking about it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the
country and there will be more money to be made than I ever dreamed of.
You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your chance.” Jesse
Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more and more
excited as he talked. At one time in his life he had been threatened
with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As he
talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when
night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old
feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and
who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder,
and appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse’s mind was fixed
upon the things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be
made almost without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him
the coming of the boy David did much to bring back with renewed force
the old faith and it seemed to him that God had at last looked with
favor upon him.

As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a
thousand new and delightful ways. The kindly attitude of all about him
expanded his quiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner
he had always had with his people. At night when he went to bed after a
long day of adventures in the stables, in the fields, or driving about
from farm to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone
in the house. If Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each night to sit
on the floor by his bedside, did not appear at once, he went to the
head of the stairs and shouted, his young voice ringing through the
narrow halls where for so long there had been a tradition of silence.
In the morning when he awoke and lay still in bed, the sounds that came
in to him through the windows filled him with delight. He thought with
a shudder of the life in the house in Winesburg and of his mother’s
angry voice that had always made him tremble. There in the country all
sounds were pleasant sounds. When he awoke at dawn the barnyard back of
the house also awoke. In the house people stirred about. Eliza
Stoughton the half-witted girl was poked in the ribs by a farm hand and
giggled noisily, in some distant field a cow bawled and was answered by
the cattle in the stables, and one of the farm hands spoke sharply to
the horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped out of bed
and ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excited his mind,
and he wondered what his mother was doing in the house in town.

From the windows of his own room he could not see directly into the
barnyard where the farm hands had now all assembled to do the morning
shores, but he could hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the
horses. When one of the men laughed, he laughed also. Leaning out at
the open window, he looked into an orchard where a fat sow wandered
about with a litter of tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning he counted
the pigs. “Four, five, six, seven,” he said slowly, wetting his finger
and making straight up and down marks on the window ledge. David ran to
put on his trousers and shirt. A feverish desire to get out of doors
took possession of him. Every morning he made such a noise coming down
stairs that Aunt Callie, the housekeeper, declared he was trying to
tear the house down. When he had run through the long old house,
shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he came into the barnyard
and looked about with an amazed air of expectancy. It seemed to him
that in such a place tremendous things might have happened during the
night. The farm hands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader, an old
man who had been on the farm since Jesse came into possession and who
before David’s time had never been known to make a joke, made the same
joke every morning. It amused David so that he laughed and clapped his
hands. “See, come here and look,” cried the old man. “Grandfather
Jesse’s white mare has torn the black stocking she wears on her foot.”

Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to
farm up and down the valley of Wine Creek, and his grandson went with
him. They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white horse.
The old man scratched his thin white beard and talked to himself of his
plans for increasing the productiveness of the fields they visited and
of God’s part in the plans all men made. Sometimes he looked at David
and smiled happily and then for a long time he appeared to forget the
boy’s existence. More and more every day now his mind turned back again
to the dreams that had filled his mind when he had first come out of
the city to live on the land. One afternoon he startled David by
letting his dreams take entire possession of him. With the boy as a
witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about an accident that
nearly destroyed the companionship that was growing up between them.

Jesse and his grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley
some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the
forest Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river.
All the afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began
to talk. His mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by
thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his
possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the
fields crying for a son, he became excited to the edge of insanity.
Stopping the horse he got out of the buggy and asked David to get out
also. The two climbed over a fence and walked along the bank of the
stream. The boy paid no attention to the muttering of his grandfather,
but ran along beside him and wondered what was going to happen. When a
rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he clapped his hands
and danced with delight. He looked at the tall trees and was sorry that
he was not a little animal to climb high in the air without being
frightened. Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the
head of his grandfather into a clump of bushes. “Wake up, little
animal. Go and climb to the top of the trees,” he shouted in a shrill
voice.

Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with
his mind in a ferment. His earnestness affected the boy, who presently
became silent and a little alarmed. Into the old man’s mind had come
the notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the
sky, that the presence of the boy and man on their knees in some lonely
spot in the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for
almost inevitable. “It was in just such a place as this that other
David tended the sheep when his father came and told him to go down
unto Saul,” he muttered.

Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen
log and when he had come to an open place among the trees he dropped
upon his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.

A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David.
Crouching beneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him
and his own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the
presence not only of his grandfather but of someone else, someone who
might hurt him, someone who was not kindly but dangerous and brutal. He
began to cry and reaching down picked up a small stick, which he held
tightly gripped in his fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in his own
idea, suddenly arose and advanced toward him, his terror grew until his
whole body shook. In the woods an intense silence seemed to lie over
everything and suddenly out of the silence came the old man’s harsh and
insistent voice. Gripping the boy’s shoulders, Jesse turned his face to
the sky and shouted. The whole left side of his face twitched and his
hand on the boy’s shoulder twitched also. “Make a sign to me, God,” he
cried. “Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to me out of the sky
and make Thy presence known to me.”

With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the
hands that held him, ran away through the forest. He did not believe
that the man who turned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the
sky was his grandfather at all. The man did not look like his
grandfather. The conviction that something strange and terrible had
happened, that by some miracle a new and dangerous person had come into
the body of the kindly old man, took possession of him. On and on he
ran down the hillside, sobbing as he ran. When he fell over the roots
of a tree and in falling struck his head, he arose and tried to run on
again. His head hurt so that presently he fell down and lay still, but
it was only after Jesse had carried him to the buggy and he awoke to
find the old man’s hand stroking his head tenderly that the terror left
him. “Take me away. There is a terrible man back there in the woods,”
he declared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of the trees
and again his lips cried out to God. “What have I done that Thou dost
not approve of me,” he whispered softly, saying the words over and over
as he drove rapidly along the road with the boy’s cut and bleeding head
held tenderly against his shoulder.



SURRENDER

PART THREE

The story of Louise Bentley, who became Mrs. John Hardy and lived with
her husband in a brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg, is a story of
misunderstanding.

Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made
livable, much will have to be done. Thoughtful books will have to be
written and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.

Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard,
imaginative father, who did not look with favor upon her coming into
the world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of
over-sensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in
such great numbers into the world.

During her early years she lived on the Bentley farm, a silent, moody
child, wanting love more than anything else in the world and not
getting it. When she was fifteen she went to live in Winesburg with the
family of Albert Hardy, who had a store for the sale of buggies and
wagons, and who was a member of the town board of education.

Louise went into town to be a student in the Winesburg High School and
she went to live at the Hardys’ because Albert Hardy and her father
were friends.

Hardy, the vehicle merchant of Winesburg, like thousands of other men
of his times, was an enthusiast on the subject of education. He had
made his own way in the world without learning got from books, but he
was convinced that had he but known books things would have gone better
with him. To everyone who came into his shop he talked of the matter,
and in his own household he drove his family distracted by his constant
harping on the subject.

He had two daughters and one son, John Hardy, and more than once the
daughters threatened to leave school altogether. As a matter of
principle they did just enough work in their classes to avoid
punishment. “I hate books and I hate anyone who likes books,” Harriet,
the younger of the two girls, declared passionately.

In Winesburg as on the farm Louise was not happy. For years she had
dreamed of the time when she could go forth into the world, and she
looked upon the move into the Hardy household as a great step in the
direction of freedom. Always when she had thought of the matter, it had
seemed to her that in town all must be gaiety and life, that there men
and women must live happily and freely, giving and taking friendship
and affection as one takes the feel of a wind on the cheek. After the
silence and the cheerlessness of life in the Bentley house, she dreamed
of stepping forth into an atmosphere that was warm and pulsating with
life and reality. And in the Hardy household Louise might have got
something of the thing for which she so hungered but for a mistake she
made when she had just come to town.

Louise won the disfavor of the two Hardy girls, Mary and Harriet, by
her application to her studies in school. She did not come to the house
until the day when school was to begin and knew nothing of the feeling
they had in the matter. She was timid and during the first month made
no acquaintances. Every Friday afternoon one of the hired men from the
farm drove into Winesburg and took her home for the week-end, so that
she did not spend the Saturday holiday with the town people. Because
she was embarrassed and lonely she worked constantly at her studies. To
Mary and Harriet, it seemed as though she tried to make trouble for
them by her proficiency. In her eagerness to appear well Louise wanted
to answer every question put to the class by the teacher. She jumped up
and down and her eyes flashed. Then when she had answered some question
the others in the class had been unable to answer, she smiled happily.
“See, I have done it for you,” her eyes seemed to say. “You need not
bother about the matter. I will answer all questions. For the whole
class it will be easy while I am here.”

In the evening after supper in the Hardy house, Albert Hardy began to
praise Louise. One of the teachers had spoken highly of her and he was
delighted. “Well, again I have heard of it,” he began, looking hard at
his daughters and then turning to smile at Louise. “Another of the
teachers has told me of the good work Louise is doing. Everyone in
Winesburg is telling me how smart she is. I am ashamed that they do not
speak so of my own girls.” Arising, the merchant marched about the room
and lighted his evening cigar.

The two girls looked at each other and shook their heads wearily.
Seeing their indifference the father became angry. “I tell you it is
something for you two to be thinking about,” he cried, glaring at them.
“There is a big change coming here in America and in learning is the
only hope of the coming generations. Louise is the daughter of a rich
man but she is not ashamed to study. It should make you ashamed to see
what she does.”

The merchant took his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to
depart for the evening. At the door he stopped and glared back. So
fierce was his manner that Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to
her own room. The daughters began to speak of their own affairs. “Pay
attention to me,” roared the merchant. “Your minds are lazy. Your
indifference to education is affecting your characters. You will amount
to nothing. Now mark what I say—Louise will be so far ahead of you that
you will never catch up.”

The distracted man went out of the house and into the street shaking
with wrath. He went along muttering words and swearing, but when he got
into Main Street his anger passed. He stopped to talk of the weather or
the crops with some other merchant or with a farmer who had come into
town and forgot his daughters altogether or, if he thought of them,
only shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, girls will be girls,” he
muttered philosophically.

In the house when Louise came down into the room where the two girls
sat, they would have nothing to do with her. One evening after she had
been there for more than six weeks and was heartbroken because of the
continued air of coldness with which she was always greeted, she burst
into tears. “Shut up your crying and go back to your own room and to
your books,” Mary Hardy said sharply.


The room occupied by Louise was on the second floor of the Hardy house,
and her window looked out upon an orchard. There was a stove in the
room and every evening young John Hardy carried up an armful of wood
and put it in a box that stood by the wall. During the second month
after she came to the house, Louise gave up all hope of getting on a
friendly footing with the Hardy girls and went to her own room as soon
as the evening meal was at an end.

Her mind began to play with thoughts of making friends with John Hardy.
When he came into the room with the wood in his arms, she pretended to
be busy with her studies but watched him eagerly. When he had put the
wood in the box and turned to go out, she put down her head and
blushed. She tried to make talk but could say nothing, and after he had
gone she was angry at herself for her stupidity.

The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing
close to the young man. She thought that in him might be found the
quality she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her
that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had
been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm
inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to
others. She became obsessed with the thought that it wanted but a
courageous act on her part to make all of her association with people
something quite different, and that it was possible by such an act to
pass into a new life as one opens a door and goes into a room. Day and
night she thought of the matter, but although the thing she wanted so
earnestly was something very warm and close it had as yet no conscious
connection with sex. It had not become that definite, and her mind had
only alighted upon the person of John Hardy because he was at hand and
unlike his sisters had not been unfriendly to her.

The Hardy sisters, Mary and Harriet, were both older than Louise. In a
certain kind of knowledge of the world they were years older. They
lived as all of the young women of Middle Western towns lived. In those
days young women did not go out of our towns to Eastern colleges and
ideas in regard to social classes had hardly begun to exist. A daughter
of a laborer was in much the same social position as a daughter of a
farmer or a merchant, and there were no leisure classes. A girl was
“nice” or she was “not nice.” If a nice girl, she had a young man who
came to her house to see her on Sunday and on Wednesday evenings.
Sometimes she went with her young man to a dance or a church social. At
other times she received him at the house and was given the use of the
parlor for that purpose. No one intruded upon her. For hours the two
sat behind closed doors. Sometimes the lights were turned low and the
young man and woman embraced. Cheeks became hot and hair disarranged.
After a year or two, if the impulse within them became strong and
insistent enough, they married.

One evening during her first winter in Winesburg, Louise had an
adventure that gave a new impulse to her desire to break down the wall
that she thought stood between her and John Hardy. It was Wednesday and
immediately after the evening meal Albert Hardy put on his hat and went
away. Young John brought the wood and put it in the box in Louise’s
room. “You do work hard, don’t you?” he said awkwardly, and then before
she could answer he also went away.

Louise heard him go out of the house and had a mad desire to run after
him. Opening her window she leaned out and called softly, “John, dear
John, come back, don’t go away.” The night was cloudy and she could not
see far into the darkness, but as she waited she fancied she could hear
a soft little noise as of someone going on tiptoes through the trees in
the orchard. She was frightened and closed the window quickly. For an
hour she moved about the room trembling with excitement and when she
could not longer bear the waiting, she crept into the hall and down the
stairs into a closet-like room that opened off the parlor.

Louise had decided that she would perform the courageous act that had
for weeks been in her mind. She was convinced that John Hardy had
concealed himself in the orchard beneath her window and she was
determined to find him and tell him that she wanted him to come close
to her, to hold her in his arms, to tell her of his thoughts and dreams
and to listen while she told him her thoughts and dreams. “In the
darkness it will be easier to say things,” she whispered to herself, as
she stood in the little room groping for the door.

And then suddenly Louise realized that she was not alone in the house.
In the parlor on the other side of the door a man’s voice spoke softly
and the door opened. Louise just had time to conceal herself in a
little opening beneath the stairway when Mary Hardy, accompanied by her
young man, came into the little dark room.

For an hour Louise sat on the floor in the darkness and listened.
Without words Mary Hardy, with the aid of the man who had come to spend
the evening with her, brought to the country girl a knowledge of men
and women. Putting her head down until she was curled into a little
ball she lay perfectly still. It seemed to her that by some strange
impulse of the gods, a great gift had been brought to Mary Hardy and
she could not understand the older woman’s determined protest.

The young man took Mary Hardy into his arms and kissed her. When she
struggled and laughed, he but held her the more tightly. For an hour
the contest between them went on and then they went back into the
parlor and Louise escaped up the stairs. “I hope you were quiet out
there. You must not disturb the little mouse at her studies,” she heard
Harriet saying to her sister as she stood by her own door in the
hallway above.

Louise wrote a note to John Hardy and late that night, when all in the
house were asleep, she crept downstairs and slipped it under his door.
She was afraid that if she did not do the thing at once her courage
would fail. In the note she tried to be quite definite about what she
wanted. “I want someone to love me and I want to love someone,” she
wrote. “If you are the one for me I want you to come into the orchard
at night and make a noise under my window. It will be easy for me to
crawl down over the shed and come to you. I am thinking about it all
the time, so if you are to come at all you must come soon.”

For a long time Louise did not know what would be the outcome of her
bold attempt to secure for herself a lover. In a way she still did not
know whether or not she wanted him to come. Sometimes it seemed to her
that to be held tightly and kissed was the whole secret of life, and
then a new impulse came and she was terribly afraid. The age-old
woman’s desire to be possessed had taken possession of her, but so
vague was her notion of life that it seemed to her just the touch of
John Hardy’s hand upon her own hand would satisfy. She wondered if he
would understand that. At the table next day while Albert Hardy talked
and the two girls whispered and laughed, she did not look at John but
at the table and as soon as possible escaped. In the evening she went
out of the house until she was sure he had taken the wood to her room
and gone away. When after several evenings of intense listening she
heard no call from the darkness in the orchard, she was half beside
herself with grief and decided that for her there was no way to break
through the wall that had shut her off from the joy of life.

And then on a Monday evening two or three weeks after the writing of
the note, John Hardy came for her. Louise had so entirely given up the
thought of his coming that for a long time she did not hear the call
that came up from the orchard. On the Friday evening before, as she was
being driven back to the farm for the week-end by one of the hired men,
she had on an impulse done a thing that had startled her, and as John
Hardy stood in the darkness below and called her name softly and
insistently, she walked about in her room and wondered what new impulse
had led her to commit so ridiculous an act.

The farm hand, a young fellow with black curly hair, had come for her
somewhat late on that Friday evening and they drove home in the
darkness. Louise, whose mind was filled with thoughts of John Hardy,
tried to make talk but the country boy was embarrassed and would say
nothing. Her mind began to review the loneliness of her childhood and
she remembered with a pang the sharp new loneliness that had just come
to her. “I hate everyone,” she cried suddenly, and then broke forth
into a tirade that frightened her escort. “I hate father and the old
man Hardy, too,” she declared vehemently. “I get my lessons there in
the school in town but I hate that also.”

Louise frightened the farm hand still more by turning and putting her
cheek down upon his shoulder. Vaguely she hoped that he like that young
man who had stood in the darkness with Mary would put his arms about
her and kiss her, but the country boy was only alarmed. He struck the
horse with the whip and began to whistle. “The road is rough, eh?” he
said loudly. Louise was so angry that reaching up she snatched his hat
from his head and threw it into the road. When he jumped out of the
buggy and went to get it, she drove off and left him to walk the rest
of the way back to the farm.

Louise Bentley took John Hardy to be her lover. That was not what she
wanted but it was so the young man had interpreted her approach to him,
and so anxious was she to achieve something else that she made no
resistance. When after a few months they were both afraid that she was
about to become a mother, they went one evening to the county seat and
were married. For a few months they lived in the Hardy house and then
took a house of their own. All during the first year Louise tried to
make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had
led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Again
and again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always
without success. Filled with his own notions of love between men and
women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the lips. That
confused her so that in the end she did not want to be kissed. She did
not know what she wanted.

When the alarm that had tricked them into marriage proved to be
groundless, she was angry and said bitter, hurtful things. Later when
her son David was born, she could not nurse him and did not know
whether she wanted him or not. Sometimes she stayed in the room with
him all day, walking about and occasionally creeping close to touch him
tenderly with her hands, and then other days came when she did not want
to see or be near the tiny bit of humanity that had come into the
house. When John Hardy reproached her for her cruelty, she laughed. “It
is a man child and will get what it wants anyway,” she said sharply.
“Had it been a woman child there is nothing in the world I would not
have done for it.”



TERROR

PART FOUR

When David Hardy was a tall boy of fifteen, he, like his mother, had an
adventure that changed the whole current of his life and sent him out
of his quiet corner into the world. The shell of the circumstances of
his life was broken and he was compelled to start forth. He left
Winesburg and no one there ever saw him again. After his disappearance,
his mother and grandfather both died and his father became very rich.
He spent much money in trying to locate his son, but that is no part of
this story.

It was in the late fall of an unusual year on the Bentley farms.
Everywhere the crops had been heavy. That spring, Jesse had bought part
of a long strip of black swamp land that lay in the valley of Wine
Creek. He got the land at a low price but had spent a large sum of
money to improve it. Great ditches had to be dug and thousands of tile
laid. Neighboring farmers shook their heads over the expense. Some of
them laughed and hoped that Jesse would lose heavily by the venture,
but the old man went silently on with the work and said nothing.

When the land was drained he planted it to cabbages and onions, and
again the neighbors laughed. The crop was, however, enormous and
brought high prices. In the one year Jesse made enough money to pay for
all the cost of preparing the land and had a surplus that enabled him
to buy two more farms. He was exultant and could not conceal his
delight. For the first time in all the history of his ownership of the
farms, he went among his men with a smiling face.

Jesse bought a great many new machines for cutting down the cost of
labor and all of the remaining acres in the strip of black fertile
swamp land. One day he went into Winesburg and bought a bicycle and a
new suit of clothes for David and he gave his two sisters money with
which to go to a religious convention at Cleveland, Ohio.

