Winesburg, Ohio

Published：2026-07-31 11:54:49 Source: how to choose baby play gyms Author: Balls

Winesburg,kids ukuleles for 5 year olds under 25 dollars Ohio

by Sherwood Anderson

Contents

INTRODUCTION

by Irving Howe

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chancedupon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches of SherwoodAnderson’s small-town “grotesques,” I felt that he wasopening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths whichnothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York City boy who never sawthe crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled acrossAmerica, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wastedlove—was this the “real” America?—that Andersonsketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to offer sopowerful 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 mylast week-end pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town uponwhich Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose, not very differentfrom most other American towns, and the few of its residents I tried to engagein talk about Anderson seemed quite uninterested. This indifference would nothave 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 Ipublished a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after LionelTrilling’s influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from whichAnderson’s reputation would never quite recover. Trilling chargedAnderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotionalmeandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was acertain cogency in Trilling’s attack, at least with regard toAnderson’s inferior work, most of which he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio.In my book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of judgmentTrilling had made with my still keen affection for the best of Anderson’swritings. By then, I had read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguishedthan Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and thebook I wrote might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light—a glow ofdarkness, you might say—that he had brought to me.

Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps fearing I might have tosurrender an admiration of youth. (There are some writers one should neverreturn to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say a fewintroductory words about Anderson and his work, I have again fallen under thespell of Winesburg, Ohio, again responded to the half-spoken desires, theflickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I now have some changes ofresponse: a few of the stories no longer haunt me as once they did, but thelong story “Godliness,” which years ago I considered a failure, Inow see as a quaintly effective account of the way religious fanaticism andmaterial acquisitiveness can become intertwined in American experience.

Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His childhood and youth in Clyde, atown with perhaps three thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of poverty, buthe also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial American society. Thecountry was then experiencing what he would later call “a sudden andalmost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modernlife of machines.” There were still people in Clyde who remembered thefrontier, and like America itself, the town lived by a mixture of dilutedCalvinism and a strong belief in “progress,” Young Sherwood, knownas “Jobby”—the boy always ready to work—showed the kindof entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a“go-getter,” And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago in his earlytwenties, he worked in an advertising agency where he proved adept at turningout copy. “I create nothing, I boost, I boost,” he said abouthimself, 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 fortymiles west of Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold paint. “Iwas 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 inElyria, “I was a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one.”Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—aneed for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind ofexperience?—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 wouldelevate this into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the sterility ofcommerce and turned to the rewards of literature. Nor was this, I believe,merely a deception on Anderson’s part, since the breakdown painful as itsurely 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 therebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come tobe called the “Chicago Renaissance.” Anderson soon adopted theposture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, hepresented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism andmaterialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up withdeviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accountswith—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-townAmerica. The dream of an unconditional personal freedom, that hazy Americanversion of utopia, would remain central throughout Anderson’s life andwork. It was an inspiration; it was a delusion.

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

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

No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appearance than a number of criticallabels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexualfreedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may once have had theirpoint, but by now they seem dated and stale. The revolt against the village(about which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into history. Theespousal 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 Americanrealism, that now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of Anderson’sstories social verisimilitude, or the “photographing” of familiarappearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a novel byTheodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Only occasionally, and then with a verylight touch, does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements of hisimaginary town—although the fact that his stories are set in amid-American place like Winesburg does constitute an important formativecondition. You might even say, with only slight overstatement, that whatAnderson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be described as“antirealistic,” fictions notable less for precise locale andsocial detail than for a highly personal, even strange vision of American life.Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extremestates of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychicbearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little communityin which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occurby now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of “thetypical small town” (whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressedlandscape in which lost souls wander about; they make their flittingappearances mostly in the darkness of night, these stumps and shades ofhumanity. This vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrowtruth—but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorialvoice and the mode of composition forming muted signals of the book’scontent. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are not, norare they meant to be, “fully-rounded” characters such as we canexpect in realistic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for amoment, 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 andlove, driven almost mad by the search for human connection. In the economy ofWinesburg these grotesques matter less in their own right than as agents orsymptoms of that “indefinable hunger” for meaning which isAnderson’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 aredisconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the particular circumstances ofsmall-town America as Anderson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does hefeel that he is sketching an inescapable human condition which makes all of usbear the burden of loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story“Adventure” turns her face to the wall and tries “to forceherself to face the fact that many people must live and die alone, even inWinesburg.” Or especially in Winesburg? Such impressions have been put inmore general terms in Anderson’s only successful novel, Poor White:

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

These “walls” of misunderstanding are only seldom due to physicaldeformities (Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands”) or oppressive socialarrangements (Kate Swift in “The Teacher.”) Misunderstanding,loneliness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as virtuallya 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 livesthey have known desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship. Inall of them there was once something sweet, “like the twisted littleapples that grow in the orchards in Winesburg.” Now, broken and adrift,they clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a “truth” which turns outto bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperateto speak out but unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable tolife, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mildglow over the entire book. “Words,” as the American writer PaulaFox has said, “are nets through which all truth escapes.” Yet whatdo we have but words?

They want, these Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to releaseemotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricitybut hardly can; Louise Bentley “tried to talk but could saynothing”; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing“his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained thethings he had been unable to explain to living people.”

In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great themesof American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle for speech as it entailsa search for the self. Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the basicmovements of the book, is “Paper Pills,” in which the old DoctorReefy sits “in his empty office close by a window that was covered withcobwebs,” writes down some thoughts on slips of paper (“pyramids oftruth,” 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 simplypersuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and therebyincommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral signature.

After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a recurrentpattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage,venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark, there toestablish some initiatory relationship with George Willard, the young reporterwho hasn’t yet lived long enough to become a grotesque. Hesitantly,fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent rage, they approach him, pleadingthat he listen to their stories in the hope that perhaps they can find somesort of renewal in his youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and fragile boy theypour out their desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that George Willard“will write the book I may never get written,” and for EnochRobinson, the boy represents “the youthful sadness, young man’ssadness, 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 soextreme they cannot establish direct ties—they can only hope forconnection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is morethan he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is sympathetic to theircomplaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams. The grotesquesturn to him because he seems “different”—younger, more open,not yet hardened—but it is precisely this “difference” thatkeeps him from responding as warmly as they want. It is hardly the boy’sfault; it is simply in the nature of things. For George Willard, the grotesquesform a moment in his education; for the grotesques, their encounters withGeorge Willard come to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.

The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance tobe simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. Inactuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twainand preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base ofa tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found inordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs here is astylized version of the American language, sometimes rising to quite formalrhetorical patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But atits best, Anderson’s prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a suppleinstrument, yielding that “low fine music” which he admired so muchin the stories of Turgenev.

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

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

Anderson’s influence upon later American writers, especially those whowrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulknerboth praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of feeling, a new senseof introspectiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner put it,Anderson’s “was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word andphrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressedby what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity … to seek always to penetrateto thought’s uttermost end.” And in many younger writers who maynot even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of hisapproach, echoes of his voice.

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

To the memory of my mother,
EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,

whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger tosee 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 gettinginto bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted tolook at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bedso that it would be on a level with the window.

