Title: Winesburg, Ohio
Author: 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, a Tale in Four Parts
       I, concerning Jesse Bentley
       II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
       III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley
       IV Terror, 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 fide 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

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 the 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 Tim 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."



II

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.


III

Surrender

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."



IV

Terror

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 five 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 fight 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 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 stating
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 stem 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.



THE END

Go To Freeread HOME PAGE

• Rental Agreements DIY Australia
• Fresh Flowers and Gifts
• Pinpoint your most fertile times and learn how to Get Pregnant fast
• Environmentally friendly cloth sanitary pads, good for you, good for the planet
• Real Estate Option Agreements
• Buying or selling a business? Confidentiality Agreement