In the fall of that year when the frost came and the trees in the
forests along Wine Creek were golden brown, David spent every moment
when he did not have to attend school, out in the open. Alone or with
other boys he went every afternoon into the woods to gather nuts. The
other boys of the countryside, most of them sons of laborers on the
Bentley farms, had guns with which they went hunting rabbits and
squirrels, but David did not go with them. He made himself a sling with
rubber bands and a forked stick and went off by himself to gather nuts.
As he went about thoughts came to him. He realized that he was almost a
man and wondered what he would do in life, but before they came to
anything, the thoughts passed and he was a boy again. One day he killed
a squirrel that sat on one of the lower branches of a tree and
chattered at him. Home he ran with the squirrel in his hand. One of the
Bentley sisters cooked the little animal and he ate it with great
gusto. The skin he tacked on a board and suspended the board by a
string from his bedroom window.

That gave his mind a new turn. After that he never went into the woods
without carrying the sling in his pocket and he spent hours shooting at
imaginary animals concealed among the brown leaves in the trees.
Thoughts of his coming manhood passed and he was content to be a boy
with a boy’s impulses.

One Saturday morning when he was about to set off for the woods with
the sling in his pocket and a bag for nuts on his shoulder, his
grandfather stopped him. In the eyes of the old man was the strained
serious look that always a little frightened David. At such times Jesse
Bentley’s eyes did not look straight ahead but wavered and seemed to be
looking at nothing. Something like an invisible curtain appeared to
have come between the man and all the rest of the world. “I want you to
come with me,” he said briefly, and his eyes looked over the boy’s head
into the sky. “We have something important to do today. You may bring
the bag for nuts if you wish. It does not matter and anyway we will be
going into the woods.”

Jesse and David set out from the Bentley farmhouse in the old phaeton
that was drawn by the white horse. When they had gone along in silence
for a long way they stopped at the edge of a field where a flock of
sheep were grazing. Among the sheep was a lamb that had been born out
of season, and this David and his grandfather caught and tied so
tightly that it looked like a little white ball. When they drove on
again Jesse let David hold the lamb in his arms. “I saw it yesterday
and it put me in mind of what I have long wanted to do,” he said, and
again he looked away over the head of the boy with the wavering,
uncertain stare in his eyes.

After the feeling of exaltation that had come to the farmer as a result
of his successful year, another mood had taken possession of him. For a
long time he had been going about feeling very humble and prayerful.
Again he walked alone at night thinking of God and as he walked he
again connected his own figure with the figures of old days. Under the
stars he knelt on the wet grass and raised up his voice in prayer. Now
he had decided that like the men whose stories filled the pages of the
Bible, he would make a sacrifice to God. “I have been given these
abundant crops and God has also sent me a boy who is called David,” he
whispered to himself. “Perhaps I should have done this thing long ago.”
He was sorry the idea had not come into his mind in the days before his
daughter Louise had been born and thought that surely now when he had
erected a pile of burning sticks in some lonely place in the woods and
had offered the body of a lamb as a burnt offering, God would appear to
him and give him a message.

More and more as he thought of the matter, he thought also of David and
his passionate self-love was partially forgotten. “It is time for the
boy to begin thinking of going out into the world and the message will
be one concerning him,” he decided. “God will make a pathway for him.
He will tell me what place David is to take in life and when he shall
set out on his journey. It is right that the boy should be there. If I
am fortunate and an angel of God should appear, David will see the
beauty and glory of God made manifest to man. It will make a true man
of God of him also.”

In silence Jesse and David drove along the road until they came to that
place where Jesse had once before appealed to God and had frightened
his grandson. The morning had been bright and cheerful, but a cold wind
now began to blow and clouds hid the sun. When David saw the place to
which they had come he began to tremble with fright, and when they
stopped by the bridge where the creek came down from among the trees,
he wanted to spring out of the phaeton and run away.

A dozen plans for escape ran through David’s head, but when Jesse
stopped the horse and climbed over the fence into the wood, he
followed. “It is foolish to be afraid. Nothing will happen,” he told
himself as he went along with the lamb in his arms. There was something
in the helplessness of the little animal held so tightly in his arms
that gave him courage. He could feel the rapid beating of the beast’s
heart and that made his own heart beat less rapidly. As he walked
swiftly along behind his grandfather, he untied the string with which
the four legs of the lamb were fastened together. “If anything happens
we will run away together,” he thought.

In the woods, after they had gone a long way from the road, Jesse
stopped in an opening among the trees where a clearing, overgrown with
small bushes, ran up from the creek. He was still silent but began at
once to erect a heap of dry sticks which he presently set afire. The
boy sat on the ground with the lamb in his arms. His imagination began
to invest every movement of the old man with significance and he became
every moment more afraid. “I must put the blood of the lamb on the head
of the boy,” Jesse muttered when the sticks had begun to blaze
greedily, and taking a long knife from his pocket he turned and walked
rapidly across the clearing toward David.

Terror seized upon the soul of the boy. He was sick with it. For a
moment he sat perfectly still and then his body stiffened and he sprang
to his feet. His face became as white as the fleece of the lamb that,
now finding itself suddenly released, ran down the hill. David ran
also. Fear made his feet fly. Over the low bushes and logs he leaped
frantically. As he ran he put his hand into his pocket and took out the
branched stick from which the sling for shooting squirrels was
suspended. When he came to the creek that was shallow and splashed down
over the stones, he dashed into the water and turned to look back, and
when he saw his grandfather still running toward him with the long
knife held tightly in his hand he did not hesitate, but reaching down,
selected a stone and put it in the sling. With all his strength he drew
back the heavy rubber bands and the stone whistled through the air. It
hit Jesse, who had entirely forgotten the boy and was pursuing the
lamb, squarely in the head. With a groan he pitched forward and fell
almost at the boy’s feet. When David saw that he lay still and that he
was apparently dead, his fright increased immeasurably. It became an
insane panic.

With a cry he turned and ran off through the woods weeping
convulsively. “I don’t care—I killed him, but I don’t care,” he sobbed.
As he ran on and on he decided suddenly that he would never go back
again to the Bentley farms or to the town of Winesburg. “I have killed
the man of God and now I will myself be a man and go into the world,”
he said stoutly as he stopped running and walked rapidly down a road
that followed the windings of Wine Creek as it ran through fields and
forests into the west.

On the ground by the creek Jesse Bentley moved uneasily about. He
groaned and opened his eyes. For a long time he lay perfectly still and
looked at the sky. When at last he got to his feet, his mind was
confused and he was not surprised by the boy’s disappearance. By the
roadside he sat down on a log and began to talk about God. That is all
they ever got out of him. Whenever David’s name was mentioned he looked
vaguely at the sky and said that a messenger from God had taken the
boy. “It happened because I was too greedy for glory,” he declared, and
would have no more to say in the matter.



A MAN OF IDEAS


He lived with his mother, a grey, silent woman with a peculiar ashy
complexion. The house in which they lived stood in a little grove of
trees beyond where the main street of Winesburg crossed Wine Creek. His
name was Joe Welling, and his father had been a man of some dignity in
the community, a lawyer, and a member of the state legislature at
Columbus. Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike
anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent
for days and then suddenly spouts fire. No, he wasn’t like that—he was
like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men
inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him
away into a strange uncanny physical state in which his eyes roll and
his legs and arms jerk. He was like that, only that the visitation that
descended upon Joe Welling was a mental and not a physical thing. He
was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his ideas was
uncontrollable. Words rolled and tumbled from his mouth. A peculiar
smile came upon his lips. The edges of his teeth that were tipped with
gold glistened in the light. Pouncing upon a bystander he began to
talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed
into his face, peered into his eyes, pounded upon his chest with a
shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention.

In those days the Standard Oil Company did not deliver oil to the
consumer in big wagons and motor trucks as it does now, but delivered
instead to retail grocers, hardware stores, and the like. Joe was the
Standard Oil agent in Winesburg and in several towns up and down the
railroad that went through Winesburg. He collected bills, booked
orders, and did other things. His father, the legislator, had secured
the job for him.

In and out of the stores of Winesburg went Joe Welling—silent,
excessively polite, intent upon his business. Men watched him with eyes
in which lurked amusement tempered by alarm. They were waiting for him
to break forth, preparing to flee. Although the seizures that came upon
him were harmless enough, they could not be laughed away. They were
overwhelming. Astride an idea, Joe was overmastering. His personality
became gigantic. It overrode the man to whom he talked, swept him away,
swept all away, all who stood within sound of his voice.

In Sylvester West’s Drug Store stood four men who were talking of horse
racing. Wesley Moyer’s stallion, Tony Tip, was to race at the June
meeting at Tiffin, Ohio, and there was a rumor that he would meet the
stiffest competition of his career. It was said that Pop Geers, the
great racing driver, would himself be there. A doubt of the success of
Tony Tip hung heavy in the air of Winesburg.

Into the drug store came Joe Welling, brushing the screen door
violently aside. With a strange absorbed light in his eyes he pounced
upon Ed Thomas, he who knew Pop Geers and whose opinion of Tony Tip’s
chances was worth considering.

“The water is up in Wine Creek,” cried Joe Welling with the air of
Pheidippides bringing news of the victory of the Greeks in the struggle
at Marathon. His finger beat a tattoo upon Ed Thomas’s broad chest. “By
Trunion bridge it is within eleven and a half inches of the flooring,”
he went on, the words coming quickly and with a little whistling noise
from between his teeth. An expression of helpless annoyance crept over
the faces of the four.

“I have my facts correct. Depend upon that. I went to Sinnings’
Hardware Store and got a rule. Then I went back and measured. I could
hardly believe my own eyes. It hasn’t rained you see for ten days. At
first I didn’t know what to think. Thoughts rushed through my head. I
thought of subterranean passages and springs. Down under the ground
went my mind, delving about. I sat on the floor of the bridge and
rubbed my head. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not one. Come out into
the street and you’ll see. There wasn’t a cloud. There isn’t a cloud
now. Yes, there was a cloud. I don’t want to keep back any facts. There
was a cloud in the west down near the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a
man’s hand.

“Not that I think that has anything to do with it. There it is, you
see. You understand how puzzled I was.

“Then an idea came to me. I laughed. You’ll laugh, too. Of course it
rained over in Medina County. That’s interesting, eh? If we had no
trains, no mails, no telegraph, we would know that it rained over in
Medina County. That’s where Wine Creek comes from. Everyone knows that.
Little old Wine Creek brought us the news. That’s interesting. I
laughed. I thought I’d tell you—it’s interesting, eh?”

Joe Welling turned and went out at the door. Taking a book from his
pocket, he stopped and ran a finger down one of the pages. Again he was
absorbed in his duties as agent of the Standard Oil Company. “Hern’s
Grocery will be getting low on coal oil. I’ll see them,” he muttered,
hurrying along the street, and bowing politely to the right and left at
the people walking past.

When George Willard went to work for the _Winesburg Eagle_ he was
besieged by Joe Welling. Joe envied the boy. It seemed to him that he
was meant by Nature to be a reporter on a newspaper. “It is what I
should be doing, there is no doubt of that,” he declared, stopping
George Willard on the sidewalk before Daugherty’s Feed Store. His eyes
began to glisten and his forefinger to tremble. “Of course I make more
money with the Standard Oil Company and I’m only telling you,” he
added. “I’ve got nothing against you but I should have your place. I
could do the work at odd moments. Here and there I would run finding
out things you’ll never see.”

Becoming more excited Joe Welling crowded the young reporter against
the front of the feed store. He appeared to be lost in thought, rolling
his eyes about and running a thin nervous hand through his hair. A
smile spread over his face and his gold teeth glittered. “You get out
your note book,” he commanded. “You carry a little pad of paper in your
pocket, don’t you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought
of it the other day. Let’s take decay. Now what is decay? It’s fire. It
burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that? Of course
not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street
there—they’re all on fire. They’re burning up. Decay you see is always
going on. It doesn’t stop. Water and paint can’t stop it. If a thing is
iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That’s fire, too. The world is on
fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters
_‘The World Is On Fire.’_ That will make ’em look up. They’ll say
you’re a smart one. I don’t care. I don’t envy you. I just snatched
that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. You got to
admit that.”

Turning quickly, Joe Welling walked rapidly away. When he had taken
several steps he stopped and looked back. “I’m going to stick to you,”
he said. “I’m going to make you a regular hummer. I should start a
newspaper myself, that’s what I should do. I’d be a marvel. Everybody
knows that.”

When George Willard had been for a year on the _Winesburg Eagle_, four
things happened to Joe Welling. His mother died, he came to live at the
New Willard House, he became involved in a love affair, and he
organized the Winesburg Baseball Club.

Joe organized the baseball club because he wanted to be a coach and in
that position he began to win the respect of his townsmen. “He is a
wonder,” they declared after Joe’s team had whipped the team from
Medina County. “He gets everybody working together. You just watch
him.”

Upon the baseball field Joe Welling stood by first base, his whole body
quivering with excitement. In spite of themselves all the players
watched him closely. The opposing pitcher became confused.

“Now! Now! Now! Now!” shouted the excited man. “Watch me! Watch me!
Watch my fingers! Watch my hands! Watch my feet! Watch my eyes! Let’s
work together here! Watch me! In me you see all the movements of the
game! Work with me! Work with me! Watch me! Watch me! Watch me!”

With runners of the Winesburg team on bases, Joe Welling became as one
inspired. Before they knew what had come over them, the base runners
were watching the man, edging off the bases, advancing, retreating,
held as by an invisible cord. The players of the opposing team also
watched Joe. They were fascinated. For a moment they watched and then,
as though to break a spell that hung over them, they began hurling the
ball wildly about, and amid a series of fierce animal-like cries from
the coach, the runners of the Winesburg team scampered home.

Joe Welling’s love affair set the town of Winesburg on edge. When it
began everyone whispered and shook his head. When people tried to
laugh, the laughter was forced and unnatural. Joe fell in love with
Sarah King, a lean, sad-looking woman who lived with her father and
brother in a brick house that stood opposite the gate leading to the
Winesburg Cemetery.

The two Kings, Edward the father, and Tom the son, were not popular in
Winesburg. They were called proud and dangerous. They had come to
Winesburg from some place in the South and ran a cider mill on the
Trunion Pike. Tom King was reported to have killed a man before he came
to Winesburg. He was twenty-seven years old and rode about town on a
grey pony. Also he had a long yellow mustache that dropped down over
his teeth, and always carried a heavy, wicked-looking walking stick in
his hand. Once he killed a dog with the stick. The dog belonged to Win
Pawsey, the shoe merchant, and stood on the sidewalk wagging its tail.
Tom King killed it with one blow. He was arrested and paid a fine of
ten dollars.

Old Edward King was small of stature and when he passed people in the
street laughed a queer unmirthful laugh. When he laughed he scratched
his left elbow with his right hand. The sleeve of his coat was almost
worn through from the habit. As he walked along the street, looking
nervously about and laughing, he seemed more dangerous than his silent,
fierce-looking son.

When Sarah King began walking out in the evening with Joe Welling,
people shook their heads in alarm. She was tall and pale and had dark
rings under her eyes. The couple looked ridiculous together. Under the
trees they walked and Joe talked. His passionate eager protestations of
love, heard coming out of the darkness by the cemetery wall, or from
the deep shadows of the trees on the hill that ran up to the Fair
Grounds from Waterworks Pond, were repeated in the stores. Men stood by
the bar in the New Willard House laughing and talking of Joe’s
courtship. After the laughter came the silence. The Winesburg baseball
team, under his management, was winning game after game, and the town
had begun to respect him. Sensing a tragedy, they waited, laughing
nervously.

Late on a Saturday afternoon the meeting between Joe Welling and the
two Kings, the anticipation of which had set the town on edge, took
place in Joe Welling’s room in the New Willard House. George Willard
was a witness to the meeting. It came about in this way:

When the young reporter went to his room after the evening meal he saw
Tom King and his father sitting in the half darkness in Joe’s room. The
son had the heavy walking stick in his hand and sat near the door. Old
Edward King walked nervously about, scratching his left elbow with his
right hand. The hallways were empty and silent.

George Willard went to his own room and sat down at his desk. He tried
to write but his hand trembled so that he could not hold the pen. He
also walked nervously up and down. Like the rest of the town of
Winesburg he was perplexed and knew not what to do.

It was seven-thirty and fast growing dark when Joe Welling came along
the station platform toward the New Willard House. In his arms he held
a bundle of weeds and grasses. In spite of the terror that made his
body shake, George Willard was amused at the sight of the small spry
figure holding the grasses and half running along the platform.

Shaking with fright and anxiety, the young reporter lurked in the
hallway outside the door of the room in which Joe Welling talked to the
two Kings. There had been an oath, the nervous giggle of old Edward
King, and then silence. Now the voice of Joe Welling, sharp and clear,
broke forth. George Willard began to laugh. He understood. As he had
swept all men before him, so now Joe Welling was carrying the two men
in the room off their feet with a tidal wave of words. The listener in
the hall walked up and down, lost in amazement.

Inside the room Joe Welling had paid no attention to the grumbled
threat of Tom King. Absorbed in an idea he closed the door and,
lighting a lamp, spread the handful of weeds and grasses upon the
floor. “I’ve got something here,” he announced solemnly. “I was going
to tell George Willard about it, let him make a piece out of it for the
paper. I’m glad you’re here. I wish Sarah were here also. I’ve been
going to come to your house and tell you of some of my ideas. They’re
interesting. Sarah wouldn’t let me. She said we’d quarrel. That’s
foolish.”

Running up and down before the two perplexed men, Joe Welling began to
explain. “Don’t you make a mistake now,” he cried. “This is something
big.” His voice was shrill with excitement. “You just follow me, you’ll
be interested. I know you will. Suppose this—suppose all of the wheat,
the corn, the oats, the peas, the potatoes, were all by some miracle
swept away. Now here we are, you see, in this county. There is a high
fence built all around us. We’ll suppose that. No one can get over the
fence and all the fruits of the earth are destroyed, nothing left but
these wild things, these grasses. Would we be done for? I ask you that.
Would we be done for?” Again Tom King growled and for a moment there
was silence in the room. Then again Joe plunged into the exposition of
his idea. “Things would go hard for a time. I admit that. I’ve got to
admit that. No getting around it. We’d be hard put to it. More than one
fat stomach would cave in. But they couldn’t down us. I should say
not.”

Tom King laughed good naturedly and the shivery, nervous laugh of
Edward King rang through the house. Joe Welling hurried on. “We’d
begin, you see, to breed up new vegetables and fruits. Soon we’d regain
all we had lost. Mind, I don’t say the new things would be the same as
the old. They wouldn’t. Maybe they’d be better, maybe not so good.
That’s interesting, eh? You can think about that. It starts your mind
working, now don’t it?”

In the room there was silence and then again old Edward King laughed
nervously. “Say, I wish Sarah was here,” cried Joe Welling. “Let’s go
up to your house. I want to tell her of this.”

There was a scraping of chairs in the room. It was then that George
Willard retreated to his own room. Leaning out at the window he saw Joe
Welling going along the street with the two Kings. Tom King was forced
to take extraordinary long strides to keep pace with the little man. As
he strode along, he leaned over, listening—absorbed, fascinated. Joe
Welling again talked excitedly. “Take milkweed now,” he cried. “A lot
might be done with milkweed, eh? It’s almost unbelievable. I want you
to think about it. I want you two to think about it. There would be a
new vegetable kingdom you see. It’s interesting, eh? It’s an idea. Wait
till you see Sarah, she’ll get the idea. She’ll be interested. Sarah is
always interested in ideas. You can’t be too smart for Sarah, now can
you? Of course you can’t. You know that.”



ADVENTURE


Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere
boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney’s Dry
Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married a second
husband.

Alice’s step-father was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His
story is an odd one. It will be worth telling some day.

At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat slight. Her head was large
and overshadowed her body. Her shoulders were a little stooped and her
hair and eyes brown. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a
continual ferment went on.