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

For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked ofother 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 inAndersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died ofstarvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, likethe old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lipsand the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in hismouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed wasforgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who waspast 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 hehad been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and hisheart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time dieunexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did notalarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easilyexplained. 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, butsomething inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, onlythat the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t ayouth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It isabsurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on hishigh bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at iswhat 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 longlife, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and anumber of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had knownpeople, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was differentfrom the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writerthought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning histhoughts?

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhatsleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. Heimagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a longprocession of figures before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyesof the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writerhad 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 intothe room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhapsindigestion.

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 beganto write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind andhe wanted to describe it.

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

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

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

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of thetruths 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 anelaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment oneof the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and triedto live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced becamea falsehood.

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

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

HANDS

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edgeof a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walkednervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover butthat had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see thepublic highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returningfrom the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shoutedboisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted todrag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feetof the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the faceof 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 handsfiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangledlocks.

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, didnot think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he hadlived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had comeclose to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of theNew Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willardwas the reporter on the Winesburg Eagleand sometimes in the evenings hewalked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the oldman walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he washoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After thewagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field throughthe tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along theroad to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together andlooking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walkagain upon the porch on his own house.

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years hadbeen the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowypersonality, 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 MainStreet 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 andloud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fishreturned 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 mindduring 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 behindhis 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, likeunto 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 quietinexpressive 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 beatwith them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made him morecomfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were walking in thefields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his handspounding 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 inobscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attractedattention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum hadpicked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. Theybecame his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made moregrotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proudof the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud ofBanker 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. Attimes an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. He felt thatthere must be a reason for their strange activity and their inclination to keephidden away and only a growing respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept him fromblurting 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 ona summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All afternoonWing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he had stopped andbeating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had shouted at GeorgeWillard, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people abouthim, “You are destroying yourself,” he cried. “You have theinclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want tobe like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitatethem.”

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

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

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

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

With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his feet andthrust 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,” hesaid nervously.

Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and across ameadow, 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 bythe memory of the terror he had seen in the man’s eyes.“There’s something wrong, but I don’t want to know what itis. 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 hiddenwonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering pennantsof promise.

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

Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of thoserare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as alovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men arenot 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 ofhis school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking untildusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here and there wenthis hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousledheads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress inthat also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders andthe touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster’s effort tocarry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his fingers heexpressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates lifeis diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbeliefwent 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 theyoung master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in themorning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange, hideous accusationsfell from his loosehung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver.Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning AdolphMyers were galvanized into beliefs.

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

One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon, came to theschoolhouse door. Calling Adolph Myers into the school yard he began to beathim with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down into the frightened face ofthe school-master, his wrath became more and more terrible. Screaming withdismay, 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 kickhim about the yard.

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

For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but fortybut looked sixty-five. The name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of goods seenat a freight station as he hurried through an eastern Ohio town. He had an auntin Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who raised chickens, and with her helived until she died. He had been ill for a year after the experience inPennsylvania, and after his recovery worked as a day laborer in the fields,going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he did notunderstand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again andagain the fathers of the boys had talked of the hands. “Keep your handsto yourself,” the saloon keeper had roared, dancing, with fury in theschoolhouse yard.

Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued to walkup and down until the sun had disappeared and the road beyond the field waslost in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut slices of bread andspread honey upon them. When the rumble of the evening train that took away theexpress cars loaded with the day’s harvest of berries had passed andrestored the silence of the summer night, he went again to walk upon theveranda. 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 mediumthrough which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a part ofhis loneliness and his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the fewdishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screendoor that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few straywhite bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting thelamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to hismouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of lightbeneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in someservice of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out ofthe light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee goingswiftly 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 thetime during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded whitehorse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married agirl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her fatherdied. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed verybeautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within ayear after the marriage she died.

The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When thehands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as largeas walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe and after hiswife’s death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that wascovered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in Augusthe 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 seedsof something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block abovethe Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly, building upsomething that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected andafter erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erectother pyramids.

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

The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who becamehis 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 thefall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. Theapples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put inbarrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments thatare filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are onlya few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like theknuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they aredelicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gatheredall of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted groundpicking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only thefew know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

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

One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of themhe 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 wayand had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a series ofcircumstances also curious.

The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had comedown to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she sawsuitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike. They talked toher of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and intheir eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different were much unlikeeach other. One of them, a slender young man with white hands, the son of ajeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with her hewas never off the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, saidnothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he beganto 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 beganto be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to thinkthere was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to her thatas he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning itslowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that hehad bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dreamthree times, then she became in the family way to the one who said nothing atall but who in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so thatfor days the marks of his teeth showed.

After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her that shenever wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one morning andwithout 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 thebookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country practitioners, DoctorReefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a handkerchief to her teethand groaned. Her husband was with her and when the tooth was taken out theyboth screamed and blood ran down on the woman’s white dress. The talldark girl did not pay any attention. When the woman and the man had gone thedoctor 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 everyday. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an illness, but shewas like one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples, she couldnot get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in thecity apartments. In the fall after the beginning of her acquaintanceship withhim she married Doctor Reefy and in the following spring she died. During thewinter he read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled onthe bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away inhis pockets to become round hard balls.

MOTHER

Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and herface was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but forty-five, someobscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. Listlessly she went aboutthe disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the ragged carpetsand, when she was able to be about, doing the work of a chambermaid among bedssoiled by the slumbers of fat traveling men. Her husband, Tom Willard, aslender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a blackmustache trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out ofhis mind. The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly through thehalls, he took as a reproach to himself. When he thought of her he grew angryand swore. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on the edge of failure and hewished himself out of it. He thought of the old house and the woman who livedthere with him as things defeated and done for. The hotel in which he had begunlife so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he wentspruce and business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stoppedand turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and ofthe woman would follow him even into the streets. “Damn such a life, damnit!” he sputtered aimlessly.

Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been theleading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. Some day, he told himself,the tide of things political will turn in my favor and the years of ineffectualservice count big in the bestowal of rewards. He dreamed of going to Congressand even of becoming governor. Once when a younger member of the party arose ata political conference and began to boast of his faithful service, Tom Willardgrew white with fury. “Shut up, you,” he roared, glaring about.“What do you know of service? What are you but a boy? Look at whatI’ve done here! I was a Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime tobe 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 ofsympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In the son’spresence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he hurried about townintent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into his room and closing thedoor 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 seesomething half forgotten that had once been a part of herself recreated. Theprayer concerned that. “Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeatfrom you,” she cried, and so deep was her determination that her wholebody shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead andsee him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will comeback,” she declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. Idemand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take anyblow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for usboth.” Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about the boy’s room.“And do not let him become smart and successful either,” she addedvaguely.

