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
s