When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the
store, Alice had an affair with a young man. The young man, named Ned
Currie, was older than Alice. He, like George Willard, was employed on
the _Winesburg Eagle_ and for a long time he went to see Alice almost
every evening. Together the two walked under the trees through the
streets of the town and talked of what they would do with their lives.
Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her into his arms
and kissed her. He became excited and said things he did not intend to
say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come
into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The
outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was
torn away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late
in the fall of her sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland
where he hoped to get a place on a city newspaper and rise in the
world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling voice she told him
what was in her mind. “I will work and you can work,” she said. “I do
not want to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your
making progress. Don’t marry me now. We will get along without that and
we can be together. Even though we live in the same house no one will
say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no
attention to us.”

Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his
sweetheart and was also deeply touched. He had wanted the girl to
become his mistress but changed his mind. He wanted to protect and care
for her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said sharply;
“you may be sure I’ll let you do no such thing. As soon as I get a good
job I’ll come back. For the present you’ll have to stay here. It’s the
only thing we can do.”

On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his new life in the
city, Ned Currie went to call on Alice. They walked about through the
streets for an hour and then got a rig from Wesley Moyer’s livery and
went for a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found
themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the young man forgot the
resolutions he had made regarding his conduct with the girl.

They got out of the buggy at a place where a long meadow ran down to
the bank of Wine Creek and there in the dim light became lovers. When
at midnight they returned to town they were both glad. It did not seem
to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out
the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened. “Now we will have
to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that,” Ned
Currie said as he left the girl at her father’s door.

The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a
Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago. For a time he was lonely and
wrote to Alice almost every day. Then he was caught up by the life of
the city; he began to make friends and found new interests in life. In
Chicago he boarded at a house where there were several women. One of
them attracted his attention and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the
end of a year he had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long
time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of the city parks and
saw the moon shining on the grass as it had shone that night on the
meadow by Wine Creek, did he think of her at all.

In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a woman. When she
was twenty-two years old her father, who owned a harness repair shop,
died suddenly. The harness maker was an old soldier, and after a few
months his wife received a widow’s pension. She used the first money
she got to buy a loom and became a weaver of carpets, and Alice got a
place in Winney’s store. For a number of years nothing could have
induced her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end return to
her.

She was glad to be employed because the daily round of toil in the
store made the time of waiting seem less long and uninteresting. She
began to save money, thinking that when she had saved two or three
hundred dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try if her
presence would not win back his affections.

Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight
in the field, but felt that she could never marry another man. To her
the thought of giving to another what she still felt could belong only
to Ned seemed monstrous. When other young men tried to attract her
attention she would have nothing to do with them. “I am his wife and
shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not,” she whispered to
herself, and for all of her willingness to support herself could not
have understood the growing modern idea of a woman’s owning herself and
giving and taking for her own ends in life.

Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the morning until six
at night and on three evenings a week went back to the store to stay
from seven until nine. As time passed and she became more and more
lonely she began to practice the devices common to lonely people. When
at night she went upstairs into her own room she knelt on the floor to
pray and in her prayers whispered things she wanted to say to her
lover. She became attached to inanimate objects, and because it was her
own, could not bare to have anyone touch the furniture of her room. The
trick of saving money, begun for a purpose, was carried on after the
scheme of going to the city to find Ned Currie had been given up. It
became a fixed habit, and when she needed new clothes she did not get
them. Sometimes on rainy afternoons in the store she got out her bank
book and, letting it lie open before her, spent hours dreaming
impossible dreams of saving money enough so that the interest would
support both herself and her future husband.

“Ned always liked to travel about,” she thought. “I’ll give him the
chance. Some day when we are married and I can save both his money and
my own, we will be rich. Then we can travel together all over the
world.”

In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months into years as
Alice waited and dreamed of her lover’s return. Her employer, a grey
old man with false teeth and a thin grey mustache that drooped down
over his mouth, was not given to conversation, and sometimes, on rainy
days and in the winter when a storm raged in Main Street, long hours
passed when no customers came in. Alice arranged and rearranged the
stock. She stood near the front window where she could look down the
deserted street and thought of the evenings when she had walked with
Ned Currie and of what he had said. “We will have to stick to each
other now.” The words echoed and re-echoed through the mind of the
maturing woman. Tears came into her eyes. Sometimes when her employer
had gone out and she was alone in the store she put her head on the
counter and wept. “Oh, Ned, I am waiting,” she whispered over and over,
and all the time the creeping fear that he would never come back grew
stronger within her.

In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days
of summer have come, the country about Winesburg is delightful. The
town lies in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields are
pleasant patches of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little
cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to sit on Sunday
afternoons. Through the trees they look out across the fields and see
farmers at work about the barns or people driving up and down on the
roads. In the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes, looking
like a toy thing in the distance.

For several years after Ned Currie went away Alice did not go into the
wood with the other young people on Sunday, but one day after he had
been gone for two or three years and when her loneliness seemed
unbearable, she put on her best dress and set out. Finding a little
sheltered place from which she could see the town and a long stretch of
the fields, she sat down. Fear of age and ineffectuality took
possession of her. She could not sit still, and arose. As she stood
looking out over the land something, perhaps the thought of never
ceasing life as it expresses itself in the flow of the seasons, fixed
her mind on the passing years. With a shiver of dread, she realized
that for her the beauty and freshness of youth had passed. For the
first time she felt that she had been cheated. She did not blame Ned
Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness swept over her. Dropping
to her knees, she tried to pray, but instead of prayers words of
protest came to her lips. “It is not going to come to me. I will never
find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?” she cried, and an odd sense
of relief came with this, her first bold attempt to face the fear that
had become a part of her everyday life.

In the year when Alice Hindman became twenty-five two things happened
to disturb the dull uneventfulness of her days. Her mother married Bush
Milton, the carriage painter of Winesburg, and she herself became a
member of the Winesburg Methodist Church. Alice joined the church
because she had become frightened by the loneliness of her position in
life. Her mother’s second marriage had emphasized her isolation. “I am
becoming old and queer. If Ned comes he will not want me. In the city
where he is living men are perpetually young. There is so much going on
that they do not have time to grow old,” she told herself with a grim
little smile, and went resolutely about the business of becoming
acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when the store had
closed she went to a prayer meeting in the basement of the church and
on Sunday evening attended a meeting of an organization called The
Epworth League.

When Will Hurley, a middle-aged man who clerked in a drug store and who
also belonged to the church, offered to walk home with her she did not
protest. “Of course I will not let him make a practice of being with
me, but if he comes to see me once in a long time there can be no harm
in that,” she told herself, still determined in her loyalty to Ned
Currie.

Without realizing what was happening, Alice was trying feebly at first,
but with growing determination, to get a new hold upon life. Beside the
drug clerk she walked in silence, but sometimes in the darkness as they
went stolidly along she put out her hand and touched softly the folds
of his coat. When he left her at the gate before her mother’s house she
did not go indoors, but stood for a moment by the door. She wanted to
call to the drug clerk, to ask him to sit with her in the darkness on
the porch before the house, but was afraid he would not understand. “It
is not him that I want,” she told herself; “I want to avoid being so
much alone. If I am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with
people.”


During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a passionate
restlessness took possession of Alice. She could not bear to be in the
company of the drug clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk
with her she sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and when,
weary from the long hours of standing behind the counter in the store,
she went home and crawled into bed, she could not sleep. With staring
eyes she looked into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child
awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep within her there
was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded
some definite answer from life.

Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her
breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the
darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling
beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a
refrain. “Why doesn’t something happen? Why am I left here alone?” she
muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer
depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned
Currie or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something
answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her.

And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure. It frightened
and confused her. She had come home from the store at nine and found
the house empty. Bush Milton had gone off to town and her mother to the
house of a neighbor. Alice went upstairs to her room and undressed in
the darkness. For a moment she stood by the window hearing the rain
beat against the glass and then a strange desire took possession of
her. Without stopping to think of what she intended to do, she ran
downstairs through the dark house and out into the rain. As she stood
on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her
body a mad desire to run naked through the streets took possession of
her.

She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect
on her body. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage.
She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human
and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled
homeward. Alice started to run. A wild, desperate mood took possession
of her. “What do I care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him,”
she thought; and then without stopping to consider the possible result
of her madness, called softly. “Wait!” she cried. “Don’t go away.
Whoever you are, you must wait.”

The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man
and somewhat deaf. Putting his hand to his mouth, he shouted. “What?
What say?” he called.

Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was so frightened at
the thought of what she had done that when the man had gone on his way
she did not dare get to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees
through the grass to the house. When she got to her own room she bolted
the door and drew her dressing table across the doorway. Her body shook
as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had difficulty
getting into her nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face
in the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. “What is the matter with me? I
will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and
turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face
bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in
Winesburg.



RESPECTABILITY


If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer
afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron
cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging,
hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey
is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a
kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are
fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for
a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male
acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

Had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village
of Winesburg, Ohio, there would have been for you no mystery in regard
to the beast in his cage. “It is like Wash Williams,” you would have
said. “As he sits in the corner there, the beast is exactly like old
Wash sitting on the grass in the station yard on a summer evening after
he has closed his office for the night.”

Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest
thing in town. His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble.
He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his
eyes looked soiled.

I go too fast. Not everything about Wash was unclean. He took care of
his hands. His fingers were fat, but there was something sensitive and
shapely in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument in the
telegraph office. In his youth Wash Williams had been called the best
telegraph operator in the state, and in spite of his degradement to the
obscure office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.

Wash Williams did not associate with the men of the town in which he
lived. “I’ll have nothing to do with them,” he said, looking with
bleary eyes at the men who walked along the station platform past the
telegraph office. Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed
Griffith’s saloon, and after drinking unbelievable quantities of beer
staggered off to his room in the New Willard House and to his bed for
the night.

Wash Williams was a man of courage. A thing had happened to him that
made him hate life, and he hated it wholeheartedly, with the abandon of
a poet. First of all, he hated women. “Bitches,” he called them. His
feeling toward men was somewhat different. He pitied them. “Does not
every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or another?” he
asked.

In Winesburg no attention was paid to Wash Williams and his hatred of
his fellows. Once Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, complained to the
telegraph company, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and
smelled abominably, but nothing came of her complaint. Here and there a
man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing
resentment of something he had not the courage to resent. When Wash
walked through the streets such a one had an instinct to pay him
homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him. The superintendent who
had supervision over the telegraph operators on the railroad that went
through Winesburg felt that way. He had put Wash into the obscure
office at Winesburg to avoid discharging him, and he meant to keep him
there. When he received the letter of complaint from the banker’s wife,
he tore it up and laughed unpleasantly. For some reason he thought of
his own wife as he tore up the letter.

Wash Williams once had a wife. When he was still a young man he married
a woman at Dayton, Ohio. The woman was tall and slender and had blue
eyes and yellow hair. Wash was himself a comely youth. He loved the
woman with a love as absorbing as the hatred he later felt for all
women.

In all of Winesburg there was but one person who knew the story of the
thing that had made ugly the person and the character of Wash Williams.
He once told the story to George Willard and the telling of the tale
came about in this way:

George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer
of women’s hats who worked in a millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate
McHugh. The young man was not in love with the woman, who, in fact, had
a suitor who worked as bartender in Ed Griffith’s saloon, but as they
walked about under the trees they occasionally embraced. The night and
their own thoughts had aroused something in them. As they were
returning to Main Street they passed the little lawn beside the
railroad station and saw Wash Williams apparently asleep on the grass
beneath a tree. On the next evening the operator and George Willard
walked out together. Down the railroad they went and sat on a pile of
decaying railroad ties beside the tracks. It was then that the operator
told the young reporter his story of hate.

Perhaps a dozen times George Willard and the strange, shapeless man who
lived at his father’s hotel had been on the point of talking. The young
man looked at the hideous, leering face staring about the hotel dining
room and was consumed with curiosity. Something he saw lurking in the
staring eyes told him that the man who had nothing to say to others had
nevertheless something to say to him. On the pile of railroad ties on
the summer evening, he waited expectantly. When the operator remained
silent and seemed to have changed his mind about talking, he tried to
make conversation. “Were you ever married, Mr. Williams?” he began. “I
suppose you were and your wife is dead, is that it?”

Wash Williams spat forth a succession of vile oaths. “Yes, she is
dead,” he agreed. “She is dead as all women are dead. She is a
living-dead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth
foul by her presence.” Staring into the boy’s eyes, the man became
purple with rage. “Don’t have fool notions in your head,” he commanded.
“My wife, she is dead; yes, surely. I tell you, all women are dead, my
mother, your mother, that tall dark woman who works in the millinery
store and with whom I saw you walking about yesterday—all of them, they
are all dead. I tell you there is something rotten about them. I was
married, sure. My wife was dead before she married me, she was a foul
thing come out a woman more foul. She was a thing sent to make life
unbearable to me. I was a fool, do you see, as you are now, and so I
married this woman. I would like to see men a little begin to
understand women. They are sent to prevent men making the world worth
while. It is a trick in Nature. Ugh! They are creeping, crawling,
squirming things, they with their soft hands and their blue eyes. The
sight of a woman sickens me. Why I don’t kill every woman I see I don’t
know.”

Half frightened and yet fascinated by the light burning in the eyes of
the hideous old man, George Willard listened, afire with curiosity.
Darkness came on and he leaned forward trying to see the face of the
man who talked. When, in the gathering darkness, he could no longer see
the purple, bloated face and the burning eyes, a curious fancy came to
him. Wash Williams talked in low even tones that made his words seem
the more terrible. In the darkness the young reporter found himself
imagining that he sat on the railroad ties beside a comely young man
with black hair and black shining eyes. There was something almost
beautiful in the voice of Wash Williams, the hideous, telling his story
of hate.

The telegraph operator of Winesburg, sitting in the darkness on the
railroad ties, had become a poet. Hatred had raised him to that
elevation. “It is because I saw you kissing the lips of that Belle
Carpenter that I tell you my story,” he said. “What happened to me may
next happen to you. I want to put you on your guard. Already you may be
having dreams in your head. I want to destroy them.”

Wash Williams began telling the story of his married life with the tall
blonde girl with the blue eyes whom he had met when he was a young
operator at Dayton, Ohio. Here and there his story was touched with
moments of beauty intermingled with strings of vile curses. The
operator had married the daughter of a dentist who was the youngest of
three sisters. On his marriage day, because of his ability, he was
promoted to a position as dispatcher at an increased salary and sent to
an office at Columbus, Ohio. There he settled down with his young wife
and began buying a house on the installment plan.

The young telegraph operator was madly in love. With a kind of
religious fervor he had managed to go through the pitfalls of his youth
and to remain virginal until after his marriage. He made for George
Willard a picture of his life in the house at Columbus, Ohio, with the
young wife. “In the garden back of our house we planted vegetables,” he
said, “you know, peas and corn and such things. We went to Columbus in
early March and as soon as the days became warm I went to work in the
garden. With a spade I turned up the black ground while she ran about
laughing and pretending to be afraid of the worms I uncovered. Late in
April came the planting. In the little paths among the seed beds she
stood holding a paper bag in her hand. The bag was filled with seeds. A
few at a time she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the
warm, soft ground.”

For a moment there was a catch in the voice of the man talking in the
darkness. “I loved her,” he said. “I don’t claim not to be a fool. I
love her yet. There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along
the black ground to her feet and groveled before her. I kissed her
shoes and the ankles above her shoes. When the hem of her garment
touched my face I trembled. When after two years of that life I found
she had managed to acquire three other lovers who came regularly to our
house when I was away at work, I didn’t want to touch them or her. I
just sent her home to her mother and said nothing. There was nothing to
say. I had four hundred dollars in the bank and I gave her that. I
didn’t ask her reasons. I didn’t say anything. When she had gone I
cried like a silly boy. Pretty soon I had a chance to sell the house
and I sent that money to her.”

Wash Williams and George Willard arose from the pile of railroad ties
and walked along the tracks toward town. The operator finished his tale
quickly, breathlessly.

“Her mother sent for me,” he said. “She wrote me a letter and asked me
to come to their house at Dayton. When I got there it was evening about
this time.”

Wash Williams’ voice rose to a half scream. “I sat in the parlor of
that house two hours. Her mother took me in there and left me. Their
house was stylish. They were what is called respectable people. There
were plush chairs and a couch in the room. I was trembling all over. I
hated the men I thought had wronged her. I was sick of living alone and
wanted her back. The longer I waited the more raw and tender I became.
I thought that if she came in and just touched me with her hand I would
perhaps faint away. I ached to forgive and forget.”

Wash Williams stopped and stood staring at George Willard. The boy’s
body shook as from a chill. Again the man’s voice became soft and low.
“She came into the room naked,” he went on. “Her mother did that. While
I sat there she was taking the girl’s clothes off, perhaps coaxing her
to do it. First I heard voices at the door that led into a little
hallway and then it opened softly. The girl was ashamed and stood
perfectly still staring at the floor. The mother didn’t come into the
room. When she had pushed the girl in through the door she stood in the
hallway waiting, hoping we would—well, you see—waiting.”

George Willard and the telegraph operator came into the main street of
Winesburg. The lights from the store windows lay bright and shining on
the sidewalks. People moved about laughing and talking. The young
reporter felt ill and weak. In imagination, he also became old and
shapeless. “I didn’t get the mother killed,” said Wash Williams,
staring up and down the street. “I struck her once with a chair and
then the neighbors came in and took it away. She screamed so loud you
see. I won’t ever have a chance to kill her now. She died of a fever a
month after that happened.”



THE THINKER


The house in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg lived with his mother had
been at one time the show place of the town, but when young Seth lived
there its glory had become somewhat dimmed. The huge brick house which
Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had overshadowed it. The
Richmond place was in a little valley far out at the end of Main
Street. Farmers coming into town by a dusty road from the south passed
by a grove of walnut trees, skirted the Fair Ground with its high board
fence covered with advertisements, and trotted their horses down
through the valley past the Richmond place into town. As much of the
country north and south of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and berry
raising, Seth saw wagon-loads of berry pickers—boys, girls, and
women—going to the fields in the morning and returning covered with
dust in the evening. The chattering crowd, with their rude jokes cried
out from wagon to wagon, sometimes irritated him sharply. He regretted
that he also could not laugh boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and
make of himself a figure in the endless stream of moving, giggling
activity that went up and down the road.

The Richmond house was built of limestone, and, although it was said in
the village to have become run down, had in reality grown more
beautiful with every passing year. Already time had begun a little to
color the stone, lending a golden richness to its surface and in the
evening or on dark days touching the shaded places beneath the eaves
with wavering patches of browns and blacks.

The house had been built by Seth’s grandfather, a stone quarryman, and
it, together with the stone quarries on Lake Erie eighteen miles to the
north, had been left to his son, Clarence Richmond, Seth’s father.
Clarence Richmond, a quiet passionate man extraordinarily admired by
his neighbors, had been killed in a street fight with the editor of a
newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. The fight concerned the publication of
Clarence Richmond’s name coupled with that of a woman school teacher,
and as the dead man had begun the row by firing upon the editor, the
effort to punish the slayer was unsuccessful. After the quarryman’s
death it was found that much of the money left to him had been
squandered in speculation and in insecure investments made through the
influence of friends.

Left with but a small income, Virginia Richmond had settled down to a
retired life in the village and to the raising of her son. Although she
had been deeply moved by the death of the husband and father, she did
not at all believe the stories concerning him that ran about after his
death. To her mind, the sensitive, boyish man whom all had
instinctively loved, was but an unfortunate, a being too fine for
everyday life. “You’ll be hearing all sorts of stories, but you are not
to believe what you hear,” she said to her son. “He was a good man,
full of tenderness for everyone, and should not have tried to be a man
of affairs. No matter how much I were to plan and dream of your future,
I could not imagine anything better for you than that you turn out as
good a man as your father.”

Several years after the death of her husband, Virginia Richmond had
become alarmed at the growing demands upon her income and had set
herself to the task of increasing it. She had learned stenography and
through the influence of her husband’s friends got the position of
court stenographer at the county seat. There she went by train each
morning during the sessions of the court, and when no court sat, spent
her days working among the rosebushes in her garden. She was a tall,
straight figure of a woman with a plain face and a great mass of brown
hair.