The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a formalthing without meaning. When she was ill and sat by the window in her room hesometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat by a window thatlooked over the roof of a small frame building into Main Street. By turningtheir heads they could see through another window, along an alleyway that ranbehind the Main Street stores and into the back door of Abner Groff’sbakery. Sometimes as they sat thus a picture of village life presented itselfto them. At the back door of his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or anempty milk bottle in his hand. For a long time there was a feud between thebaker and a grey cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. The boy andhis mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently emergefollowed by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The baker’seyes were small and red and his black hair and beard were filled with flourdust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the cat had disappeared, hehurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even some of the tools of his tradeabout. Once he broke a window at the back of Sinning’s Hardware Store. Inthe alley the grey cat crouched behind barrels filled with torn paper andbroken bottles above which flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she wasalone, and after watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part ofthe baker, Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands andwept. After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried toforget the contest between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like arehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the silence madethem both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening train came in at thestation. In the street below feet tramped up and down upon a board sidewalk. Inthe 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 thestation platform. Over on Main Street sounded a man’s voice, laughing.The door of the express office banged. George Willard arose and crossing theroom fumbled for the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked against a chair, making itscrape along the floor. By the window sat the sick woman, perfectly still,listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless, could be seen drooping over theends of the arms of the chair. “I think you had better be out among theboys. You are too much indoors,” she said, striving to relieve theembarrassment 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 Housetheir temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted only bykerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth Willard had anadventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and her son had not come tovisit her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of life that remained in her bodywas blown into a flame by her anxiety and she crept out of bed, dressed andhurried along the hallway toward her son’s room, shaking with exaggeratedfears. As she went along she steadied herself with her hand, slipped along thepapered walls of the hall and breathed with difficulty. The air whistledthrough 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 hadonce belonged to her father and the ownership of which still stood recorded inher name in the county courthouse. The hotel was continually losing patronagebecause of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby. Her ownroom was in an obscure corner and when she felt able to work she voluntarilyworked among the beds, preferring the labor that could be done when the guestswere abroad seeking trade among the merchants of Winesburg.

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

In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and startedagain toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would open and the boycome upon her. When she had reached a safe distance and was about to turn acorner into a second hallway she stopped and bracing herself with her handswaited, thinking to shake off a trembling fit of weakness that had come uponher. The presence of the boy in the room had made her happy. In her bed, duringthe 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 stoodtrembling in the darkness the door of her son’s room opened and theboy’s father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed out atthe door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he said infuriatedthe woman.

Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself as asuccessful 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 ofcoming upon his wife, he swaggered and began to dramatize himself as one of thechief men of the town. He wanted his son to succeed. He it was who had securedfor the boy the position on the Winesburg Eagle. Now, with a ring ofearnestness in his voice, he was advising concerning some course of conduct.“I tell you what, George, you’ve got to wake up,” he saidsharply. “Will Henderson has spoken to me three times concerning thematter. He says you go along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to andacting like a gawky girl. What ails you?” Tom Willard laughedgood-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 notafraid. What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper man had put thenotion of becoming a writer into your mind that’s all right. Only I guessyou’ll have to wake up to do that too, eh?”

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

A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of theWinesburg hotel keeper. The determination was the result of long years of quietand rather ineffectual thinking. “Now,” she told herself, “Iwill 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 ratherquiet and natural, as though an understanding existed between them, maddenedher. Although for years she had hated her husband, her hatred had always beforebeen a quite impersonal thing. He had been merely a part of something else thatshe hated. Now, and by the few words at the door, he had become the thingpersonified. In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists and glaredabout. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she took out a longpair of sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a dagger. “I willstab him,” she said aloud. “He has chosen to be the voice of eviland I will kill him. When I have killed him something will snap within myselfand 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 asomewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been what is called“stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with travelingmen guests at her father’s hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them totell her of life in the cities out of which they had come. Once she startledthe town by putting on men’s clothes and riding a bicycle down MainStreet.

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

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

And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that cameshe felt for a time released and happy. She did not blame the men who walkedwith 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 andthen sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she put her hand upon the face of theman and had always the same thought. Even though he were large and bearded shethought he had become suddenly a little boy. She wondered why he did not sobalso.

In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House, ElizabethWillard lighted a lamp and put it on a dressing table that stood by the door. Athought had come into her mind and she went to a closet and brought out a smallsquare box and set it on the table. The box contained material for make-up andhad been left with other things by a theatrical company that had once beenstranded in Winesburg. Elizabeth Willard had decided that she would bebeautiful. Her hair was still black and there was a great mass of it braidedand coiled about her head. The scene that was to take place in the office belowbegan to grow in her mind. No ghostly worn-out figure should confront TomWillard, but something quite unexpected and startling. Tall and with duskycheeks and hair that fell in a mass from her shoulders, a figure should comestriding down the stairway before the startled loungers in the hotel office.The figure would be silent—it would be swift and terrible. As a tigresswhose 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 lightthat stood upon the table and stood weak and trembling in the darkness. Thestrength that had been as a miracle in her body left and she half reeled acrossthe floor, clutching at the back of the chair in which she had spent so manylong days staring out over the tin roofs into the main street of Winesburg. Inthe hallway there was the sound of footsteps and George Willard came in at thedoor. Sitting in a chair beside his mother he began to talk. “I’mgoing to get out of here,” he said. “I don’t know where Ishall go or what I shall do but I am going away.”

The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. “Isuppose you had better wake up,” she said. “You think that? Youwill 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 andtrembled.

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

Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together. Again, as onthe other evenings, they were embarrassed. After a time the boy tried again totalk. “I suppose it won’t be for a year or two but I’ve beenthinking 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 thewoman. She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had come fromthe 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 muchindoors,” 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 yellowmustache. He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of whichprotruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth wereblack and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes. The lid ofthe left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as thoughthe lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside thedoctor’s head playing with the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard. It began when Georgehad been working for a year on the Winesburg Eagleand theacquaintanceship 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 slippingin at the back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made of a combinationof sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a sensualist and had reached theage of forty-five. He imagined the gin renewed the youth in him. Like mostsensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and for an hour he lingered aboutgossiping with Tom Willy. The saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered manwith peculiarly marked hands. That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimespaints with red the faces of men and women had touched with red TomWilly’s fingers and the backs of his hands. As he stood by the bartalking to Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together. As he grew more andmore excited the red of his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands hadbeen dipped in blood that had dried and faded.

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

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

“If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself adoctor I have mighty few patients,” he began. “There is a reasonfor that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much ofmedicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The reason, you see, does notappear on the surface. It lies in fact in my character, which has, if you thinkabout it, many strange turns. Why I want to talk to you of the matter Idon’t know. I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes. I have adesire 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 boythe tales were very real and full of meaning. He began to admire the fatunclean-looking man and, in the afternoon when Will Henderson had gone, lookedforward with keen interest to the doctor’s coming.

Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years. He came from Chicagoand when he arrived was drunk and got into a fight with Albert Longworth, thebaggageman. The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the doctor’s beingescorted to the village lockup. When he was released he rented a room above ashoe-repairing shop at the lower end of Main Street and put out the sign thatannounced himself as a doctor. Although he had but few patients and these ofthe poorer sort who were unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money forhis needs. He slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at BiffCarter’s lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroadstation. In the summer the lunch room was filled with flies and BiffCarter’s white apron was more dirty than his floor. Doctor Parcival didnot mind. Into the lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents upon thecounter. “Feed me what you wish for that,” he said laughing.“Use up food that you wouldn’t otherwise sell. It makes nodifference to me. I am a man of distinction, you see. Why should I concernmyself with what I eat.”