In the relationship between Seth Richmond and his mother, there was a
quality that even at eighteen had begun to color all of his traffic
with men. An almost unhealthy respect for the youth kept the mother for
the most part silent in his presence. When she did speak sharply to him
he had only to look steadily into her eyes to see dawning there the
puzzled look he had already noticed in the eyes of others when he
looked at them.

The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the
mother did not. She expected from all people certain conventional
reactions to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled
and looked at the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all
was forgiven. After the weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept
into his room and kissed him.

Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did not do these
things. After the severest reprimand, he did not tremble and look at
the floor but instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to
invade her mind. As for creeping into his room—after Seth had passed
his fifteenth year, she would have been half afraid to do anything of
the kind.

Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys
ran away from home. The three boys climbed into the open door of an
empty freight car and rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was
being held. One of the boys had a bottle filled with a combination of
whiskey and blackberry wine, and the three sat with legs dangling out
of the car door drinking from the bottle. Seth’s two companions sang
and waved their hands to idlers about the stations of the towns through
which the train passed. They planned raids upon the baskets of farmers
who had come with their families to the fair. “We will live like kings
and won’t have to spend a penny to see the fair and horse races,” they
declared boastfully.

After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down
the floor of her home filled with vague alarms. Although on the next
day she discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on
what adventure the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All
through the night she lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling
herself that Seth, like his father, would come to a sudden and violent
end. So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the
weight of her wrath that, although she would not allow the marshal to
interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and paper and wrote
down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon
him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going about the garden and
saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part.

And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a little weary and
with coal soot in his ears and about his eyes, she again found herself
unable to reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail
by the kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her. “I wanted to
turn back within an hour after we had started,” he explained. “I didn’t
know what to do. I knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if
I didn’t go on I would be ashamed of myself. I went through with the
thing for my own good. It was uncomfortable, sleeping on wet straw, and
two drunken Negroes came and slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket
out of a farmer’s wagon I couldn’t help thinking of his children going
all day without food. I was sick of the whole affair, but I was
determined to stick it out until the other boys were ready to come
back.”

“I’m glad you did stick it out,” replied the mother, half resentfully,
and kissing him upon the forehead pretended to busy herself with the
work about the house.

On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New Willard House to
visit his friend, George Willard. It had rained during the afternoon,
but as he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and
a golden glow lit up the west. Going around a corner, he turned in at
the door of the hotel and began to climb the stairway leading up to his
friend’s room. In the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men
were engaged in a discussion of politics.

On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices of the men
below. They were excited and talked rapidly. Tom Willard was berating
the traveling men. “I am a Democrat but your talk makes me sick,” he
said. “You don’t understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are
friends. It is impossible perhaps for your mind to grasp that. If
anyone tells you that a friendship can be deeper and bigger and more
worth while than dollars and cents, or even more worth while than state
politics, you snicker and laugh.”

The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a tall,
grey-mustached man who worked for a wholesale grocery house. “Do you
think that I’ve lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark
Hanna?” he demanded. “Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money and
nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and
don’t you forget it.”

The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the rest of the
discussion, but went on up the stairway and into the little dark hall.
Something in the voices of the men talking in the hotel office started
a chain of thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to think
that loneliness was a part of his character, something that would
always stay with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by a window
that looked into an alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner
Groff, the town baker. His tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and down the
alleyway. In his shop someone called the baker, who pretended not to
hear. The baker had an empty milk bottle in his hand and an angry
sullen look in his eyes.

In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the “deep one.” “He’s like his
father,” men said as he went through the streets. “He’ll break out some
of these days. You wait and see.”

The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys
instinctively greeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected
Seth Richmond’s outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was
deeper than boys are given credit for being, but he was not what the
men of the town, and even his mother, thought him to be. No great
underlying purpose lay back of his habitual silence, and he had no
definite plan for his life. When the boys with whom he associated were
noisy and quarrelsome, he stood quietly at one side. With calm eyes he
watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn’t
particularly interested in what was going on, and sometimes wondered if
he would ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as he stood
in the half-darkness by the window watching the baker, he wished that
he himself might become thoroughly stirred by something, even by the
fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted. “It would be
better for me if I could become excited and wrangle about politics like
windy old Tom Willard,” he thought, as he left the window and went
again along the hallway to the room occupied by his friend, George
Willard.

George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the rather odd
friendship between the two, it was he who was forever courting and the
younger boy who was being courted. The paper on which George worked had
one policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as
possible of the inhabitants of the village. Like an excited dog, George
Willard ran here and there, noting on his pad of paper who had gone on
business to the county seat or had returned from a visit to a
neighboring village. All day he wrote little facts upon the pad. “A. P.
Wringlet had received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom
Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new
barn on his place on the Valley Road.”

The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given
him a place of distinction in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked
continually of the matter, “It’s the easiest of all lives to live,” he
declared, becoming excited and boastful. “Here and there you go and
there is no one to boss you. Though you are in India or in the South
Seas in a boat, you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I
get my name up and then see what fun I shall have.”

In George Willard’s room, which had a window looking down into an
alleyway and one that looked across railroad tracks to Biff Carter’s
Lunch Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair
and looked at the floor. George Willard, who had been sitting for an
hour idly playing with a lead pencil, greeted him effusively. “I’ve
been trying to write a love story,” he explained, laughing nervously.
Lighting a pipe he began walking up and down the room. “I know what I’m
going to do. I’m going to fall in love. I’ve been sitting here and
thinking it over and I’m going to do it.”

As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went to a window and
turning his back to his friend leaned out. “I know who I’m going to
fall in love with,” he said sharply. “It’s Helen White. She is the only
girl in town with any ‘get-up’ to her.”

Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked toward his
visitor. “Look here,” he said. “You know Helen White better than I do.
I want you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking to her and
say that I’m in love with her. See what she says to that. See how she
takes it, and then you come and tell me.”

Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door. The words of his comrade
irritated him unbearably. “Well, good-bye,” he said briefly.

George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to
look into Seth’s face. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do?
You stay here and let’s talk,” he urged.

A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the men of the town
who were, he thought, perpetually talking of nothing, and most of all,
against his own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. “Aw, speak
to her yourself,” he burst forth and then, going quickly through the
door, slammed it sharply in his friend’s face. “I’m going to find Helen
White and talk to her, but not about him,” he muttered.

Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door of the hotel
muttering with wrath. Crossing a little dusty street and climbing a low
iron railing, he went to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George
Willard he thought a profound fool, and he wished that he had said so
more vigorously. Although his acquaintanceship with Helen White, the
banker’s daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the subject
of his thoughts and he felt that she was something private and personal
to himself. “The busy fool with his love stories,” he muttered, staring
back over his shoulder at George Willard’s room, “why does he never
tire of his eternal talking.”

It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the station platform
men and boys loaded the boxes of red, fragrant berries into two express
cars that stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although
in the west a storm threatened, and no street lamps were lighted. In
the dim light the figures of the men standing upon the express truck
and pitching the boxes in at the doors of the cars were but dimly
discernible. Upon the iron railing that protected the station lawn sat
other men. Pipes were lighted. Village jokes went back and forth. Away
in the distance a train whistled and the men loading the boxes into the
cars worked with renewed activity.

Seth arose from his place on the grass and went silently past the men
perched upon the railing and into Main Street. He had come to a
resolution. “I’ll get out of here,” he told himself. “What good am I
here? I’m going to some city and go to work. I’ll tell mother about it
tomorrow.”

Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past Wacker’s Cigar Store
and the Town Hall, and into Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the
thought that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the
depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at
fault. In the heavy shadows of a big tree before Doctor Welling’s
house, he stopped and stood watching half-witted Turk Smollet, who was
pushing a wheelbarrow in the road. The old man with his absurdly boyish
mind had a dozen long boards on the wheelbarrow, and, as he hurried
along the road, balanced the load with extreme nicety. “Easy there,
Turk! Steady now, old boy!” the old man shouted to himself, and laughed
so that the load of boards rocked dangerously.

Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood chopper whose
peculiarities added so much of color to the life of the village. He
knew that when Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of
a whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old man was going
far out of his way in order to pass through Main Street and exhibit his
skill in wheeling the boards. “If George Willard were here, he’d have
something to say,” thought Seth. “George belongs to this town. He’d
shout at Turk and Turk would shout at him. They’d both be secretly
pleased by what they had said. It’s different with me. I don’t belong.
I’ll not make a fuss about it, but I’m going to get out of here.”

Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness, feeling himself an
outcast in his own town. He began to pity himself, but a sense of the
absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he
was simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity.
“I’m made to go to work. I may be able to make a place for myself by
steady working, and I might as well be at it,” he decided.

Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the darkness by the
front door. On the door hung a heavy brass knocker, an innovation
introduced into the village by Helen White’s mother, who had also
organized a women’s club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the
knocker and let it fall. Its heavy clatter sounded like a report from
distant guns. “How awkward and foolish I am,” he thought. “If Mrs.
White comes to the door, I won’t know what to say.”

It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth standing at the
edge of the porch. Blushing with pleasure, she stepped forward, closing
the door softly. “I’m going to get out of town. I don’t know what I’ll
do, but I’m going to get out of here and go to work. I think I’ll go to
Columbus,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll get into the State University down
there. Anyway, I’m going. I’ll tell mother tonight.” He hesitated and
looked doubtfully about. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to walk with
me?”

Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy
clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the
deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder.
Hurrying forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting
the ladder against the wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so
that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the
deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In the tops of the
trees the wind began to play, disturbing the sleeping birds so that
they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of
the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm
of night flies.

Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had been a half
expressed intimacy between him and the maiden who now for the first
time walked beside him. For a time she had been beset with a madness
for writing notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found them
concealed in his books at school and one had been given him by a child
met in the street, while several had been delivered through the village
post office.

The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a
mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth had not answered them, although he
had been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in
pencil upon the stationery of the banker’s wife. Putting them into the
pocket of his coat, he went through the street or stood by the fence in
the school yard with something burning at his side. He thought it fine
that he should be thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most
attractive girl in town.

Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced
the street. The building had once been a factory for the making of
barrel staves but was now vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a
house a man and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming
dearly across to the half-embarrassed youth and maiden. There was the
sound of scraping chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel
path to a wooden gate. Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over
and kissed the woman. “For old times’ sake,” he said and, turning,
walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.

“That’s Belle Turner,” whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into
Seth’s hand. “I didn’t know she had a fellow. I thought she was too old
for that.” Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a
strange, dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came a desire to
tell her something he had been determined not to tell. “George
Willard’s in love with you,” he said, and in spite of his agitation his
voice was low and quiet. “He’s writing a story, and he wants to be in
love. He wants to know how it feels. He wanted me to tell you and see
what you said.”

Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden
surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge
sat on a wooden bench beneath a bush.

On the street as he walked beside the girl new and daring thoughts had
come into Seth Richmond’s mind. He began to regret his decision to get
out of town. “It would be something new and altogether delightful to
remain and walk often through the streets with Helen White,” he
thought. In imagination he saw himself putting his arm about her waist
and feeling her arms clasped tightly about his neck. One of those odd
combinations of events and places made him connect the idea of
love-making with this girl and a spot he had visited some days before.
He had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer who lived on a
hillside beyond the Fair Ground and had returned by a path through a
field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer’s house Seth had
stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming
noise had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must
be the home of a swarm of bees.

And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him
in the long grass. He stood in a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in
the field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with
tiny purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the
weeds the bees were gathered in armies, singing as they worked.

Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the
weeds beneath the tree. Beside him, in the scene built in his fancy,
lay Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept
him from kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he
wished. Instead, he lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening
to the army of bees that sang the sustained masterful song of labor
above his head.

On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily. Releasing the hand of
the girl, he thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. A desire to
impress the mind of his companion with the importance of the resolution
he had made came over him and he nodded his head toward the house.
“Mother’ll make a fuss, I suppose,” he whispered. “She hasn’t thought
at all about what I’m going to do in life. She thinks I’m going to stay
on here forever just being a boy.”

Seth’s voice became charged with boyish earnestness. “You see, I’ve got
to strike out. I’ve got to get to work. It’s what I’m good for.”

Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of
admiration swept over her. “This is as it should be,” she thought.
“This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man.” Certain
vague desires that had been invading her body were swept away and she
sat up very straight on the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and
flashes of heat lightning lit up the eastern sky. The garden that had
been so mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her might
have become the background for strange and wonderful adventures, now
seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite definite and
limited in its outlines.

“What will you do up there?” she whispered.

Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the
darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward
than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A
feeling of impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned,
and he tried to tell her of it. “Everyone talks and talks,” he began.
“I’m sick of it. I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where
talk don’t count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t
know. I guess I don’t care much. I just want to work and keep quiet.
That’s all I’ve got in my mind.”

Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did not want to
bring the meeting to an end but could not think of anything more to
say. “It’s the last time we’ll see each other,” he whispered.

A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand upon Seth’s
shoulder, she started to draw his face down toward her own upturned
face. The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some
vague adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would
now never be realized. “I think I’d better be going along,” she said,
letting her hand fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her.
“Don’t you go with me; I want to be alone,” she said. “You go and talk
with your mother. You’d better do that now.”

Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away
through the hedge. A desire to run after her came to him, but he only
stood staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been
perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she
had come. Walking slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow of
a large tree and looked at his mother sitting by a lighted window
busily sewing. The feeling of loneliness that had visited him earlier
in the evening returned and colored his thoughts of the adventure
through which he had just passed. “Huh!” he exclaimed, turning and
staring in the direction taken by Helen White. “That’s how things’ll
turn out. She’ll be like the rest. I suppose she’ll begin now to look
at me in a funny way.” He looked at the ground and pondered this
thought. “She’ll be embarrassed and feel strange when I’m around,” he
whispered to himself. “That’s how it’ll be. That’s how everything’ll
turn out. When it comes to loving someone, it won’t never be me. It’ll
be someone else—some fool—someone who talks a lot—someone like that
George Willard.”



TANDY


Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an
unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little
attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking
and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so
absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds
of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the
little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty
of her dead mother’s relatives.

A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did
not see. He was a tall, redhaired young man who was almost always
drunk. Sometimes he sat in a chair before the New Willard House with
Tom Hard, the father. As Tom talked, declaring there could be no God,
the stranger smiled and winked at the bystanders. He and Tom became
friends and were much together.

The stranger was the son of a rich merchant of Cleveland and had come
to Winesburg on a mission. He wanted to cure himself of the habit of
drink, and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living
in a rural community he would have a better chance in the struggle with
the appetite that was destroying him.

His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing
hours led to his drinking harder than ever. But he did succeed in doing
something. He gave a name rich with meaning to Tom Hard’s daughter.

One evening when he was recovering from a long debauch the stranger
came reeling along the main street of the town. Tom Hard sat in a chair
before the New Willard House with his daughter, then a child of five,
on his knees. Beside him on the board sidewalk sat young George
Willard. The stranger dropped into a chair beside them. His body shook
and when he tried to talk his voice trembled.

It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the
railroad that ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel.
Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast
from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in
the roadway arose and barked. The stranger began to babble and made a
prophecy concerning the child that lay in the arms of the agnostic.

“I came here to quit drinking,” he said, and tears began to run down
his cheeks. He did not look at Tom Hard, but leaned forward and stared
into the darkness as though seeing a vision. “I ran away to the country
to be cured, but I am not cured. There is a reason.” He turned to look
at the child who sat up very straight on her father’s knee and returned
the look.

The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. “Drink is not the only thing
to which I am addicted,” he said. “There is something else. I am a
lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you
know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable,
you see. There are few who understand that.”

The stranger became silent and seemed overcome with sadness, but
another blast from the whistle of the passenger engine aroused him. “I
have not lost faith. I proclaim that. I have only been brought to the
place where I know my faith will not be realized,” he declared
hoarsely. He looked hard at the child and began to address her, paying
no more attention to the father. “There is a woman coming,” he said,
and his voice was now sharp and earnest. “I have missed her, you see.
She did not come in my time. You may be the woman. It would be like
fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as this,
when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is as yet only a
child.”

The shoulders of the stranger shook violently, and when he tried to
roll a cigarette the paper fell from his trembling fingers. He grew
angry and scolded. “They think it’s easy to be a woman, to be loved,
but I know better,” he declared. Again he turned to the child. “I
understand,” he cried. “Perhaps of all men I alone understand.”

His glance again wandered away to the darkened street. “I know about
her, although she has never crossed my path,” he said softly. “I know
about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that
she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new
quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the
name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is
the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from
women and that they do not get.”

The stranger arose and stood before Tom Hard. His body rocked back and
forth and he seemed about to fall, but instead he dropped to his knees
on the sidewalk and raised the hands of the little girl to his drunken
lips. He kissed them ecstatically. “Be Tandy, little one,” he pleaded.
“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.
Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or
woman. Be Tandy.”

The stranger arose and staggered off down the street. A day or two
later he got aboard a train and returned to his home in Cleveland. On
the summer evening, after the talk before the hotel, Tom Hard took the
girl child to the house of a relative where she had been invited to
spend the night. As he went along in the darkness under the trees he
forgot the babbling voice of the stranger and his mind returned to the
making of arguments by which he might destroy men’s faith in God. He
spoke his daughter’s name and she began to weep.

“I don’t want to be called that,” she declared. “I want to be called
Tandy—Tandy Hard.” The child wept so bitterly that Tom Hard was touched
and tried to comfort her. He stopped beneath a tree and, taking her
into his arms, began to caress her. “Be good, now,” he said sharply;
but she would not be quieted. With childish abandon she gave herself
over to grief, her voice breaking the evening stillness of the street.
“I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy Hard,” she
cried, shaking her head and sobbing as though her young strength were
not enough to bear the vision the words of the drunkard had brought to
her.



THE STRENGTH OF GOD


The Reverend Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of
Winesburg, and had been in that position ten years. He was forty years
old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in
the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from
Wednesday morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the
two sermons that must be preached on Sunday. Early on Sunday morning he
went into a little room called a study in the bell tower of the church
and prayed. In his prayers there was one note that always predominated.
“Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!” he pleaded,
kneeling on the bare floor and bowing his head in the presence of the
task that lay before him.

The Reverend Hartman was a tall man with a brown beard. His wife, a
stout, nervous woman, was the daughter of a manufacturer of underwear
at Cleveland, Ohio. The minister himself was rather a favorite in the
town. The elders of the church liked him because he was quiet and
unpretentious and Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, thought him scholarly
and refined.

The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other
churches of Winesburg. It was larger and more imposing and its minister
was better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on summer
evenings sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street
and up and down Buckeye Street he went, bowing gravely to the people,
while his wife, afire with secret pride, looked at him out of the
corners of her eyes and worried lest the horse become frightened and
run away.

For a good many years after he came to Winesburg things went well with
Curtis Hartman. He was not one to arouse keen enthusiasm among the
worshippers in his church but on the other hand he made no enemies. In
reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods
of remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the
highways and byways of the town. He wondered if the flame of the spirit
really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new
current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his
soul and the people would tremble before the spirit of God made
manifest in him. “I am a poor stick and that will never really happen
to me,” he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit up his
features. “Oh well, I suppose I’m doing well enough,” he added
philosophically.

The room in the bell tower of the church, where on Sunday mornings the
minister prayed for an increase in him of the power of God, had but one
window. It was long and narrow and swung outward on a hinge like a
door. On the window, made of little leaded panes, was a design showing
the Christ laying his hand upon the head of a child. One Sunday morning
in the summer as he sat by his desk in the room with a large Bible
opened before him, and the sheets of his sermon scattered about, the
minister was shocked to see, in the upper room of the house next door,
a woman lying in her bed and smoking a cigarette while she read a book.
Curtis Hartman went on tiptoe to the window and closed it softly. He
was horror stricken at the thought of a woman smoking and trembled also
to think that his eyes, just raised from the pages of the book of God,
had looked upon the bare shoulders and white throat of a woman. With
his brain in a whirl he went down into the pulpit and preached a long
sermon without once thinking of his gestures or his voice. The sermon
attracted unusual attention because of its power and clearness. “I
wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying a message into her
soul,” he thought and began to hope that on future Sunday mornings he
might be able to say words that would touch and awaken the woman
apparently far gone in secret sin.

The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through the windows of
which the minister had seen the sight that had so upset him, was
occupied by two women. Aunt Elizabeth Swift, a grey competent-looking
widow with money in the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with her
daughter Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school teacher was thirty
years old and had a neat trim-looking figure. She had few friends and
bore a reputation of having a sharp tongue. When he began to think
about her, Curtis Hartman remembered that she had been to Europe and
had lived for two years in New York City. “Perhaps after all her
smoking means nothing,” he thought. He began to remember that when he
was a student in college and occasionally read novels, good, although
somewhat worldly women, had smoked through the pages of a book that had
once fallen into his hands. With a rush of new determination he worked
on his sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to reach
the ears and the soul of this new listener, both his embarrassment in
the pulpit and the necessity of prayer in the study on Sunday mornings.

Reverend Hartman’s experience with women had been somewhat limited. He
was the son of a wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his
way through college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer had
boarded in a house where he lived during his school days and he had
married her after a formal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the
most part by the girl herself. On his marriage day the underwear
manufacturer had given his daughter five thousand dollars and he
promised to leave her at least twice that amount in his will. The
minister had thought himself fortunate in marriage and had never
permitted himself to think of other women. He did not want to think of
other women. What he wanted was to do the work of God quietly and
earnestly.

In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke. From wanting to reach the
ears of Kate Swift, and through his sermons to delve into her soul, he
began to want also to look again at the figure lying white and quiet in
the bed. On a Sunday morning when he could not sleep because of his
thoughts he arose and went to walk in the streets. When he had gone
along Main Street almost to the old Richmond place he stopped and
picking up a stone rushed off to the room in the bell tower. With the
stone he broke out a corner of the window and then locked the door and
sat down at the desk before the open Bible to wait. When the shade of
the window to Kate Swift’s room was raised he could see, through the
hole, directly into her bed, but she was not there. She also had arisen
and had gone for a walk and the hand that raised the shade was the hand
of Aunt Elizabeth Swift.

The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal
desire to “peep” and went back to his own house praising God. In an ill
moment he forgot, however, to stop the hole in the window. The piece of
glass broken out at the corner of the window just nipped off the bare
heel of the boy standing motionless and looking with rapt eyes into the
face of the Christ.

Curtis Hartman forgot his sermon on that Sunday morning. He talked to
his congregation and in his talk said that it was a mistake for people
to think of their minister as a man set aside and intended by nature to
lead a blameless life. “Out of my own experience I know that we, who
are the ministers of God’s word, are beset by the same temptations that
assail you,” he declared. “I have been tempted and have surrendered to
temptation. It is only the hand of God, placed beneath my head, that
has raised me up. As he has raised me so also will he raise you. Do not
despair. In your hour of sin raise your eyes to the skies and you will
be again and again saved.”

Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of
his mind and began to be something like a lover in the presence of his
wife. One evening when they drove out together he turned the horse out
of Buckeye Street and in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks
Pond, put his arm about Sarah Hartman’s waist. When he had eaten
breakfast in the morning and was ready to retire to his study at the
back of his house he went around the table and kissed his wife on the
cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came into his head, he smiled and
raised his eyes to the skies. “Intercede for me, Master,” he muttered,
“keep me in the narrow path intent on Thy work.”

And now began the real struggle in the soul of the brown-bearded
minister. By chance he discovered that Kate Swift was in the habit of
lying in her bed in the evenings and reading a book. A lamp stood on a
table by the side of the bed and the light streamed down upon her white
shoulders and bare throat. On the evening when he made the discovery
the minister sat at the desk in the dusty room from nine until after
eleven and when her light was put out stumbled out of the church to
spend two more hours walking and praying in the streets. He did not
want to kiss the shoulders and the throat of Kate Swift and had not
allowed his mind to dwell on such thoughts. He did not know what he
wanted. “I am God’s child and he must save me from myself,” he cried,
in the darkness under the trees as he wandered in the streets. By a
tree he stood and looked at the sky that was covered with hurrying
clouds. He began to talk to God intimately and closely. “Please,
Father, do not forget me. Give me power to go tomorrow and repair the
hole in the window. Lift my eyes again to the skies. Stay with me, Thy
servant, in his hour of need.”

Up and down through the silent streets walked the minister and for days
and weeks his soul was troubled. He could not understand the temptation
that had come to him nor could he fathom the reason for its coming. In
a way he began to blame God, saying to himself that he had tried to
keep his feet in the true path and had not run about seeking sin.
“Through my days as a young man and all through my life here I have
gone quietly about my work,” he declared. “Why now should I be tempted?
What have I done that this burden should be laid on me?”

Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis
Hartman crept out of his house to the room in the bell tower to sit in
the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and
later went to walk and pray in the streets. He could not understand
himself. For weeks he would go along scarcely thinking of the school
teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to
look at her body. And then something would happen. As he sat in the
study of his own house, hard at work on a sermon, he would become
nervous and begin to walk up and down the room. “I will go out into the
streets,” he told himself and even as he let himself in at the church
door he persistently denied to himself the cause of his being there. “I
will not repair the hole in the window and I will train myself to come
here at night and sit in the presence of this woman without raising my
eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The Lord has devised this
temptation as a test of my soul and I will grope my way out of darkness
into the light of righteousness.”

One night in January when it was bitter cold and snow lay deep on the
streets of Winesburg Curtis Hartman paid his last visit to the room in
the bell tower of the church. It was past nine o’clock when he left his
own house and he set out so hurriedly that he forgot to put on his
overshoes. In Main Street no one was abroad but Hop Higgins the night
watchman and in the whole town no one was awake but the watchman and
young George Willard, who sat in the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_
trying to write a story. Along the street to the church went the
minister, plowing through the drifts and thinking that this time he
would utterly give way to sin. “I want to look at the woman and to
think of kissing her shoulders and I am going to let myself think what
I choose,” he declared bitterly and tears came into his eyes. He began
to think that he would get out of the ministry and try some other way
of life. “I shall go to some city and get into business,” he declared.
“If my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give myself
over to sin. At least I shall not be a hypocrite, preaching the word of
God with my mind thinking of the shoulders and neck of a woman who does
not belong to me.”

It was cold in the room of the bell tower of the church on that January
night and almost as soon as he came into the room Curtis Hartman knew
that if he stayed he would be ill. His feet were wet from tramping in
the snow and there was no fire. In the room in the house next door Kate
Swift had not yet appeared. With grim determination the man sat down to
wait. Sitting in the chair and gripping the edge of the desk on which
lay the Bible he stared into the darkness thinking the blackest
thoughts of his life. He thought of his wife and for the moment almost
hated her. “She has always been ashamed of passion and has cheated me,”
he thought. “Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a
woman. He has no right to forget that he is an animal and in me there
is something that is Greek. I will throw off the woman of my bosom and
seek other women. I will besiege this school teacher. I will fly in the
face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will live then
for my lusts.”

The distracted man trembled from head to foot, partly from cold, partly
from the struggle in which he was engaged. Hours passed and a fever
assailed his body. His throat began to hurt and his teeth chattered.
His feet on the study floor felt like two cakes of ice. Still he would
not give up. “I will see this woman and will think the thoughts I have
never dared to think,” he told himself, gripping the edge of the desk
and waiting.

Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that night of
waiting in the church, and also he found in the thing that happened
what he took to be the way of life for him. On other evenings when he
had waited he had not been able to see, through the little hole in the
glass, any part of the school teacher’s room except that occupied by
her bed. In the darkness he had waited until the woman suddenly
appeared sitting in the bed in her white nightrobe. When the light was
turned up she propped herself up among the pillows and read a book.
Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes. Only her bare shoulders and
throat were visible.

On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after
his mind had two or three times actually slipped away into an odd land
of fantasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself
back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next door a
lamp was lighted and the waiting man stared into an empty bed. Then
upon the bed before his eyes a naked woman threw herself. Lying face
downward she wept and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final
outburst of weeping she half arose, and in the presence of the man who
had waited to look and not to think thoughts the woman of sin began to
pray. In the lamplight her figure, slim and strong, looked like the
figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window.

Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a
cry he arose, dragging the heavy desk along the floor. The Bible fell,
making a great clatter in the silence. When the light in the house next
door went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along
the street he went and ran in at the door of the _Winesburg Eagle_. To
George Willard, who was tramping up and down in the office undergoing a
struggle of his own, he began to talk half incoherently. “The ways of
God are beyond human understanding,” he cried, running in quickly and
closing the door. He began to advance upon the young man, his eyes
glowing and his voice ringing with fervor. “I have found the light,” he
cried. “After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me
in the body of a woman.” His voice dropped and he began to whisper. “I
did not understand,” he said. “What I took to be a trial of my soul was
only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit.
God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher,
kneeling naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not
be aware of it, she is an instrument of God, bearing the message of
truth.”

Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door
he stopped, and after looking up and down the deserted street, turned
again to George Willard. “I am delivered. Have no fear.” He held up a
bleeding fist for the young man to see. “I smashed the glass of the
window,” he cried. “Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The
strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist.”



THE TEACHER


Snow lay deep in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about
ten o’clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in
clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were
fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. “There will be good
sleighing,” said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith’s
saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist
stumbling along in the kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. “Snow
will bring the people into town on Saturday,” said the druggist. The
two men stopped and discussed their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on
a light overcoat and no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot
with the toe of the right. “Snow will be good for the wheat,” observed
the druggist sagely.

Young George Willard, who had nothing to do, was glad because he did
not feel like working that day. The weekly paper had been printed and
taken to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow began to fall
on Thursday. At eight o’clock, after the morning train had passed, he
put a pair of skates in his pocket and went up to Waterworks Pond but
did not go skating. Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine
Creek he went until he came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a
fire against the side of a log and sat down at the end of the log to
think. When the snow began to fall and the wind to blow he hurried
about getting fuel for the fire.

The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his
school teacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a
book she wanted him to read and had been alone with her for an hour.
For the fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with great
earnestness and he could not make out what she meant by her talk. He
began to believe she must be in love with him and the thought was both
pleasing and annoying.

Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on the fire. Looking
about to be sure he was alone he talked aloud pretending he was in the
presence of the woman, “Oh, you’re just letting on, you know you are,”
he declared. “I am going to find out about you. You wait and see.”

The young man got up and went back along the path toward town leaving
the fire blazing in the wood. As he went through the streets the skates
clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he
built a fire in the stove and lay down on top of the bed. He began to
have lustful thoughts and pulling down the shade of the window closed
his eyes and turned his face to the wall. He took a pillow into his
arms and embraced it thinking first of the school teacher, who by her
words had stirred something within him, and later of Helen White, the
slim daughter of the town banker, with whom he had been for a long time
half in love.

By nine o’clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the
weather had become bitter cold. It was difficult to walk about. The
stores were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses. The
evening train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in
its arrival. By ten o’clock all but four of the eighteen hundred
citizens of the town were in bed.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake. He was lame and
carried a heavy stick. On dark nights he carried a lantern. Between
nine and ten o’clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he
stumbled through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then he
went into alleyways and tried the back doors. Finding all tight he
hurried around the corner to the New Willard House and beat on the
door. Through the rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove.
“You go to bed. I’ll keep the stove going,” he said to the boy who
slept on a cot in the hotel office.

Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his shoes. When the boy
had gone to sleep he began to think of his own affairs. He intended to
paint his house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost
of paint and labor. That led him into other calculations. The night
watchman was sixty years old and wanted to retire. He had been a
soldier in the Civil War and drew a small pension. He hoped to find
some new method of making a living and aspired to become a professional
breeder of ferrets. Already he had four of the strangely shaped savage
little creatures, that are used by sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits,
in the cellar of his house. “Now I have one male and three females,” he
mused. “If I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve or fifteen. In
another year I shall be able to begin advertising ferrets for sale in
the sporting papers.”

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank.
He did not sleep. By years of practice he had trained himself to sit
for hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the
morning he was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only
three people were awake in Winesburg. George Willard was in the office
of the _Eagle_ pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but
in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood.
In the bell tower of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis
Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a revelation
from God, and Kate Swift, the school teacher, was leaving her house for
a walk in the storm.

It was past ten o’clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was
unpremeditated. It was as though the man and the boy, by thinking of
her, had driven her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth Swift
had gone to the county seat concerning some business in connection with
mortgages in which she had money invested and would not be back until
the next day. By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room
of the house sat the daughter reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to
her feet and, snatching a cloak from a rack by the front door, ran out
of the house.

At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty
woman. Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with
blotches that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the winter
streets she was lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square,
and her features were as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal
in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening.

During the afternoon the school teacher had been to see Doctor Welling
concerning her health. The doctor had scolded her and had declared she
was in danger of losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to
be abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous.

The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and
would not have turned back had she remembered. She was very cold but
after walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she
went to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales
set in the ground before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along
Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winters’ barn and turning east followed a
street of low frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker
Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead’s chicken farm to
Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had
driven her out of doors passed and then returned again.

There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate
Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and
stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long
while something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of
the children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a
time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.

With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and
down in the schoolroom and talked very rapidly. It did not seem to
matter what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children
of Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning
the life of the dead writer. The stories were told with the air of one
who had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of
his private life. The children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles
Lamb must be someone who had once lived in Winesburg.

On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto
Cellini. That time they laughed. What a bragging, blustering, brave,
lovable fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she
invented anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a
room above Cellini’s lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys
guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that
he became dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him.
Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.

On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snow-covered
streets, a crisis had come into the life of the school teacher.
Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been
very adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in
the schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought
within her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events
transpired in her mind. The people of the town thought of her as a
confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own way
thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make
and mar their own lives. In reality she was the most eagerly passionate
soul among them, and more than once, in the five years since she had
come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school
teacher, had been compelled to go out of the house and walk half
through the night fighting out some battle raging within. Once on a
night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when she came
home had a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift. “I am glad you’re not a
man,” said the mother sharply. “More than once I’ve waited for your
father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I’ve
had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to
see the worst side of him reproduced in you.”


Kate Swift’s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In
something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized
the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the
summer she had gone to the _Eagle_ office and finding the boy
unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the
two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school teacher tried to bring
home to the mind of the boy some conception of the difficulties he
would have to face as a writer. “You will have to know life,” she
declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of
George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look
into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace.
“If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,”
she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing
until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want
to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of
what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of
words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about,
not what they say.”

On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend
Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of the church waiting to look at
her body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a
book. It was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy.
He had the book under his arm and was preparing to depart. Again Kate
Swift talked with great earnestness. Night was coming on and the light
in the room grew dim. As he turned to go she spoke his name softly and
with an impulsive movement took hold of his hand. Because the reporter
was rapidly becoming a man something of his man’s appeal, combined with
the winsomeness of the boy, stirred the heart of the lonely woman. A
passionate desire to have him understand the import of life, to learn
to interpret it truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward,
her lips brushed his cheek. At the same moment he for the first time
became aware of the marked beauty of her features. They were both
embarrassed, and to relieve her feeling she became harsh and
domineering. “What’s the use? It will be ten years before you begin to
understand what I mean when I talk to you,” she cried passionately.


On the night of the storm and while the minister sat in the church
waiting for her, Kate Swift went to the office of the _Winesburg
Eagle_, intending to have another talk with the boy. After the long
walk in the snow she was cold, lonely, and tired. As she came through
Main Street she saw the light from the printshop window shining on the
snow and on an impulse opened the door and went in. For an hour she sat
by the stove in the office talking of life. She talked with passionate
earnestness. The impulse that had driven her out into the snow poured
itself out into talk. She became inspired as she sometimes did in the
presence of the children in school. A great eagerness to open the door
of life to the boy, who had been her pupil and who she thought might
possess a talent for the understanding of life, had possession of her.
So strong was her passion that it became something physical. Again her
hands took hold of his shoulders and she turned him about. In the dim
light her eyes blazed. She arose and laughed, not sharply as was
customary with her, but in a queer, hesitating way. “I must be going,”
she said. “In a moment, if I stay, I’ll be wanting to kiss you.”

In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked
to the door. She was a teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked
at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had
a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took
possession of her. In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a
boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man.

The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the
warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went
out of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited.
When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body
fall heavily against him. For George Willard the confusion was
immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of the woman
tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists
began to beat on his face. When the school teacher had run away and
left him alone, he walked up and down the office swearing furiously.

It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded
himself. When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad.
Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman
George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God
bearing a message of truth.


George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the
printshop went home. Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in
his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room.
The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When
he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.

George Willard rolled about in the bed on which he had lain in the
afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The
words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in
his ears. His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to
the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand what had happened.
He could not make it out. Over and over he turned the matter in his
mind. Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another
day to come. At four o’clock he pulled the covers up about his neck and
tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a
hand and with it groped about in the darkness. “I have missed
something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me,”
he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the
last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.



LONELINESS


He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road
leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the
town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of
the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the road before the
house a flock of chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the
deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his mother in those days and
when he was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High School.
Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth inclined to
silence. He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and
sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make
him realize where he was so that he would turn out of the beaten track
and let them pass.

When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York City and was a
city man for fifteen years. He studied French and went to an art
school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind
he planned to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the
masters there, but that never turned out.

Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could draw well enough
and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that
might have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he
was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development.
He never grew up and of course he couldn’t understand people and he
couldn’t make people understand him. The child in him kept bumping
against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions.
Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against an iron post. That
made him lame. It was one of the many things that kept things from
turning out for Enoch Robinson.

In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became
confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good
deal with young men. He got into a group of other young artists, both
men and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in
his room. Once he got drunk and was taken to a police station where a
police magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an
affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging
house. The woman and Enoch walked together three blocks and then the
young man grew afraid and ran away. The woman had been drinking and the
incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of a building and
laughed so heartily that another man stopped and laughed with her. The
two went away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his room
trembling and vexed.

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington
Square and was long and narrow like a hallway. It is important to get
that fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a
room almost more than it is the story of a man.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends. There
was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were
artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists.
Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in
rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost
feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than
it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch
Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in
a corner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike
eyes stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made, crude
things, half finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in
their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side
to side. Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of
words, such as are always being said.

Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn’t know how. He was too excited to
talk coherently. When he tried he sputtered and stammered and his voice
sounded strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He knew
what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could never by any
possibility say it. When a picture he had painted was under discussion,
he wanted to burst out with something like this: “You don’t get the
point,” he wanted to explain; “the picture you see doesn’t consist of
the things you see and say words about. There is something else,
something you don’t see at all, something you aren’t intended to see.
Look at this one over here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that you might not notice
at all is, you see, the beginning of everything. There is a clump of
elders there such as used to grow beside the road before our house back
in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there is something hidden.
It is a woman, that’s what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and
the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see how the old man who
drives a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who has a
farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be ground into meal
at Comstock’s mill. He knows there is something in the elders,
something hidden away, and yet he doesn’t quite know.

“It’s a woman you see, that’s what it is! It’s a woman and, oh, she is
lovely! She is hurt and is suffering but she makes no sound. Don’t you
see how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty
comes out from her and spreads over everything. It is in the sky back
there and all around everywhere. I didn’t try to paint the woman, of
course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull to talk of
composition and such things! Why do you not look at the sky and then
run away as I used to do when I was a boy back there in Winesburg,
Ohio?”

That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the
guests who came into his room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his
own mind. He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed
in the pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped
inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of
locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him,
that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began
to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he
explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.
His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among
whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself,
something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something
that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind the
elders in the pictures.

The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all
children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple
reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of
his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could
harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to
be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last
and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a
kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing
Washington Square in the city of New York.

Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to
touch actual flesh-and-bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind.
At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a
girl who sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and went to
live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the
woman he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations
are made for advertisements.