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and endednowhere. 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. “Itwas in a town in Iowa—or was it in Illinois? I don’t remember andanyway it makes no difference. Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity anddon’t want to be very definite. Have you ever thought it strange that Ihave money for my needs although I do nothing? I may have stolen a great sum ofmoney or been involved in a murder before I came here. There is food forthought in that, eh? If you were a really smart newspaper reporter you wouldlook me up. In Chicago there was a Doctor Cronin who was murdered. Have youheard of that? Some men murdered him and put him in a trunk. In the earlymorning they hauled the trunk across the city. It sat on the back of an expresswagon and they were on the seat as unconcerned as anything. Along they wentthrough quiet streets where everyone was asleep. The sun was just coming upover the lake. Funny, eh—just to think of them smoking pipes andchattering as they drove along as unconcerned as I am now. Perhaps I was one ofthose men. That would be a strange turn of things, now wouldn’t it,eh?” Again Doctor Parcival began his tale: “Well, anyway there Iwas, a reporter on a paper just as you are here, running about and gettinglittle items to print. My mother was poor. She took in washing. Her dream wasto 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 asylumover at Dayton, Ohio. There you see I have let it slip out! All of this tookplace in Ohio, right here in Ohio. There is a clew if you ever get the notionof looking me up.

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

“The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color. How I hated thatcolor! My brother was always covered with it. On pay days he used to get drunkand come home wearing his paint-covered clothes and bringing his money withhim. 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 orangecolored 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’sdirty clothes. In she would come and stand by the table, rubbing her eyes withher apron that was covered with soap-suds.

“‘Don’t touch it! Don’t you dare touch thatmoney,’ my brother roared, and then he himself took five or ten dollarsand went tramping off to the saloons. When he had spent what he had taken hecame back for more. He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed aboutuntil he had spent it all, a little at a time. Then he went back to his jobwith the painting crew on the railroad. After he had gone things began toarrive at our house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there would be adress 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 downthreatening us if we dared so much as touch the money that sometimes lay on thetable three days.

“We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister and prayed. I was aregular ass about saying prayers. You should have heard me. When my father diedI prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother was in towndrinking and going about buying the things for us. In the evening after supperI knelt by the table where the money lay and prayed for hours. When no one waslooking I stole a dollar or two and put it in my pocket. That makes me laughnow but then it was terrible. It was on my mind all the time. I got six dollarsa week from my job on the paper and always took it straight home to mother. Thefew 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. Iborrowed some money from the man for whom I worked and went on the train atnight. 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 newspaperreporter. That made them afraid. There had been some negligence, somecarelessness, you see, when father was ill. They thought perhaps I would writeit up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do anything of thekind.

“Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed thedead body. I wonder what put that notion into my head. Wouldn’t mybrother, the painter, have laughed, though. There I stood over the dead bodyand spread out my hands. The superintendent of the asylum and some of hishelpers came in and stood about looking sheepish. It was very amusing. I spreadout 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 upand down in the office of the Winesburg Eaglewhere George Willard satlistening. He was awkward and, as the office was small, continually knockedagainst things. “What a fool I am to be talking,” he said.“That is not my object in coming here and forcing my acquaintanceshipupon you. I have something else in mind. You are a reporter just as I was onceand you have attracted my attention. You may end by becoming just such anotherfool. I want to warn you and keep on warning you. That’s why I seek youout.”

Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard’s attitude toward men. Itseemed to the boy that the man had but one object in view, to make everyoneseem despicable. “I want to fill you with hatred and contempt so that youwill be a superior being,” he declared. “Look at my brother. Therewas a fellow, eh? He despised everyone, you see. You have no idea with whatcontempt he looked upon mother and me. And was he not our superior? You know hewas. You have not seen him and yet I have made you feel that. I have given youa sense of it. He is dead. Once when he was drunk he lay down on the tracks andthe 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 monthGeorge Willard had been going each morning to spend an hour in thedoctor’s office. The visits came about through a desire on the part ofthe doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book he was in the process ofwriting. To write the book Doctor Parcival declared was the object of hiscoming to Winesburg to live.

On the morning in August before the coming of the boy, an incident had happenedin the doctor’s office. There had been an accident on Main Street. A teamof horses had been frightened by a train and had run away. A little girl, thedaughter 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 hadfound the child dead. From the crowd someone had run to the office of DoctorParcival who had bluntly refused to go down out of his office to the deadchild. The useless cruelty of his refusal had passed unnoticed. Indeed, the manwho had come up the stairway to summon him had hurried away without hearing therefusal.

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

Doctor Parcival shook with fright. “I have a presentiment,” hedeclared emphatically. “It may be that what I am talking about will notoccur 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 MainStreet.”

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

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. “You must payattention to me,” he urged. “If something happens perhaps you willbe able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is verysimple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It isthis—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 ofthe Winesburg Eagleand went hurriedly out at the back door. The nightwas warm and cloudy and although it was not yet eight o’clock, thealleyway back of the Eagleoffice was pitch dark. A team of horses tiedto a post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the hard-baked ground. A catsprang from under George Willard’s feet and ran away into the night. Theyoung man was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed by ablow. In the alleyway he trembled as though with fright.

In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going carefully andcautiously. The back doors of the Winesburg stores were open and he could seemen 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 herarm. Sid Green the clerk was waiting on her. He leaned over the counter andtalked earnestly.

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

George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been trying tomake up his mind to go through with the adventure and now he was acting. In theoffice of the Winesburg Eaglehe had been sitting since sixo’clock trying to think.

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

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

George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father’shouse. She was washing dishes by the light of a kerosene lamp. There she stoodbehind 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 ofhis body. Only a narrow potato patch separated him from the adventure. Fiveminutes passed before he felt sure enough of himself to call to her.“Louise! Oh, Louise!” he called. The cry stuck in his throat. Hisvoice became a hoarse whisper.

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

George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness withthe 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 hadcome that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The letter wasbrief. “I’m yours if you want me,” it said. He thought itannoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was nothingbetween them. “She has a nerve! Well, gracious sakes, she has anerve,” he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row ofvacant lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had been plantedright down to the sidewalk.

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

In the shadows by Williams’ barn George and Louise stood, not daring totalk. She was not particularly comely and there was a black smudge on the sideof her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose with her finger aftershe 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,” hethought. Just to touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided,be an exquisite pleasure. She began to quibble. “You think you’rebetter than I am. Don’t tell me, I guess I know,” she said drawingcloser to him.

A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that hadlurked in the girl’s eyes when they had met on the streets and thought ofthe note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered tales concerning herthat had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male, boldand 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 canthey know?” he urged.

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

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

When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o’clock andhad 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 acigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he waspleased. For five minutes the two stood in the shelter of the store awning andtalked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had wanted more than anything else totalk to some man. Around a corner toward the New Willard House he wentwhistling softly.

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

GODLINESS

A TALE IN FOUR PARTS

PART ONE

There were always three or four old people sitting on the front porch of thehouse or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the oldpeople 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’suncle.

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

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

By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that part ofNorthern Ohio where the Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from pioneerlife. Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain. He had built modernbarns and most of his land was drained with carefully laid tile drain, but inorder 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 beforeJesse’s time. They came from New York State and took up land when thecountry was new and land could be had at a low price. For a long time they, incommon with all the other Middle Western people, were very poor. The land theyhad settled upon was heavily wooded and covered with fallen logs andunderbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing these away and cutting thetimber, there were still the stumps to be reckoned with. Plows run through thefields caught on hidden roots, stones lay all about, on the low places watergathered, and the young corn turned yellow, sickened and died.

When Jesse Bentley’s father and brothers had come into their ownership ofthe place, much of the harder part of the work of clearing had been done, butthey clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They lived aspractically all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring andthrough most of the winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg werea sea of mud. The four young men of the family worked hard all day in thefields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tiredbeasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse andbrutal and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal. On Saturdayafternoons they hitched a team of horses to a three-seated wagon and went offto town. In town they stood about the stoves in the stores talking to otherfarmers or to the store keepers. They were dressed in overalls and in thewinter wore heavy coats that were flecked with mud. Their hands as theystretched them out to the heat of the stoves were cracked and red. It wasdifficult for them to talk and so they for the most part kept silent. When theyhad bought meat, flour, sugar, and salt, they went into one of the Winesburgsaloons and drank beer. Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lustsof their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up newground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor tookpossession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats andshouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at othertimes they broke forth into songs. Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of theboys, struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a teamster’swhip, and the old man seemed likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the strawin the loft of the stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passionturned out to be murder. He was kept alive with food brought by his mother, whoalso kept him informed of the injured man’s condition. When all turnedout well he emerged from his hiding place and went back to the work of clearingland as though nothing had happened.

The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes of the Bentleys and wasresponsible for the rise of the youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward, Harry, andWill 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 sentword to Jesse that he would have to come home.

Then the mother, who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and thefather became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and movinginto town. All day he went about shaking his head and muttering. The work inthe fields was neglected and weeds grew high in the corn. Old Tom hired men buthe did not use them intelligently. When they had gone away to the fields in themorning he wandered into the woods and sat down on a log. Sometimes he forgotto 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 hewas a slight, sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At eighteen he had left hometo go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a minister of thePresbyterian Church. All through his boyhood he had been what in our countrywas called an “odd sheep” and had not got on with his brothers. Ofall the family only his mother had understood him and she was now dead. When hecame home to take charge of the farm, that had at that time grown to more thansix hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and in the nearby town ofWinesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle the work that had beendone by his four strong brothers.

There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse did notlook 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 narrowblack string tie. The neighbors were amused when they saw him, after the yearsaway, and they were even more amused when they saw the woman he had married inthe city.

As a matter of fact, Jesse’s wife did soon go under. That was perhapsJesse’s fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the CivilWar 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. Shetried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her goon without interference. She helped to do the milking and did part of thehousework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a yearshe worked every day from sunrise until late at night and then after givingbirth to a child she died.

As for Jesse Bentley—although he was a delicately built man there wassomething within him that could not easily be killed. He had brown curly hairand grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering anduncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature. His mouthwas like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child. Jesse Bentley wasa fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he sufferedand made others suffer. Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out oflife and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very short time after he camehome to the Bentley farm he made everyone there a little afraid of him, and hiswife, who should have been close to him as his mother had been, was afraidalso. At the end of two weeks after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over tohim the entire ownership of the place and retired into the background. Everyoneretired into the background. In spite of his youth and inexperience, Jesse hadthe trick of mastering the souls of his people. He was so in earnest ineverything he did and said that no one understood him. He made everyone on thefarm 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 werehis dependents. Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the worldhere in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He couldmaster others but he could not master himself. The running of the farm as ithad never been run before was easy for him. When he came home from Clevelandwhere he had been in school, he shut himself off from all of his people andbegan to make plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made himsuccessful. Other men on the farms about him worked too hard and were too firedto think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for itssuccess was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something in hispassionate nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to theold house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked intothe barnyard and other windows that looked off across the fields. By the windowhe sat down to think. Hour after hour and day after day he sat and looked overthe land and thought out his new place in life. The passionate burning thing inhis nature flamed up and his eyes became hard. He wanted to make the farmproduce as no farm in his state had ever produced before and then he wantedsomething else. It was the indefinable hunger within that made his eyes waverand that kept him always more and more silent before people. He would havegiven much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing hecould not achieve.

All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his small frame was gathered theforce of a long line of strong men. He had always been extraordinarily alivewhen he was a small boy on the farm and later when he was a young man inschool. In the school he had studied and thought of God and the Bible with hiswhole mind and heart. As time passed and he grew to know people better, hebegan to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from hisfellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, andas he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived itseemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod. Although inhis absorption in himself and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact thathis young wife was doing a strong woman’s work even after she had becomelarge with child and that she was killing herself in his service, he did notintend 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 toa corner and wait for death, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the oldman from his mind.

In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to him satJesse thinking of his own affairs. In the stables he could hear the tramping ofhis horses and the restless movement of his cattle. Away in the fields he couldsee other cattle wandering over green hills. The voices of men, his men whoworked for him, came in to him through the window. From the milkhouse there wasthe 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 dayswho had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out ofthe skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and to talk tohim also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness to in some way achieve in his ownlife the flavor of significance that had hung over these men took possession ofhim. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the matter aloud to God and the sound ofhis own words strengthened and fed his eagerness.

“I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields,” hedeclared. “Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors andall 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 shallbe rulers!” Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and jumping to his feetwalked up and down in the room. In fancy he saw himself living in old times andamong old peoples. The land that lay stretched out before him became of vastsignificance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung fromhimself. 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 thepower 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 declaredin a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he thought that somethinglike a halo of Godly approval hung over him.

It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later day tounderstand Jesse Bentley. In the last fifty years a vast change has taken placein the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming ofindustrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill criesof millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going andcoming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the inter-urban carlines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in theselater days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in thelives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badlyimagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in everyhousehold, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers areeverywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in hisvillage has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. Thenewspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutalignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is goneforever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and ifyou listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the bestcity man of us all.

In Jesse Bentley’s time and in the country districts of the whole MiddleWest in the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored too hard andwere too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon paper. Asthey 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 thelittle Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of God and hisworks. The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of thetimes. The figure of God was big in the hearts of men.

And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a greatintellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward God.When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God in that. When hisfather became ill and could no longer attend to the running of the farm, hetook that also as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came to him, hewalked about at night through the streets thinking of the matter and when hehad come home and had got the work on the farm well under way, he went again atnight 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 hismind. He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained only sixhundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the edge of some meadow, he senthis voice abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the stars shining downat him.

One evening, some months after his father’s death, and when his wifeKatherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse lefthis house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was situated in a tinyvalley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the stream tothe end of his own land and on through the fields of his neighbors. As hewalked the valley broadened and then narrowed again. Great open stretches offield 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 countrythrough which he had walked should have come into his possession. He thought ofhis dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder and achievedmore. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over stones, and hebegan to think of the men of old times who like himself had owned flocks andlands.

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

GODLINESS

PART TWO

David Hardy of Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the owner ofBentley farms. When he was twelve years old he went to the old Bentley place tolive. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came into the world on thatnight 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 ofWinesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not live happilytogether and everyone agreed that she was to blame. She was a small woman withsharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been inclined to fits oftemper and when not angry she was often morose and silent. In Winesburg it wassaid 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 alarge brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg and he was the first man in thattown to keep a manservant to drive his wife’s carriage.