That began another phase of Enoch’s life. He began to play at a new
game. For a while he was very proud of himself in the role of producing
citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things and played
with realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he had a
newspaper thrown on his porch each morning. When in the evening he came
home from work he got off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind
some business man, striving to look very substantial and important. As
a payer of taxes he thought he should post himself on how things are
run. “I’m getting to be of some moment, a real part of things, of the
state and the city and all that,” he told himself with an amusing
miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home from Philadelphia, he had a
discussion with a man met on a train. Enoch talked about the
advisability of the government’s owning and operating the railroads and
the man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch’s notion that such a move on the
part of the government would be a good thing, and he grew quite excited
as he talked. Later he remembered his own words with pleasure. “I gave
him something to think about, that fellow,” he muttered to himself as
he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.

To be sure, Enoch’s marriage did not turn out. He himself brought it to
an end. He began to feel choked and walled in by the life in the
apartment, and to feel toward his wife and even toward his children as
he had felt concerning the friends who once came to visit him. He began
to tell little lies about business engagements that would give him
freedom to walk alone in the street at night and, the chance offering,
he secretly re-rented the room facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al
Robinson died on the farm near Winesburg, and he got eight thousand
dollars from the bank that acted as trustee of her estate. That took
Enoch out of the world of men altogether. He gave the money to his wife
and told her he could not live in the apartment any more. She cried and
was angry and threatened, but he only stared at her and went his own
way. In reality the wife did not care much. She thought Enoch slightly
insane and was a little afraid of him. When it was quite sure that he
would never come back, she took the two children and went to a village
in Connecticut where she had lived as a girl. In the end she married a
man who bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.

And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of
his fancy, playing with them, talking to them, happy as a child is
happy. They were an odd lot, Enoch’s people. They were made, I suppose,
out of real people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason made
an appeal to him. There was a woman with a sword in her hand, an old
man with a long white beard who went about followed by a dog, a young
girl whose stockings were always coming down and hanging over her shoe
tops. There must have been two dozen of the shadow people, invented by
the child-mind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with him.

And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked the door. With an
absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go on making his living
in the advertising place until something happened. Of course something
did happen. That is why he went back to live in Winesburg and why we
know about him. The thing that happened was a woman. It would be that
way. He was too happy. Something had to come into his world. Something
had to drive him out of the New York room to live out his life an
obscure, jerky little figure, bobbing up and down on the streets of an
Ohio town at evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of
Wesley Moyer’s livery barn.

About the thing that happened. Enoch told George Willard about it one
night. He wanted to talk to someone, and he chose the young newspaper
reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when
the younger man was in a mood to understand.

Youthful sadness, young man’s sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in
a village at the year’s end, opened the lips of the old man. The
sadness was in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but
it appealed to Enoch Robinson.

It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a drizzly wet
October rain. The fruition of the year had come and the night should
have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of
frost in the air, but it wasn’t that way. It rained and little puddles
of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in
the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.
Beneath the trees wet leaves were pasted against tree roots that
protruded from the ground. In gardens back of houses in Winesburg dry
shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on the ground. Men who had
finished the evening meal and who had planned to go uptown to talk the
evening away with other men at the back of some store changed their
minds. George Willard tramped about in the rain and was glad that it
rained. He felt that way. He was like Enoch Robinson on the evenings
when the old man came down out of his room and wandered alone in the
streets. He was like that only that George Willard had become a tall
young man and did not think it manly to weep and carry on. For a month
his mother had been very ill and that had something to do with his
sadness, but not much. He thought about himself and to the young that
always brings sadness.

Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that
extended out over the sidewalk before Voight’s wagon shop on Maumee
Street just off the main street of Winesburg. They went together from
there through the rain-washed streets to the older man’s room on the
third floor of the Heffner Block. The young reporter went willingly
enough. Enoch Robinson asked him to go after the two had talked for ten
minutes. The boy was a little afraid but had never been more curious in
his life. A hundred times he had heard the old man spoken of as a
little off his head and he thought himself rather brave and manly to go
at all. From the very beginning, in the street in the rain, the old man
talked in a queer way, trying to tell the story of the room in
Washington Square and of his life in the room. “You’ll understand if
you try hard enough,” he said conclusively. “I have looked at you when
you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It isn’t
hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and
believe, that’s all there is to it.”

It was past eleven o’clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to
George Willard in the room in the Heffner Block, came to the vital
thing, the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to
live out his life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by
the window with his head in his hand and George Willard was in a chair
by a table. A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room, although
almost bare of furniture, was scrupulously clean. As the man talked
George Willard began to feel that he would like to get out of the chair
and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put his arms about the little old
man. In the half darkness the man talked and the boy listened, filled
with sadness.

“She got to coming in there after there hadn’t been anyone in the room
for years,” said Enoch Robinson. “She saw me in the hallway of the
house and we got acquainted. I don’t know just what she did in her own
room. I never went there. I think she was a musician and played a
violin. Every now and then she came and knocked at the door and I
opened it. In she came and sat down beside me, just sat and looked
about and said nothing. Anyway, she said nothing that mattered.”

The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat
he wore was wet from the rain and drops of water kept falling with a
soft thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard
got out of the chair and sat beside him.

“I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she
was too big for the room. I felt that she was driving everything else
away. We just talked of little things, but I couldn’t sit still. I
wanted to touch her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so
strong and her face was so good and she looked at me all the time.”

The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as
from a chill. “I was afraid,” he whispered. “I was terribly afraid. I
didn’t want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I
couldn’t sit still. ‘No, no,’ I said to myself, but I got up and opened
the door just the same. She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman.
I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that room.”

Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes
shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. “I wanted her and all the
time I didn’t want her,” he explained. “Then I began to tell her about
my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep
quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn’t. I felt just as I did
about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never
come back any more.”

The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with excitement.
“One night something happened. I became mad to make her understand me
and to know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see
how important I was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go
away, I ran and locked the door. I followed her about. I talked and
talked and then all of a sudden things went to smash. A look came into
her eyes and I knew she did understand. Maybe she had understood all
the time. I was furious. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted her to
understand but, don’t you see, I couldn’t let her understand. I felt
that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned
out, you see. That’s how it is. I don’t know why.”

The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the boy listened,
filled with awe. “Go away, boy,” said the man. “Don’t stay here with me
any more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you but it isn’t.
I don’t want to talk any more. Go away.”

George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his
voice. “Don’t stop now. Tell me the rest of it,” he commanded sharply.
“What happened? Tell me the rest of the story.”

Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window that looked
down into the deserted main street of Winesburg. George Willard
followed. By the window the two stood, the tall awkward boy-man and the
little wrinkled man-boy. The childish, eager voice carried forward the
tale. “I swore at her,” he explained. “I said vile words. I ordered her
to go away and not to come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first
she pretended not to understand but I kept at it. I screamed and
stamped on the floor. I made the house ring with my curses. I didn’t
want ever to see her again and I knew, after some of the things I said,
that I never would see her again.”

The old man’s voice broke and he shook his head. “Things went to
smash,” he said quietly and sadly. “Out she went through the door and
all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all
of my people away. They all went out through the door after her. That’s
the way it was.”

George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson’s room. In the
darkness by the window, as he went through the door, he could hear the
thin old voice whimpering and complaining. “I’m alone, all alone here,”
said the voice. “It was warm and friendly in my room but now I’m all
alone.”



AN AWAKENING


Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was
tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and
wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She
worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the
day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the
daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of
Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was
no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from
its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that
sometimes persisted all through the night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his
power over her. The bookkeeper’s life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a
closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age.
At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had
invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his
street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a
damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining room door. If they
were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not
recover his equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.
She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother
and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a
handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud
she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers
and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about
which no one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed
Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith’s Saloon, and went about with the
young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings. She did not think
that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of
the bartender and walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her
nature. She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds.
About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith’s saloon. His fists were large
and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to
conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle
in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars,
which Ed spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began
an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home
town with awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving
carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose
wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars. One night at a resort called
Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later
went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the
joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at
the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface
amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in
her company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley
Moyer’s livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she
was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon
him and he told her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry
and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so
simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his
intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body he
expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her
tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became
helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the
buggy. “When I get hold of you again I’ll not let you go. You can’t
play with me,” he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping
out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. “I’ll
keep you for good the next time,” he said. “You might as well make up
your mind to that. It’s you and me for it and I’m going to have you
before I get through.”

One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was
in Ed Handby’s mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter,
went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck’s
pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher.
Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent,
but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys
and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He
said that women should look out for themselves, that the fellow who
went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As he
talked he looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five
minutes and then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the
barber’s trade in Cal Prouse’s shop and already began to consider
himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing,
drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of a night when
he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher’s son held a cigar in the side of his mouth
and as he talked spat on the floor. “The women in the place couldn’t
embarrass me although they tried hard enough,” he boasted. “One of the
girls in the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she
began to talk I went and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed
when I kissed her. I taught her to let me alone.”

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the
town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the
wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely.
Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do, George
went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets
filled with frame houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he
began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street
imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that
jingled as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector,
passing before a long line of men who stood at attention. He began to
examine the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and
began to scold. “Your pack is not in order,” he said sharply. “How many
times will I have to speak of this matter? Everything must be in order
here. We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be
done without order.”

Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. “There is a law for armies and for men
too,” he muttered, lost in reflection. “The law begins with little
things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little
thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their
clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that
law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that
swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to
learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his
body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had
just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For
the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been
talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and
when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. “To come out
of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and think things like that,” he
whispered. “It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the
boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been
thinking down here.”

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not
yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on
the railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar
for the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small
cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more
comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked
into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly
lighted and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay
about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy.
For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading
of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world
towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he
stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place
that had been a part of some former existence. On an impulse he turned
out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds
in which lived the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange
new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure
in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor
little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys
mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the
women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens,
the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the
stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children
crying—all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness,
oddly detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had
to be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and
throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big
and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing
and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them
into the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say
words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over
on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of
meaning. “Death,” he muttered, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.”

George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the
sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the
little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had
the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.
“If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we
would run until we were both tired out,” he thought. “That would make
me feel better.” With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out
of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He
thought she would understand his mood and that he could achieve in her
presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past
when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away
filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some
obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had
suddenly become too big to be used.

When George got to Belle Carpenter’s house there had already been a
visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling
Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask
the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came
and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen.
“You stay away from that kid,” he growled, thinking of George Willard,
and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. “If I catch
you together I will break your bones and his too,” he added. The
bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself
because of his failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly
upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed
Handby cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house
of a neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head
in his hands. She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard
came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her
hat. She thought that, as she walked through the streets with young
Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under
the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words.
The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness
in the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering
along and swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter
realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had
changed. “You’ll find me different,” he declared, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and looking boldly into her eyes. “I don’t know why
but it is so. You’ve got to take me for a man or let me alone. That’s
how it is.”

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street
and went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill.
The hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg
Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and
among the bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now
stiff and frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard’s heart began
to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided
that Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new
force that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon
her and had led to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with
the sense of masculine power. Although he had been annoyed that as they
walked about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact
that she had accompanied him to this place took all his doubts away.
“It is different. Everything has become different,” he thought and
taking hold of her shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her,
his eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she
leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the
darkness. In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting.
Again, as in the alleyway, George Willard’s mind ran off into words
and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the words into the still
night. “Lust,” he whispered, “lust and night and women.”

George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on
the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and
then grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and
was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the
hillside he had led the woman to one of the little open spaces among
the bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her. As in the vacant
lot, by the laborers’ houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for
the new power in himself and was waiting for the woman to speak when Ed
Handby appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had
power within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists.
Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held
him with one hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the
grass. Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger
man sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who
had risen to her feet. “You’re no good,” he said roughly. “I’ve half a
mind not to bother with you. I’d let you alone if I didn’t want you so
much.”

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man
who had humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better
than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the
bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the
bushes. The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going
indefinitely but George Willard’s head struck the root of a tree and he
lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched
her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As
he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated
himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.
When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was
puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the
voice outside himself that had so short a time before put new courage
into his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the street of
frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to
get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly
squalid and commonplace.



“QUEER”


From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr
on the rear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the
junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the
printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in
his shoes. They did not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off.
With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel
of one of his stockings. Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard,
the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg, standing at the back door of
the _Eagle_ printshop and staring absentmindedly about. “Well, well,
what next!” exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping
to his feet and creeping away from the window.

A flush crept into Elmer Cowley’s face and his hands began to tremble.
In Cowley & Son’s store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the
counter talking to his father. He imagined the reporter could hear what
was being said and the thought made him furious. With one of the shoes
still held in his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped
with a stockinged foot upon the board floor.

Cowley & Son’s store did not face the main street of Winesburg. The
front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight’s wagon shop and a
shed for the sheltering of farmers’ horses. Beside the store an
alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day drays and
delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up
and down. The store itself was indescribable. Will Henderson once said
of it that it sold everything and nothing. In the window facing Maumee
Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an apple barrel, to indicate
that orders for coal were taken, and beside the black mass of the coal
stood three combs of honey grown brown and dirty in their wooden
frames.

The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale
as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof
paint, bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that
companioned the honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.

Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager
patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall
and lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen
partially covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat.
The coat had been purchased to serve as a wedding garment. Before he
became a merchant Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore
the Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons
when he came into town to trade. When he sold the farm to become a
merchant he wore the coat constantly. It had become brown with age and
was covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed
up and ready for the day in town.

As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not
been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family,
consisting of a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in
rooms above the store and it did not cost them much to live. His
troubles were not financial. His unhappiness as a merchant lay in the
fact that when a traveling man with wares to be sold came in at the
front door he was afraid. Behind the counter he stood shaking his head.
He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to buy and thus
lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he would not be
stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what could not be
sold.

In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard
standing and apparently listening at the back door of the _Eagle_
printshop, a situation had arisen that always stirred the son’s wrath.
The traveling man talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure
expressing uncertainty. “You see how quickly it is done,” said the
traveling man, who had for sale a small flat metal substitute for
collar buttons. With one hand he quickly unfastened a collar from his
shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed a flattering wheedling
tone. “I tell you what, men have come to the end of all this fooling
with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out of the change
that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town.
Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I’ll not visit any other
store. I’ll leave the field to you.”

The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on
Ebenezer’s breast. “It’s an opportunity and I want you to take it,” he
urged. “A friend of mine told me about you. ‘See that man Cowley,’ he
said. ‘He’s a live one.’”

The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book from his pocket he
began writing out the order. Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer
Cowley went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass
showcase near the front door. He took a cheap revolver from the case
and began to wave it about. “You get out of here!” he shrieked. “We
don’t want any collar fasteners here.” An idea came to him. “Mind, I’m
not making any threat,” he added. “I don’t say I’ll shoot. Maybe I just
took this gun out of the case to look at it. But you better get out.
Yes sir, I’ll say that. You better grab up your things and get out.”

The young storekeeper’s voice rose to a scream and going behind the
counter he began to advance upon the two men. “We’re through being
fools here!” he cried. “We ain’t going to buy any more stuff until we
begin to sell. We ain’t going to keep on being queer and have folks
staring and listening. You get out of here!”

The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the
counter into a black leather bag, he ran. He was a small man and very
bow-legged and he ran awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door
and he stumbled and fell. “Crazy, that’s what he is—crazy!” he
sputtered as he arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.

In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that
the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was
embarrassed. “Well, I meant it. I think we’ve been queer long enough,”
he declared, going to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting
on a barrel he pulled on and fastened the shoe he had been holding in
his hand. He was waiting for some word of understanding from his father
but when Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the wrath in
the son and the young man ran out of the store without replying.
Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant
looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he
had confronted the traveling man. “I’ll be starched,” he said softly.
“Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched!”

Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or
what he was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road,
after turning sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped
and the passion that had been the cause of his outburst in the store
began to again find expression. “I will not be queer—one to be looked
at and listened to,” he declared aloud. “I’ll be like other people.
I’ll show that George Willard. He’ll find out. I’ll show him!”

The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared
back at the town. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had
no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering
the town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the
office and in the printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_, to stand for
something in the young merchant’s mind. He thought the boy who passed
and repassed Cowley & Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in
the street must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him. George
Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented
in his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have
believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that
vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did
he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of
Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walk whistling
and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person
strike also the greater enemy—the thing that smiled and went its own
way—the judgment of Winesburg?

Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to
grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded
from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless
blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg
carried in their pockets. Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and
had made no friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life
without friends and he hated the thought.

Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands
stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was cold with a raw wind, but
presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy.
The tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt
and the mud clung to Elmer’s shoes. His feet became cold. When he had
gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered
a wood. In the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat
trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in mind.

For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and
creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence
and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds.
A smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms
to a man who was husking corn in one of the fields.

In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to
whom he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a
half-witted old fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by
Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm when it was sold. The old
man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and
puttered about all day in the fields.

Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and
when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and
even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had
put the expression regarding being “laundered” into the mouth of his
former employer. When excited or surprised by anything he smiled
vaguely and muttered: “I’ll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I’ll be
washed and ironed and starched.”

When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially
interested in the sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also
were cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth
and apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.

Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and
waving his arms about. “You don’t understand what’s the matter with me
so of course you don’t care,” he declared. “With me it’s different.
Look how it has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was
queer, too. Even the clothes mother used to wear were not like other
people’s clothes, and look at that coat in which father goes about
there in town, thinking he’s dressed up, too. Why don’t he get a new
one? It wouldn’t cost much. I’ll tell you why. Father doesn’t know and
when mother was alive she didn’t know either. Mabel is different. She
knows but she won’t say anything. I will, though. I’m not going to be
stared at any longer. Why look here, Mook, father doesn’t know that his
store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he’ll never sell the
stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it. Sometimes he’s a little
worried that trade doesn’t come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will
come after a while. He isn’t worried. He’s queer. He doesn’t know
enough to be worried.”

The excited young man became more excited. “He don’t know but I know,”
he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of
the half-wit. “I know too well. I can’t stand it. When we lived out
here it was different. I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I
wasn’t always seeing people and thinking as I am now. In the evening,
there in town, I go to the post office or to the depot to see the train
come in, and no one says anything to me. Everyone stands around and
laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me. Then I feel so queer
that I can’t talk either. I go away. I don’t say anything. I can’t.”

The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. “I won’t stand it,” he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. “I’m not made to
stand it.”

Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the
town of Winesburg. “Go on back to work,” he screamed. “What good does
it do me to talk to you?” A thought came to him and his voice dropped.
“I’m a coward too, eh?” he muttered. “Do you know why I came clear out
here afoot? I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could
tell. I hunted out another queer one, you see. I ran away, that’s what
I did. I couldn’t stand up to someone like that George Willard. I had
to come to you. I ought to tell him and I will.”

Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about. “I will tell
him. I won’t be queer. I don’t care what they think. I won’t stand it.”

Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the
fence went back to his work in the corn. “I’ll be washed and ironed and
starched,” he declared. “Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed.” Mook
was interested. He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood
nibbling at a straw stack. “Elmer was here,” he said to the cows.
“Elmer is crazy. You better get behind the stack where he don’t see
you. He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will.”

At eight o’clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ where George Willard sat
writing. His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined
look was on his face. “You come on outside with me,” he said, stepping
in and closing the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though
prepared to resist anyone else coming in. “You just come along outside.
I want to see you.”

George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of
Winesburg. The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat
and looked very spruce and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the
overcoat pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long
been wanting to make friends with the young merchant and find out what
was in his mind. Now he thought he saw a chance and was delighted. “I
wonder what he’s up to? Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for
the paper. It can’t be a fire because I haven’t heard the fire bell and
there isn’t anyone running,” he thought.

In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few
citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove
at the back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and
the wind rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the
stairway leading to Doctor Welling’s office. Before Hern’s Grocery a
basket of apples and a rack filled with new brooms stood on the
sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard. He
tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down. His face worked
spasmodically. He seemed about to shout. “Oh, you go on back,” he
cried. “Don’t stay out here with me. I ain’t got anything to tell you.
I don’t want to see you at all.”