But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of temperduring which she was sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and quarrelsome. Sheswore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from the kitchen andthreatened her husband’s life. Once she deliberately set fire to thehouse, and often she hid herself away for days in her own room and would see noone. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave rise to all sorts of storiesconcerning her. It was said that she took drugs and that she hid herself awayfrom people because she was often so under the influence of drink that hercondition could not be concealed. Sometimes on summer afternoons she came outof the house and got into her carriage. Dismissing the driver she took thereins in her own hands and drove off at top speed through the streets. If apedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead and the frightened citizenhad to escape as best he could. To the people of the town it seemed as thoughshe 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 intothe country. On the country roads after she had gotten out of sight of thehouses she let the horses slow down to a walk and her wild, reckless moodpassed. She became thoughtful and muttered words. Sometimes tears came into hereyes. And then when she came back into town she again drove furiously throughthe quiet streets. But for the influence of her husband and the respect heinspired in people’s minds she would have been arrested more than once bythe town marshal.

Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well beimagined there was not much joy in his childhood. He was too young then to haveopinions of his own about people, but at times it was difficult for him not tohave very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother. David wasalways a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the people ofWinesburg to be something of a dullard. His eyes were brown and as a child hehad a habit of looking at things and people a long time without appearing tosee what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or whenhe 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 hisface toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the wall, he closed his eyes andtried not to think of anything. He had a habit of talking aloud to himself, andearly 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 haveto go back to town and once when he had come home from the farm after a longvisit, 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 hurryto go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the street in whichthe Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall evening and the sky wasovercast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could not bear to go intothe house where his mother and father lived, and on an impulse he decided torun 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 countryroads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in the sky. The boy’simagination was excited and he fancied that he could see and hear strangethings in the darkness. Into his mind came the conviction that he was walkingand running in some terrible void where no one had ever been before. Thedarkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind blowing in trees wasterrifying. When a team of horses approached along the road in which he walkedhe was frightened and climbed a fence. Through a field he ran until he cameinto another road and getting upon his knees felt of the soft ground with hisfingers. But for the figure of his grandfather, whom he was afraid he wouldnever find in the darkness, he thought the world must be altogether empty. Whenhis cries were heard by a farmer who was walking home from town and he wasbrought back to his father’s house, he was so tired and excited that hedid not know what was happening to him.

By chance David’s father knew that he had disappeared. On the street hehad met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son’s returnto town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy withseveral men of the town went to search the country. The report that David hadbeen kidnapped ran about through the streets of Winesburg. When he came homethere were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched himeagerly in her arms. David thought she had suddenly become another woman. Hecould not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With her own handsLouise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food. She would not lethim go to bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew out the lights andsat down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour the woman sat in thedarkness and held her boy. All the time she kept talking in a low voice. Davidcould not understand what had so changed her. Her habitually dissatisfied facehad 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 hervoice. It was not harsh or shrill as when she talked to her husband, but waslike rain falling on trees. Presently men began coming to the door to reportthat he had not been found, but she made him hide and be silent until she hadsent them away. He thought it must be a game his mother and the men of the townwere playing with him and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the thought thathis having been lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogetherunimportant matter. He thought that he would have been willing to go throughthe frightful experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end ofthe 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 butseldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived. Stillhe could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older it became moredefinite. When he was twelve years old he went to the Bentley farm to live. OldJesse 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 JohnHardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and then the two men went tothe house on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They both expected her to maketrouble but were mistaken. She was very quiet and when Jesse had explained hismission and had gone on at some length about the advantages to come throughhaving 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 mypresence,” she said sharply. Her shoulders shook and she seemed about tofly into a fit of temper. “It is a place for a man child, although it wasnever a place for me,” she went on. “You never wanted me there andof course the air of your house did me no good. It was like poison in my bloodbut it will be different with him.”

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

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

Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his motherhad come to him and that she had changed so that she was always as she had beenthat time after he ran away. He also grew bold and reaching out his handstroked 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 hardinsistent thing in Jesse Bentley that had kept the people in the house silentand timid and that had never been dispelled by the presence of the girl Louisewas apparently swept away by the coming of the boy. It was as though God hadrelented and sent a son to the man.

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

There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his mindhad been a battleground for these influences. First there was the old thing inhim. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men of God. His walking inthe fields and through the forests at night had brought him close to nature andthere were forces in the passionately religious man that ran out to the forcesin nature. The disappointment that had come to him when a daughter and not ason had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him like a blow struck by someunseen hand and the blow had somewhat softened his egotism. He still believedthat God might at any moment make himself manifest out of the winds or theclouds, but he no longer demanded such recognition. Instead he prayed for it.Sometimes he was altogether doubtful and thought God had deserted the world. Heregretted the fate that had not let him live in a simpler and sweeter time whenat the beckoning of some strange cloud in the sky men left their lands andhouses and went forth into the wilderness to create new races. While he workednight and day to make his farms more productive and to extend his holdings ofland, he regretted that he could not use his own restless energy in thebuilding of temples, the slaying of unbelievers and in general in the work ofglorifying 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 atwork in the country during those years when modern industrialism was beingborn. He began to buy machines that would permit him to do the work of thefarms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if he were ayounger man he would give up farming altogether and start a factory inWinesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit of readingnewspapers and magazines. He invented a machine for the making of fence out ofwire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and places that hehad always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing thatwas growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most materialisticage 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 thewill to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nighforgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring ofpossessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the menabout him. The greedy thing in him wanted to make money faster than it could bemade by tilling the land. More than once he went into Winesburg to talk withhis son-in-law John Hardy about it. “You are a banker and you will havechances I never had,” he said and his eyes shone. “I am thinkingabout it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the country and therewill be more money to be made than I ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish Iwere younger and had your chance.” Jesse Bentley walked up and down inthe bank office and grew more and more excited as he talked. At one time in hislife he had been threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhatweakened. As he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back homeand when night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the oldfeeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who mightat any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint forhim some heroic task to be done. Jesse’s mind was fixed upon the thingsread in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be made almost without effortby shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the coming of the boy David did muchto bring back with renewed force the old faith and it seemed to him that Godhad at last looked with favor upon him.

As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a thousandnew and delightful ways. The kindly attitude of all about him expanded hisquiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner he had always hadwith his people. At night when he went to bed after a long day of adventures inthe stables, in the fields, or driving about from farm to farm with hisgrandfather, 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 notappear at once, he went to the head of the stairs and shouted, his young voiceringing through the narrow halls where for so long there had been a traditionof silence. In the morning when he awoke and lay still in bed, the sounds thatcame in to him through the windows filled him with delight. He thought with ashudder of the life in the house in Winesburg and of his mother’s angryvoice that had always made him tremble. There in the country all sounds werepleasant sounds. When he awoke at dawn the barnyard back of the house alsoawoke. In the house people stirred about. Eliza Stoughton the half-witted girlwas poked in the ribs by a farm hand and giggled noisily, in some distant fielda cow bawled and was answered by the cattle in the stables, and one of the farmhands spoke sharply to the horse he was grooming by the stable door. Davidleaped out of bed and ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excitedhis 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 barnyardwhere the farm hands had now all assembled to do the morning shores, but hecould hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the horses. When one ofthe men laughed, he laughed also. Leaning out at the open window, he lookedinto an orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a litter of tiny pigs ather heels. Every morning he counted the pigs. “Four, five, six,seven,” he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up anddown marks on the window ledge. David ran to put on his trousers and shirt. Afeverish desire to get out of doors took possession of him. Every morning hemade 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 longold house, shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he came into the barnyardand looked about with an amazed air of expectancy. It seemed to him that insuch a place tremendous things might have happened during the night. The farmhands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader, an old man who had been on thefarm since Jesse came into possession and who before David’s time hadnever been known to make a joke, made the same joke every morning. It amusedDavid so that he laughed and clapped his hands. “See, come here andlook,” cried the old man. “Grandfather Jesse’s white mare hastorn the black stocking she wears on her foot.”

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

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

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

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

A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David. Crouchingbeneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him and his own kneesbegan to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the presence not only of hisgrandfather but of someone else, someone who might hurt him, someone who wasnot kindly but dangerous and brutal. He began to cry and reaching down pickedup a small stick, which he held tightly gripped in his fingers. When JesseBentley, absorbed in his own idea, suddenly arose and advanced toward him, histerror grew until his whole body shook. In the woods an intense silence seemedto lie over everything and suddenly out of the silence came the old man’sharsh and insistent voice. Gripping the boy’s shoulders, Jesse turned hisface to the sky and shouted. The whole left side of his face twitched and hishand 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 meout of the sky and make Thy presence known to me.”

With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the hands thatheld him, ran away through the forest. He did not believe that the man whoturned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the sky was his grandfatherat all. The man did not look like his grandfather. The conviction thatsomething strange and terrible had happened, that by some miracle a new anddangerous person had come into the body of the kindly old man, took possessionof him. On and on he ran down the hillside, sobbing as he ran. When he fellover the roots of a tree and in falling struck his head, he arose and tried torun on again. His head hurt so that presently he fell down and lay still, butit was only after Jesse had carried him to the buggy and he awoke to find theold 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,” hedeclared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of the trees and againhis lips cried out to God. “What have I done that Thou dost not approveof me,” he whispered softly, saying the words over and over as he droverapidly along the road with the boy’s cut and bleeding head held tenderlyagainst his shoulder.

SURRENDER

PART THREE

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

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 andthoughtful lives lived by people about them.

Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard, imaginativefather, who did not look with favor upon her coming into the world, Louise wasfrom childhood a neurotic, one of the race of over-sensitive women that inlater 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 shewas fifteen she went to live in Winesburg with the family of Albert Hardy, whohad a store for the sale of buggies and wagons, and who was a member of thetown board of education.

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

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

He had two daughters and one son, John Hardy, and more than once the daughtersthreatened to leave school altogether. As a matter of principle they did justenough work in their classes to avoid punishment. “I hate books and Ihate 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 ofthe time when she could go forth into the world, and she looked upon the moveinto the Hardy household as a great step in the direction of freedom. Alwayswhen she had thought of the matter, it had seemed to her that in town all mustbe gaiety and life, that there men and women must live happily and freely,giving and taking friendship and affection as one takes the feel of a wind onthe cheek. After the silence and the cheerlessness of life in the Bentleyhouse, she dreamed of stepping forth into an atmosphere that was warm andpulsating with life and reality. And in the Hardy household Louise might havegot something of the thing for which she so hungered but for a mistake she madewhen she had just come to town.

Louise won the disfavor of the two Hardy girls, Mary and Harriet, by herapplication to her studies in school. She did not come to the house until theday when school was to begin and knew nothing of the feeling they had in thematter. She was timid and during the first month made no acquaintances. EveryFriday afternoon one of the hired men from the farm drove into Winesburg andtook her home for the week-end, so that she did not spend the Saturday holidaywith the town people. Because she was embarrassed and lonely she workedconstantly at her studies. To Mary and Harriet, it seemed as though she triedto make trouble for them by her proficiency. In her eagerness to appear wellLouise wanted to answer every question put to the class by the teacher. Shejumped up and down and her eyes flashed. Then when she had answered somequestion the others in the class had been unable to answer, she smiled happily.“See, I have done it for you,” her eyes seemed to say. “Youneed not bother about the matter. I will answer all questions. For the wholeclass it will be easy while I am here.”

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

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

The merchant took his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to depart forthe evening. At the door he stopped and glared back. So fierce was his mannerthat Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to her own room. The daughtersbegan to speak of their own affairs. “Pay attention to me,” roaredthe merchant. “Your minds are lazy. Your indifference to education isaffecting your characters. You will amount to nothing. Now mark what Isay—Louise will be so far ahead of you that you will never catchup.”

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

In the house when Louise came down into the room where the two girls sat, theywould have nothing to do with her. One evening after she had been there formore than six weeks and was heartbroken because of the continued air ofcoldness with which she was always greeted, she burst into tears. “Shutup your crying and go back to your own room and to your books,” MaryHardy said sharply.

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

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

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

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

One evening during her first winter in Winesburg, Louise had an adventure thatgave a new impulse to her desire to break down the wall that she thought stoodbetween her and John Hardy. It was Wednesday and immediately after the eveningmeal Albert Hardy put on his hat and went away. Young John brought the wood andput it in the box in Louise’s room. “You do work hard, don’tyou?” he said awkwardly, and then before she could answer he also wentaway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a long time Louise did not know what would be the outcome of her boldattempt to secure for herself a lover. In a way she still did not know whetheror not she wanted him to come. Sometimes it seemed to her that to be heldtightly and kissed was the whole secret of life, and then a new impulse cameand she was terribly afraid. The age-old woman’s desire to be possessedhad taken possession of her, but so vague was her notion of life that it seemedto her just the touch of John Hardy’s hand upon her own hand wouldsatisfy. She wondered if he would understand that. At the table next day whileAlbert Hardy talked and the two girls whispered and laughed, she did not lookat John but at the table and as soon as possible escaped. In the evening shewent out of the house until she was sure he had taken the wood to her room andgone away. When after several evenings of intense listening she heard no callfrom the darkness in the orchard, she was half beside herself with grief anddecided that for her there was no way to break through the wall that had shuther off from the joy of life.

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

The farm hand, a young fellow with black curly hair, had come for her somewhatlate on that Friday evening and they drove home in the darkness. Louise, whosemind was filled with thoughts of John Hardy, tried to make talk but the countryboy was embarrassed and would say nothing. Her mind began to review theloneliness of her childhood and she remembered with a pang the sharp newloneliness that had just come to her. “I hate everyone,” she criedsuddenly, and then broke forth into a tirade that frightened her escort.“I hate father and the old man Hardy, too,” she declaredvehemently. “I get my lessons there in the school in town but I hate thatalso.”

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

Louise Bentley took John Hardy to be her lover. That was not what she wantedbut it was so the young man had interpreted her approach to him, and so anxiouswas she to achieve something else that she made no resistance. When after a fewmonths they were both afraid that she was about to become a mother, they wentone evening to the county seat and were married. For a few months they lived inthe Hardy house and then took a house of their own. All during the first yearLouise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hungerthat had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Againand again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always withoutsuccess. Filled with his own notions of love between men and women, he did notlisten but began to kiss her upon the lips. That confused her so that in theend she did not want to be kissed. She did not know what she wanted.