For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his
failure to declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the
sense of defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours
of futile sputtering at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and
his failure in the presence of the young reporter, he thought he could
see no hope of a future for himself.

And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley
& Son had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept
stealthily in and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the
rear. In the barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley &
Son’s cash. Every evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel
when he closed the store and went upstairs to bed. “They wouldn’t never
think of a careless place like that,” he told himself, thinking of
robbers.

Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of
the farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly
out at the front door and walked again in the streets.

The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. “I will get out of here, run away from home,” he told
himself. He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at
midnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would
steal a ride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose
himself in the crowds there. He would get work in some shop and become
friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he
could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make
friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had
for others.

The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at
himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter
before he left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps
challenge him, challenge all of Winesburg through him.

Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard
House and pounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the
office. He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore
with pride the title of “night clerk.” Before the boy Elmer was bold,
insistent. “You ‘wake him up,” he commanded. “You tell him to come down
by the depot. I got to see him and I’m going away on the local. Tell
him to dress and come on down. I ain’t got much time.”

The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their
flight east. George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new
overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity. “Well,
here I am. What do you want? You’ve got something to tell me, eh?” he
said.

Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at
the train that had begun to groan and get under way. “Well, you see,”
he began, and then lost control of his tongue. “I’ll be washed and
ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half
incoherently.

Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and
down before his eyes. Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket
he thrust them into George Willard’s hand. “Take them,” he cried. “I
don’t want them. Give them to father. I stole them.” With a snarl of
rage he turned and his long arms began to flay the air. Like one
struggling for release from hands that held him he struck out, hitting
George Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth. The
young reporter rolled over on the platform half unconscious, stunned by
the terrific force of the blows. Springing aboard the passing train and
running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car and
lying on his face looked back, trying to see the fallen man in the
darkness. Pride surged up in him. “I showed him,” he cried. “I guess I
showed him. I ain’t so queer. I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer.”



THE UNTOLD LIE


Ray Pearson and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on a farm three
miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday afternoons they came into town
and wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the
country.

Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty with a brown beard
and shoulders rounded by too much and too hard labor. In his nature he
was as unlike Hal Winters as two men can be unlike.

Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife
who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged
children, lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back
end of the Wills farm where Ray was employed.

Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow. He was not of the
Ned Winters family, who were very respectable people in Winesburg, but
was one of the three sons of the old man called Windpeter Winters who
had a sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who was looked upon
by everyone in Winesburg as a confirmed old reprobate.

People from the part of Northern Ohio in which Winesburg lies will
remember old Windpeter by his unusual and tragic death. He got drunk
one evening in town and started to drive home to Unionville along the
railroad tracks. Henry Brattenburg, the butcher, who lived out that
way, stopped him at the edge of the town and told him he was sure to
meet the down train but Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and
drove on. When the train struck and killed him and his two horses a
farmer and his wife who were driving home along a nearby road saw the
accident. They said that old Windpeter stood up on the seat of his
wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he
fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened by his incessant
slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death. Boys like
young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident quite
vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man
would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without
him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and
admired his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they
could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on
with their humdrum lives.

But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal
who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray’s story. It
will, however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you
will get into the spirit of it.

Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters
boys in that family, John, Hal, and Edward, all broad-shouldered big
fellows like old Windpeter himself and all fighters and woman-chasers
and generally all-around bad ones.

Hal was the worst of the lot and always up to some devilment. He once
stole a load of boards from his father’s mill and sold them in
Winesburg. With the money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy
clothes. Then he got drunk and when his father came raving into town to
find him, they met and fought with their fists on Main Street and were
arrested and put into jail together.

Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a country school
teacher out that way who had taken his fancy. He was only twenty-two
then but had already been in two or three of what were spoken of in
Winesburg as “women scrapes.” Everyone who heard of his infatuation for
the school teacher was sure it would turn out badly. “He’ll only get
her into trouble, you’ll see,” was the word that went around.

And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a field on a day in
the late October. They were husking corn and occasionally something was
said and they laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who was the more
sensitive and always minded things more, had chapped hands and they
hurt. He put them into his coat pockets and looked away across the
fields. He was in a sad, distracted mood and was affected by the beauty
of the country. If you knew the Winesburg country in the fall and how
the low hills are all splashed with yellows and reds you would
understand his feeling. He began to think of the time, long ago when he
was a young fellow living with his father, then a baker in Winesburg,
and how on such days he had wandered away into the woods to gather
nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about and smoke his pipe. His
marriage had come about through one of his days of wandering. He had
induced a girl who waited on trade in his father’s shop to go with him
and something had happened. He was thinking of that afternoon and how
it had affected his whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him.
He had forgotten about Hal and muttered words. “Tricked by Gad, that’s
what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of,” he said in a low
voice.

As though understanding his thoughts, Hal Winters spoke up. “Well, has
it been worth while? What about it, eh? What about marriage and all
that?” he asked and then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he
too was in an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. “Has a fellow
got to do it?” he asked. “Has he got to be harnessed up and driven
through life like a horse?”

Hal didn’t wait for an answer but sprang to his feet and began to walk
back and forth between the corn shocks. He was getting more and more
excited. Bending down suddenly he picked up an ear of the yellow corn
and threw it at the fence. “I’ve got Nell Gunther in trouble,” he said.
“I’m telling you, but you keep your mouth shut.”

Ray Pearson arose and stood staring. He was almost a foot shorter than
Hal, and when the younger man came and put his two hands on the older
man’s shoulders they made a picture. There they stood in the big empty
field with the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the
red and yellow hills in the distance, and from being just two
indifferent workmen they had become all alive to each other. Hal sensed
it and because that was his way he laughed. “Well, old daddy,” he said
awkwardly, “come on, advise me. I’ve got Nell in trouble. Perhaps
you’ve been in the same fix yourself. I know what everyone would say is
the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall I marry and settle
down? Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out like an old
horse? You know me, Ray. There can’t anyone break me but I can break
myself. Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come on,
you tell me. Whatever you say, Ray, I’ll do.”

Ray couldn’t answer. He shook Hal’s hands loose and turning walked
straight away toward the barn. He was a sensitive man and there were
tears in his eyes. He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal
Winters, son of old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own
training and all the beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but
for his life he couldn’t say what he knew he should say.

At half-past four that afternoon Ray was puttering about the barnyard
when his wife came up the lane along the creek and called him. After
the talk with Hal he hadn’t returned to the cornfield but worked about
the barn. He had already done the evening chores and had seen Hal,
dressed and ready for a roistering night in town, come out of the
farmhouse and go into the road. Along the path to his own house he
trudged behind his wife, looking at the ground and thinking. He
couldn’t make out what was wrong. Every time he raised his eyes and saw
the beauty of the country in the failing light he wanted to do
something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his wife
with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying. Along
the path he went scratching his head and trying to make it out. He
looked hard at his wife’s back but she seemed all right.

She only wanted him to go into town for groceries and as soon as she
had told him what she wanted began to scold. “You’re always puttering,”
she said. “Now I want you to hustle. There isn’t anything in the house
for supper and you’ve got to get to town and back in a hurry.”

Ray went into his own house and took an overcoat from a hook back of
the door. It was torn about the pockets and the collar was shiny. His
wife went into the bedroom and presently came out with a soiled cloth
in one hand and three silver dollars in the other. Somewhere in the
house a child wept bitterly and a dog that had been sleeping by the
stove arose and yawned. Again the wife scolded. “The children will cry
and cry. Why are you always puttering?” she asked.

Ray went out of the house and climbed the fence into a field. It was
just growing dark and the scene that lay before him was lovely. All the
low hills were washed with color and even the little clusters of bushes
in the corners of the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world
seemed to Ray Pearson to have become alive with something just as he
and Hal had suddenly become alive when they stood in the corn field
staring into each other’s eyes.

The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on that
fall evening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand it. Of a
sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off
the torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a
protest against his life, against all life, against everything that
makes life ugly. “There was no promise made,” he cried into the empty
spaces that lay about him. “I didn’t promise my Minnie anything and Hal
hasn’t made any promise to Nell. I know he hasn’t. She went into the
woods with him because she wanted to go. What he wanted she wanted. Why
should I pay? Why should Hal pay? Why should anyone pay? I don’t want
Hal to become old and worn out. I’ll tell him. I won’t let it go on.
I’ll catch Hal before he gets to town and I’ll tell him.”

Ray ran clumsily and once he stumbled and fell down. “I must catch Hal
and tell him,” he kept thinking, and although his breath came in gasps
he kept running harder and harder. As he ran he thought of things that
hadn’t come into his mind for years—how at the time he married he had
planned to go west to his uncle in Portland, Oregon—how he hadn’t
wanted to be a farm hand, but had thought when he got out West he would
go to sea and be a sailor or get a job on a ranch and ride a horse into
Western towns, shouting and laughing and waking the people in the
houses with his wild cries. Then as he ran he remembered his children
and in fancy felt their hands clutching at him. All of his thoughts of
himself were involved with the thoughts of Hal and he thought the
children were clutching at the younger man also. “They are the
accidents of life, Hal,” he cried. “They are not mine or yours. I had
nothing to do with them.”

Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.
His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge
of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a
pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he
thought or what he wanted.

Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of
what happened to him. It was almost dark when he got to the fence and
he put his hands on the top bar and stood staring. Hal Winters jumped a
ditch and coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and
laughed. He seemed to have lost his own sense of what had happened in
the corn field and when he put up a strong hand and took hold of the
lapel of Ray’s coat he shook the old man as he might have shaken a dog
that had misbehaved.

“You came to tell me, eh?” he said. “Well, never mind telling me
anything. I’m not a coward and I’ve already made up my mind.” He
laughed again and jumped back across the ditch. “Nell ain’t no fool,”
he said. “She didn’t ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want
to settle down and have kids.”

Ray Pearson also laughed. He felt like laughing at himself and all the
world.

As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk that lay over the
road that led to Winesburg, he turned and walked slowly back across the
fields to where he had left his torn overcoat. As he went some memory
of pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the
tumble-down house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he
muttered words. “It’s just as well. Whatever I told him would have been
a lie,” he said softly, and then his form also disappeared into the
darkness of the fields.



DRINK


Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young
and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on
a farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when
Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a
general store on the Trunion Pike.

What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier
settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had
been in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with
her husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with
her daughter, who had also married a mechanic and lived in Covington,
Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.

Then began the hard years for Tom Foster’s grandmother. First her
son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a strike and then Tom’s
mother became an invalid and died also. The grandmother had saved a
little money, but it was swept away by the illness of the daughter and
by the cost of the two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman
worker and lived with the grandson above a junk shop on a side street
in Cincinnati. For five years she scrubbed the floors in an office
building and then got a place as dish washer in a restaurant. Her hands
were all twisted out of shape. When she took hold of a mop or a broom
handle the hands looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine
clinging to a tree.

The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One
evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book
containing thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was
a great adventure for the boy. It was past seven o’clock at night when
the grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old
hands and she was so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on
leaving Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning
the owner of the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble.
Tom, who was then sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the
station with the old woman, bearing all of their earthly belongings
done up in a worn-out blanket and slung across his back. By his side
walked the grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth
twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted to put the pack
down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and if he had not
prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they got into
the train and it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a girl
and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.

All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told
Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in
the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not
believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a
thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to
Winesburg did not want to get off. “It isn’t what I thought. It may be
hard for you here,” she said, and then the train went on its way and
the two stood confused, not knowing where to turn, in the presence of
Albert Longworth, the Winesburg baggage master.

But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to get along
anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, employed his grandmother to
work in the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker’s
new brick barn.

In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who wanted help in
her housework employed a “hired girl” who insisted on sitting at the
table with the family. Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched
at the chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished a room
for the boy Tom upstairs in the barn. “He can mow the lawn and run
errands when the horses do not need attention,” she explained to her
husband.

Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered
with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the
bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he
was himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the
town without attracting the least bit of attention.

One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness. In
Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough boys
prowled through the streets, and all through his early formative years
he ran about with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a
telegraph company and delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled
with houses of prostitution. The women in the houses knew and loved Tom
Foster and the tough boys in the gangs loved him also.

He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.
In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to
stand in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of lust,
sensed their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and
listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and
strangely unaffected.

Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in the city. The
grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There
was nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on
a side street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash
drawer.

The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the
boy lurking about and thought nothing of it. When he went out into the
street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the
money walked away. Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the
matter by offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop.
The boy was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. “It is all right to
be ashamed and makes me understand new things,” he said to the
grandmother, who didn’t know what the boy was talking about but loved
him so much that it didn’t matter whether she understood or not.

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker’s stable and then lost his
place there. He didn’t take very good care of the horses and he was a
constant source of irritation to the banker’s wife. She told him to mow
the lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post
office and he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and
spent the whole afternoon with them, standing about, listening and
occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the
houses of prostitution and with the rowdy boys running through the
streets at night, so in Winesburg among its citizens he had always the
power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.

After Tom lost his place at Banker White’s he did not live with his
grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him. He
rented a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old
Rufus Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street,
and had been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had
become too feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but
did not realize his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the
room for a dollar a month. In the late afternoon when the lawyer had
gone home the boy had the place to himself and spent hours lying on the
floor by the stove and thinking of things. In the evening the
grandmother came and sat in the lawyer’s chair to smoke a pipe while
Tom remained silent, as he always did in the presence of everyone.

Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry
about some happening at the banker’s house and scolded away for hours.
Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the
lawyer’s office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled
clean she lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together.
“When you get ready to die then I will die also,” she said to the boy
lying on the floor beside her chair.

Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting
wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses. In late May
and early June he picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to
loaf and he enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat
which was too large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he
had also an overcoat, got at the same place, that was lined with fur.
The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter
Tom slept in it. He thought his method of getting along good enough and
was happy and satisfied with the way life in Winesburg had turned out
for him.

The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose,
was why people loved him. In Hern’s Grocery they would be roasting
coffee on Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade,
and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and
sat on a box at the rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but
sat perfectly still, filling his being with the spicy odor that made
him half drunk with happiness. “I like it,” he said gently. “It makes
me think of things far away, places and things like that.”

One night Tom Foster got drunk. That came about in a curious way. He
never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his life had never taken
a drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk
that one time and so went and did it.

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things,
things about ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these
things than anyone else in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular
had presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep
impression on his mind. He thought, after what he had seen of the women
standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had
seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would
put sex altogether out of his own life. One of the women of the
neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her. He
never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into
the eyes of the woman. It sickened him and in a very terrible way left
a scar on his soul. He had always before thought of women as quite
innocent things, much like his grandmother, but after that one
experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind. So gentle was
his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to
understand he decided to forget.

And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there
for two years something began to stir in him. On all sides he saw youth
making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had
happened he was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White,
daughter of the man for whom he had worked, and found himself thinking
of her at night.

That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way. He let
himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and
only concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight,
a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the
channel where he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was
victorious.

And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that
night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten
of some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended
in one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the
worse for Tom’s outbreak.

In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.
The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly
clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were
puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush,
a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.

Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make
itself felt. First he walked through the streets, going softly and
quietly along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He
said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a
little tree without leaves standing out sharply against the sky. Then
he said that she was a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the
darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on the shore of
the sea by a fisherman.

That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it. He
went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker’s tobacco
store. For an hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but
it did not interest him much and he slipped away. Then he decided to
get drunk and went into Willy’s saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey.
Putting the bottle into his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to
be alone to think more thoughts and to drink the whiskey.

Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a
mile north of town. Before him was a white road and at his back an
apple orchard in full bloom. He took a drink out of the bottle and then
lay down on the grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how
the stones in the graveled driveway by Banker White’s house were wet
with dew and glistened in the morning light. He thought of the nights
in the barn when it rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the
raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of hay. Then he
thought of a storm that had gone roaring through Winesburg several days
before and, his mind going back, he relived the night he had spent on
the train with his grandmother when the two were coming from
Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it had seemed to sit
quietly in the coach and to feel the power of the engine hurling the
train along through the night.

Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking drinks from the
bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his head began to reel got
up and walked along the road going away from Winesburg. There was a
bridge on the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie and the
drunken boy made his way along the road to the bridge. There he sat
down. He tried to drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of
the bottle he became ill and put it quickly back. His head was rocking
back and forth and so he sat on the stone approach to the bridge and
sighed. His head seemed to be flying about like a pinwheel and then
projecting itself off into space and his arms and legs flopped
helplessly about.

At eleven o’clock Tom got back into town. George Willard found him
wandering about and took him into the _Eagle_ printshop. Then he became
afraid that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped
him into the alleyway.

The reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The drunken boy talked of
Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore of a sea and had
made love to her. George had seen Helen White walking in the street
with her father during the evening and decided that Tom was out of his
head. A sentiment concerning Helen White that lurked in his own heart
flamed up and he became angry. “Now you quit that,” he said. “I won’t
let Helen White’s name be dragged into this. I won’t let that happen.”
He began shaking Tom’s shoulder, trying to make him understand. “You
quit it,” he said again.

For three hours the two young men, thus strangely thrown together,
stayed in the printshop. When he had a little recovered George took Tom
for a walk. They went into the country and sat on a log near the edge
of a wood. Something in the still night drew them together and when the
drunken boy’s head began to clear they talked.

“It was good to be drunk,” Tom Foster said. “It taught me something. I
won’t have to do it again. I will think more dearly after this. You see
how it is.”

George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed
and he felt drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had never before
been drawn toward anyone. With motherly solicitude, he insisted that
Tom get to his feet and walk about. Again they went back to the
printshop and sat in silence in the darkness.

The reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster’s action
straightened out in his mind. When Tom spoke again of Helen White he
again grew angry and began to scold. “You quit that,” he said sharply.
“You haven’t been with her. What makes you say you have? What makes you
keep saying such things? Now you quit it, do you hear?”

Tom was hurt. He couldn’t quarrel with George Willard because he was
incapable of quarreling, so he got up to go away. When George Willard
was insistent he put out his hand, laying it on the older boy’s arm,
and tried to explain.

“Well,” he said softly, “I don’t know how it was. I was happy. You see
how that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did too. I wanted
to suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I
wanted to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. I
thought of a lot of things to do, but they wouldn’t work. They all hurt
someone else.”

Tom Foster’s voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost
excited. “It was like making love, that’s what I mean,” he explained.
“Don’t you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made
everything strange. That’s why I did it. I’m glad, too. It taught me
something, that’s it, that’s what I wanted. Don’t you understand? I
wanted to learn things, you see. That’s why I did it.”



DEATH


The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy’s office, in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of
the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a
bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and
covered with dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with
their feet the feet of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the
stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked
the way.

At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the
doctor’s door. To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish. Old
chairs, carpenter’s horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the
darkness waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of rubbish belonged
to the Paris Dry Goods Company. When a counter or a row of shelves in
the store became useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw
it on the pile.

Doctor Reefy’s office was as large as a barn. A stove with a round
paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled
sawdust, held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door
stood a huge table that had once been a part of the furniture of
Herrick’s Clothing Store and that had been used for displaying
custom-made clothes. It was covered with books, bottles, and surgical
instruments. Near the edge of the table lay three or four apples left
by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy’s friend, and
who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as he came in at the door.

At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he
later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown
mustache. He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was
much occupied with the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.

On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her
son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes
went up the worn steps to Doctor Reefy’s office. Already the woman’s
naturally tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly
about. Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but
on the half dozen occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of
the visits did not primarily concern her health. She and the doctor
talked of that but they talked most of her life, of their two lives and
of the ideas that had come to them as they lived their lives in
Winesburg.

In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other
and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were
also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the
circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the
same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same
impression on the memory of an onlooker. Later, and when he grew older
and married a young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours
spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many things he had been
unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a poet in his old age and
his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. “I had come to the time
in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and
prayed to them,” he said. “I did not say my prayers in words nor did I
kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon
when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days
were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she
worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the
office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to
find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot
be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and
women in all sorts of places.”


On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the
office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.
Sometimes the doctor made philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a
hint given that strangely illuminated the life of the speaker, a wish
became a desire, or a dream, half dead, flared suddenly into life. For
the most part the words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.

Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper’s wife talked a
little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down
the stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against
the dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing
to her body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by
the window of her room and when darkness had come on and a girl from
the hotel dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow
cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing
for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when
adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion
had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words
madly over and over: “You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!” The words,
she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved
in life.

In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and
forth. The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears.
“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black
night,” he had said. “You must not try to make love definite. It is the
divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it
and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long
hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from
passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had died when she
was but five years old. Her girlhood had been lived in the most
haphazard manner imaginable. Her father was a man who had wanted to be
let alone and the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also
had lived and died a sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face,
but by ten o’clock in the morning all the joy had gone out of his
heart. When a guest complained of the fare in the hotel dining room or
one of the girls who made up the beds got married and went away, he
stamped on the floor and swore. At night when he went to bed he thought
of his daughter growing up among the stream of people that drifted in
and out of the hotel and was overcome with sadness. As the girl grew
older and began to walk out in the evening with men he wanted to talk
to her, but when he tried was not successful. He always forgot what he
wanted to say and spent the time complaining of his own affairs.

In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried to be a real
adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she
married Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure prompted
by desire alone. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real
lover. Always there was something she sought blindly, passionately,
some hidden wonder in life. The tall beautiful girl with the swinging
stride who had walked under the trees with men was forever putting out
her hand into the darkness and trying to get hold of some other hand.
In all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom
she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true
word.

Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her father’s hotel,
because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like most young girls,
she thought marriage would change the face of life. If there was in her
mind a doubt of the outcome of the marriage with Tom she brushed it
aside. Her father was ill and near death at the time and she was
perplexed because of the meaningless outcome of an affair in which she
had just been involved. Other girls of her age in Winesburg were
marrying men she had always known, grocery clerks or young farmers. In
the evening they walked in Main Street with their husbands and when she
passed they smiled happily. She began to think that the fact of
marriage might be full of some hidden significance. Young wives with
whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. “It changes things to have a
man of your own,” they said.

On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had
not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and
advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He
abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk’s
defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When
she would not let him walk about he began to complain. “I’ve never been
let alone,” he said. “Although I’ve worked hard I’ve not made the hotel
pay. Even now I owe money at the bank. You’ll find that out when I’m
gone.”

The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness. Being unable
to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl’s head down beside
his own. “There’s a way out,” he whispered. “Don’t marry Tom Willard or
anyone else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin
box in my trunk. Take it and go away.”

Again the sick man’s voice became querulous. “You’ve got to promise,”
he declared. “If you won’t promise not to marry, give me your word that
you’ll never tell Tom about the money. It is mine and if I give it to
you I’ve the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is to make up
to you for my failure as a father. Some time it may prove to be a door,
a great open door to you. Come now, I tell you I’m about to die, give
me your promise.”


In Doctor Reefy’s office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a
small desk near the window sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead
pencil that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a married
woman. She became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as
a lay figure to give point to her tale. “And then I was married and it
did not turn out at all,” she said bitterly. “As soon as I had gone
into it I began to be afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then
perhaps I found out too much during my first night with him. I don’t
remember.

“What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what
the girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.
It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I
leaned out of the window and thought of the life I had led. I didn’t
want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me. I even
began to be afraid Tom would change his mind.”

The woman’s voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came
an odd illusion. He thought that as she talked the woman’s body was
changing, that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he
could not shake off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist.
“It is good for both her body and her mind, this talking,” he muttered.

The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon
a few months after her marriage. Her voice became steadier. “In the
late afternoon I went for a drive alone,” she said. “I had a buggy and
a little grey pony I kept in Moyer’s Livery. Tom was painting and
repapering rooms in the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to make
up my mind to tell him about the eight hundred dollars father had given
to me. I couldn’t decide to do it. I didn’t like him well enough. There
was always paint on his hands and face during those days and he smelled
of paint. He was trying to fix up the old hotel, and make it new and
smart.”

The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told of the drive alone on the
spring afternoon. “It was cloudy and a storm threatened,” she said.
“Black clouds made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so
that the colors hurt my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a mile or more
and then turned into a side road. The little horse went quickly along
up hill and down. I was impatient. Thoughts came and I wanted to get
away from my thoughts. I began to beat the horse. The black clouds
settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at a terrible speed,
to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get out of town, out of my
clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any
more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I
fell and hurt my side. I wanted to run away from everything but I
wanted to run towards something too. Don’t you see, dear, how it was?”

Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the
office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone
walk before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that
intoxicated him. When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair
he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. “I cried
all the way home,” she said, as she tried to continue the story of her
wild ride, but he did not listen. “You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you
lovely dear!” he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the
tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had
been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the
body of the tired-out woman.

Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the summer afternoon in the office when he was on
the point of becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident
brought his love-making quickly to an end. As the man and woman held
each other tightly heavy feet came tramping up the office stairs. The
two sprang to their feet and stood listening and trembling. The noise
on the stairs was made by a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Company.
With a loud bang he threw an empty box on the pile of rubbish in the
hallway and then went heavily down the stairs. Elizabeth followed him
almost immediately. The thing that had come to life in her as she
talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was hysterical, as was also
Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk. Along the street
she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when she turned
out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of the New Willard House,
she began to tremble and her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.

The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She
personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired
youth running over hills, now a stern quiet man marked and scarred by
the business of living. In the darkness of her room she put out her
hand, thrusting it from under the covers of her bed, and she thought
that death like a living thing put out his hand to her. “Be patient,
lover,” she whispered. “Keep yourself young and beautiful and be
patient.”

On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon her and defeated
her plans for telling her son George of the eight hundred dollars
hidden away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading
with death for another hour of life. “Wait, dear! The boy! The boy! The
boy!” she pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to fight off
the arms of the lover she had wanted so earnestly.


Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her son George became
eighteen, and the young man had but little sense of the meaning of her
death. Only time could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the
doctor stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.

The young man went into his own room and closed the door. He had a
queer empty feeling in the region of his stomach. For a moment he sat
staring at, the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the
station platform he went, and around through residence streets past the
high-school building, thinking almost entirely of his own affairs. The
notion of death could not get hold of him and he was in fact a little
annoyed that his mother had died on that day. He had just received a
note from Helen White, the daughter of the town banker, in answer to
one from him. “Tonight I could have gone to see her and now it will
have to be put off,” he thought half angrily.

Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock. It had been cold
and rainy in the morning but in the afternoon the sun came out. Before
she died she lay paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and
with only her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six days she
struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard
to his future, and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all
who saw it kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for years.
Even Tom Willard, who had always half resented his wife, forgot his
resentment and the tears ran out of his eyes and lodged in his
mustache. The mustache had begun to turn grey and Tom colored it with
dye. There was oil in the preparation he used for the purpose and the
tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed away by his hand,
formed a fine mist-like vapor. In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked
like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter
weather.

George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother’s
death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes,
went along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was
a candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a
chair by the bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out
his hand as though to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it
back again. The air of the room was heavy with the presence of the two
self-conscious human beings, and the man hurried away.

The dead woman’s son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a
change in his life, that he would leave Winesburg. “I will go to some
city. Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper,” he thought, and then
his mind turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening
and again he was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented
his going to her.

In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to
have thoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother’s
mind had played with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and
imagined that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips.
His body trembled and his hands shook. And then something happened. The
boy sprang to his feet and stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of
the dead woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over
him so that he began to weep. A new notion came into his mind and he
turned and looked guiltily about as though afraid he would be observed.

George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought that had come into
his mind gripped him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother
but someone else lay in the bed before him. The conviction was so real
that it was almost unbearable. The body under the sheets was long and
in death looked young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange
fancy, it was unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the body before him
was alive, that in another moment a lovely woman would spring out of
the bed and confront him, became so overpowering that he could not bear
the suspense. Again and again he put out his hand. Once he touched and
half lifted the white sheet that covered her, but his courage failed
and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and went out of the room. In the
hallway outside the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put
a hand against the wall to support himself. “That’s not my mother.
That’s not my mother in there,” he whispered to himself and again his
body shook with fright and uncertainty. When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who
had come to watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he put
his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head from side to
side, half blind with grief. “My mother is dead,” he said, and then
forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he
had just come. “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,” the boy, urged
by some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.


As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in
the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother’s bed.
Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the
plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband
was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. “I jammed
the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband,
unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that
after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her
lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.



SOPHISTICATION


It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County
Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been
clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike,
where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields
now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose
in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw
scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers
black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the
departing sun set it ablaze with colors.

In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the
sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran
madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town
worked terribly at the task of amusing itself.

Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard
concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy’s office and
looked at the people. With feverish eyes he watched the faces drifting
past under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head and he
did not want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and
looked sharply about. “Well, is she going to stay with him all day?
Have I done all this waiting for nothing?” he muttered.

George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and
new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam
of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about
to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work
on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken
possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt
old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new
sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He
wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of
him after his mother’s death.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time
takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he
crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of
his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in
the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something
happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his
name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices
outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of
life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at
all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the
first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched
in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his
time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and
again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has
come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf
blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in
spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in
uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to
wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years
he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of
humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants
to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be
touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a
woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that
she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind
turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker’s daughter. Always he had
been conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into
manhood. Once on a summer night when he was eighteen, he had walked
with her on a country road and in her presence had given way to an
impulse to boast, to make himself appear big and significant in her
eyes. Now he wanted to see her for another purpose. He wanted to tell
her of the new impulses that had come to him. He had tried to make her
think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted
to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had
taken place in his nature.

As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change. What
George felt, she in her young woman’s way felt also. She was no longer
a girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood.
She had come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to
spend a day at the Fair. She also had begun to have memories. During
the day she sat in the grand-stand with a young man, one of the
instructors from the college, who was a guest of her mother’s. The
young man was of a pedantic turn of mind and she felt at once he would
not do for her purpose. At the Fair she was glad to be seen in his
company as he was well dressed and a stranger. She knew that the fact
of his presence would create an impression. During the day she was
happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless. She wanted to
drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence. While they sat
together in the grand-stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates
were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew
interested. “A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money,”
he mused.

Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily
through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening
when they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again. She
thought that the months she had spent in the city, the going to
theaters and the seeing of great crowds wandering in lighted
thoroughfares, had changed her profoundly. She wanted him to feel and
be conscious of the change in her nature.

The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of
both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been
rather stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country
road. Then they had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and
George had taken off his coat and let it hang on his arm. “Well, I’ve
stayed here in Winesburg—yes—I’ve not yet gone away but I’m growing
up,” he had said. “I’ve been reading books and I’ve been thinking. I’m
going to try to amount to something in life.

“Well,” he explained, “that isn’t the point. Perhaps I’d better quit
talking.”

The confused boy put his hand on the girl’s arm. His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town. In his
desperation George boasted, “I’m going to be a big man, the biggest
that ever lived here in Winesburg,” he declared. “I want you to do
something, I don’t know what. Perhaps it is none of my business. I want
you to try to be different from other women. You see the point. It’s
none of my business I tell you. I want you to be a beautiful woman. You
see what I want.”

The boy’s voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and
went along the street to Helen White’s house. At the gate he tried to
say something impressive. Speeches he had thought out came into his
head, but they seemed utterly pointless. “I thought—I used to think—I
had it in my mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now I know you won’t,”
was all he could find to say as she went through the gate and toward
the door of her house.

On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway and looked at the
crowd drifting through Main Street, George thought of the talk beside
the field of young corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of
himself. In the street the people surged up and down like cattle
confined in a pen. Buggies and wagons almost filled the narrow
thoroughfare. A band played and small boys raced along the sidewalk,
diving between the legs of men. Young men with shining red faces walked
awkwardly about with girls on their arms. In a room above one of the
stores, where a dance was to be held, the fiddlers tuned their
instruments. The broken sounds floated down through an open window and
out across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the horns of the
band. The medley of sounds got on young Willard’s nerves. Everywhere,
on all sides, the sense of crowding, moving life closed in about him.
He wanted to run away by himself and think. “If she wants to stay with
that fellow she may. Why should I care? What difference does it make to
me?” he growled and went along Main Street and through Hern’s Grocery
into a side street.

George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he wanted to weep but
pride made him walk rapidly along, swinging his arms. He came to Wesley
Moyer’s livery barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a group of
men who talked of a race Wesley’s stallion, Tony Tip, had won at the
Fair during the afternoon. A crowd had gathered in front of the barn
and before the crowd walked Wesley, prancing up and down boasting. He
held a whip in his hand and kept tapping the ground. Little puffs of
dust arose in the lamplight. “Hell, quit your talking,” Wesley
exclaimed. “I wasn’t afraid, I knew I had ’em beat all the time. I
wasn’t afraid.”

Ordinarily George Willard would have been intensely interested in the
boasting of Moyer, the horseman. Now it made him angry. He turned and
hurried away along the street. “Old windbag,” he sputtered. “Why does
he want to be bragging? Why don’t he shut up?”

George went into a vacant lot and, as he hurried along, fell over a
pile of rubbish. A nail protruding from an empty barrel tore his
trousers. He sat down on the ground and swore. With a pin he mended the
torn place and then arose and went on. “I’ll go to Helen White’s house,
that’s what I’ll do. I’ll walk right in. I’ll say that I want to see
her. I’ll walk right in and sit down, that’s what I’ll do,” he
declared, climbing over a fence and beginning to run.


On the veranda of Banker White’s house Helen was restless and
distraught. The instructor sat between the mother and daughter. His
talk wearied the girl. Although he had also been raised in an Ohio
town, the instructor began to put on the airs of the city. He wanted to
appear cosmopolitan. “I like the chance you have given me to study the
background out of which most of our girls come,” he declared. “It was
good of you, Mrs. White, to have me down for the day.” He turned to
Helen and laughed. “Your life is still bound up with the life of this
town?” he asked. “There are people here in whom you are interested?” To
the girl his voice sounded pompous and heavy.

Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at
the back she stopped and stood listening. Her mother began to talk.
“There is no one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen’s
breeding,” she said.

Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the
garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to
her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words. Afire
with eagerness she ran through a garden gate and, turning a corner by
the banker’s barn, went into a little side street. “George! Where are
you, George?” she cried, filled with nervous excitement. She stopped
running, and leaned against a tree to laugh hysterically. Along the
dark little street came George Willard, still saying words. “I’m going
to walk right into her house. I’ll go right in and sit down,” he
declared as he came up to her. He stopped and stared stupidly. “Come
on,” he said and took hold of her hand. With hanging heads they walked
away along the street under the trees. Dry leaves rustled under foot.
Now that he had found her George wondered what he had better do and
say.


At the upper end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half
decayed old grand-stand. It has never been painted and the boards are
all warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill
rising out of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can
see at night, over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected
against the sky.

George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the
path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that
had come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both
broken and intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was
reflected in her.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm
unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and
remembers, and the older, the more sophisticated thing had possession
of George Willard. Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled
with respect. When they got to the grand-stand they climbed up under
the roof and sat down on one of the long bench-like seats.

There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into
a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a
night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never
to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of
living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people
pouring in from the town and the country around. Farmers with their
wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame
houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed
and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The
place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and
squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away.
The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing
silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective
tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of
the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the
people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that
tears come into the eyes.

In the darkness under the roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat
beside Helen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the
scheme of existence. Now that he had come out of town where the
presence of the people stirring about, busy with a multitude of
affairs, had been so irritating, the irritation was all gone. The
presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. It was as though her
woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the
machinery of his life. He began to think of the people in the town
where he had always lived with something like reverence. He had
reverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by her, but he
did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood. In the
darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand
on her shoulder. A wind began to blow and he shivered. With all his
strength he tried to hold and to understand the mood that had come upon
him. In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human
atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the
same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this
other,” was the substance of the thing felt.

In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of
the late fall. Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads
pulling their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of
goods in off the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores. In the Opera
House a crowd had gathered to see a show and further down Main Street
the fiddlers, their instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the
feet of youth flying over a dance floor.

In the darkness in the grand-stand Helen White and George Willard
remained silent. Now and then the spell that held them was broken and
they turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other’s eyes.
They kissed but that impulse did not last. At the upper end of the Fair
Ground a half dozen men worked over horses that had raced during the
afternoon. The men had built a fire and were heating kettles of water.
Only their legs could be seen as they passed back and forth in the
light. When the wind blew the little flames of the fire danced crazily
about.

George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went
along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind
whispered among the dry corn blades. For a moment during the walk back
into town the spell that held them was broken. When they had come to
the crest of Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again
put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. She embraced him eagerly and
then again they drew quickly back from that impulse. They stopped
kissing and stood a little apart. Mutual respect grew big in them. They
were both embarrassed and to relieve their embarrassment dropped into
the animalism of youth. They laughed and began to pull and haul at each
other. In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in,
they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little
animals.

It was so they went down the hill. In the darkness they played like two
splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward,
Helen tripped George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with
laughter, he roiled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a
moment she stopped in the darkness. There was no way of knowing what
woman’s thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill
was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked
beside him in dignified silence. For some reason they could not have
explained they had both got from their silent evening together the
thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken
hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the
modern world possible.



DEPARTURE


Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was
April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The
trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds
are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the
air and making a carpet underfoot.

George came downstairs into the hotel office carrying a brown leather
bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o’clock he had been
awake thinking of the journey he was about to take and wondering what
he would find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel
office lay on a cot by the door. His mouth was open and he snored
lustily. George crept past the cot and went out into the silent
deserted main street. The east was pink with the dawn and long streaks
of light climbed into the sky where a few stars still shone.

Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg there is a great
stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in
town and drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking
wagons. In the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the late
afternoon in the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered
with dust, a smoky haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look
across it is like looking out across the sea. In the spring when the
land is green the effect is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide
green billiard table on which tiny human insects toil up and down.

All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in
the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the
great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and
only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when
bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the
song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to
walk again in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by
a little stream two miles from town and then turned and walked silently
back again. When he got to Main Street clerks were sweeping the
sidewalks before the stores. “Hey, you George. How does it feel to be
going away?” they asked.

The westbound train leaves Winesburg at seven forty-five in the
morning. Tom Little is conductor. His train runs from Cleveland to
where it connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in
Chicago and New York. Tom has what in railroad circles is called an
“easy run.” Every evening he returns to his family. In the fall and
spring he spends his Sundays fishing in Lake Erie. He has a round red
face and small blue eyes. He knows the people in the towns along his
railroad better than a city man knows the people who live in his
apartment building.

George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven
o’clock. Tom Willard carried his bag. The son had become taller than
the father.

On the station platform everyone shook the young man’s hand. More than
a dozen people waited about. Then they talked of their own affairs.
Even Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got
out of bed. George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall thin woman
of fifty who worked in the Winesburg post office, came along the
station platform. She had never before paid any attention to George.
Now she stopped and put out her hand. In two words she voiced what
everyone felt. “Good luck,” she said sharply and then turning went on
her way.

When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scampered
hurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street hoping to
have a parting word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see
her. When the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and,
although he knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just
setting out, made no comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards
go out of their towns to the city. It was a commonplace enough incident
with him. In the smoking car there was a man who had just invited Tom
to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky Bay. He wanted to accept the
invitation and talk over details.

George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking, then
took out his pocket-book and counted his money. His mind was occupied
with a desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had
said to him concerned the matter of his behavior when he got to the
city. “Be a sharp one,” Tom Willard had said. “Keep your eyes on your
money. Be awake. That’s the ticket. Don’t let anyone think you’re a
greenhorn.”

After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was
surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg.

The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life,
began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic.
Things like his mother’s death, his departure from Winesburg, the
uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious and larger
aspects of his life did not come into his mind.

He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the
main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully
gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch
Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a
summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by
a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an
envelope.

The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for
dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly
sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he
closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for
a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car
window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had
become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life" ***

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