When the alarm that had tricked them into marriage proved to be groundless, shewas angry and said bitter, hurtful things. Later when her son David was born,she could not nurse him and did not know whether she wanted him or not.Sometimes she stayed in the room with him all day, walking about andoccasionally creeping close to touch him tenderly with her hands, and thenother days came when she did not want to see or be near the tiny bit ofhumanity that had come into the house. When John Hardy reproached her for hercruelty, she laughed. “It is a man child and will get what it wantsanyway,” she said sharply. “Had it been a woman child there isnothing in the world I would not have done for it.”

TERROR

PART FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

That gave his mind a new turn. After that he never went into the woods withoutcarrying the sling in his pocket and he spent hours shooting at imaginaryanimals concealed among the brown leaves in the trees. Thoughts of his comingmanhood passed and he was content to be a boy with a boy’s impulses.

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

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

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

More and more as he thought of the matter, he thought also of David and hispassionate self-love was partially forgotten. “It is time for the boy tobegin thinking of going out into the world and the message will be oneconcerning him,” he decided. “God will make a pathway for him. Hewill tell me what place David is to take in life and when he shall set out onhis journey. It is right that the boy should be there. If I am fortunate and anangel of God should appear, David will see the beauty and glory of God mademanifest to man. It will make a true man of God of him also.”

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

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

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

Terror seized upon the soul of the boy. He was sick with it. For a moment hesat perfectly still and then his body stiffened and he sprang to his feet. Hisface became as white as the fleece of the lamb that, now finding itselfsuddenly released, ran down the hill. David ran also. Fear made his feet fly.Over the low bushes and logs he leaped frantically. As he ran he put his handinto his pocket and took out the branched stick from which the sling forshooting squirrels was suspended. When he came to the creek that was shallowand splashed down over the stones, he dashed into the water and turned to lookback, and when he saw his grandfather still running toward him with the longknife held tightly in his hand he did not hesitate, but reaching down, selecteda stone and put it in the sling. With all his strength he drew back the heavyrubber bands and the stone whistled through the air. It hit Jesse, who hadentirely forgotten the boy and was pursuing the lamb, squarely in the head.With a groan he pitched forward and fell almost at the boy’s feet. WhenDavid saw that he lay still and that he was apparently dead, his frightincreased immeasurably. It became an insane panic.

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

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

A MAN OF IDEAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When George Willard went to work for the Winesburg Eaglehe was besiegedby Joe Welling. Joe envied the boy. It seemed to him that he was meant byNature to be a reporter on a newspaper. “It is what I should be doing,there is no doubt of that,” he declared, stopping George Willard on thesidewalk before Daugherty’s Feed Store. His eyes began to glisten and hisforefinger to tremble. “Of course I make more money with the Standard OilCompany and I’m only telling you,” he added. “I’ve gotnothing against you but I should have your place. I could do the work at oddmoments. Here and there I would run finding out things you’ll neversee.”

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

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

When George Willard had been for a year on the Winesburg Eagle, fourthings happened to Joe Welling. His mother died, he came to live at the NewWillard House, he became involved in a love affair, and he organized theWinesburg Baseball Club.

Joe organized the baseball club because he wanted to be a coach and in thatposition he began to win the respect of his townsmen. “He is awonder,” they declared after Joe’s team had whipped the team fromMedina County. “He gets everybody working together. You just watchhim.”

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

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

With runners of the Winesburg team on bases, Joe Welling became as oneinspired. Before they knew what had come over them, the base runners werewatching the man, edging off the bases, advancing, retreating, held as by aninvisible cord. The players of the opposing team also watched Joe. They werefascinated. For a moment they watched and then, as though to break a spell thathung over them, they began hurling the ball wildly about, and amid a series offierce animal-like cries from the coach, the runners of the Winesburg teamscampered home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shaking with fright and anxiety, the young reporter lurked in the hallwayoutside the door of the room in which Joe Welling talked to the two Kings.There had been an oath, the nervous giggle of old Edward King, and thensilence. Now the voice of Joe Welling, sharp and clear, broke forth. GeorgeWillard began to laugh. He understood. As he had swept all men before him, sonow Joe Welling was carrying the two men in the room off their feet with atidal wave of words. The listener in the hall walked up and down, lost inamazement.

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

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

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

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

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

ADVENTURE

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

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

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

When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the store, Alicehad an affair with a young man. The young man, named Ned Currie, was older thanAlice. He, like George Willard, was employed on the Winesburg Eagleandfor a long time he went to see Alice almost every evening. Together the twowalked under the trees through the streets of the town and talked of what theywould do with their lives. Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currietook her into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and said things he didnot intend to say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautifulcome into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The outercrust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was torn away andshe gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late in the fall of hersixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland where he hoped to get a placeon a city newspaper and rise in the world, she wanted to go with him. With atrembling voice she told him what was in her mind. “I will work and youcan work,” she said. “I do not want to harness you to a needlessexpense that will prevent your making progress. Don’t marry me now. Wewill get along without that and we can be together. Even though we live in thesame house no one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and peoplewill pay no attention to us.”

Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his sweetheart andwas also deeply touched. He had wanted the girl to become his mistress butchanged his mind. He wanted to protect and care for her. “You don’tknow what you’re talking about,” he said sharply; “you may besure I’ll let you do no such thing. As soon as I get a good jobI’ll come back. For the present you’ll have to stay here.It’s the only thing we can do.”

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

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

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

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

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

Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight in thefield, but felt that she could never marry another man. To her the thought ofgiving to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned seemedmonstrous. When other young men tried to attract her attention she would havenothing to do with them. “I am his wife and shall remain his wife whetherhe comes back or not,” she whispered to herself, and for all of herwillingness to support herself could not have understood the growing modernidea of a woman’s owning herself and giving and taking for her own endsin life.

Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the morning until six atnight and on three evenings a week went back to the store to stay from sevenuntil nine. As time passed and she became more and more lonely she began topractice the devices common to lonely people. When at night she went upstairsinto her own room she knelt on the floor to pray and in her prayers whisperedthings she wanted to say to her lover. She became attached to inanimateobjects, and because it was her own, could not bare to have anyone touch thefurniture of her room. The trick of saving money, begun for a purpose, wascarried on after the scheme of going to the city to find Ned Currie had beengiven up. It became a fixed habit, and when she needed new clothes she did notget them. Sometimes on rainy afternoons in the store she got out her bank bookand, letting it lie open before her, spent hours dreaming impossible dreams ofsaving money enough so that the interest would support both herself and herfuture husband.

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

In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months into years as Alicewaited and dreamed of her lover’s return. Her employer, a grey old manwith false teeth and a thin grey mustache that drooped down over his mouth, wasnot given to conversation, and sometimes, on rainy days and in the winter whena storm raged in Main Street, long hours passed when no customers came in.Alice arranged and rearranged the stock. She stood near the front window whereshe could look down the deserted street and thought of the evenings when shehad walked with Ned Currie and of what he had said. “We will have tostick to each other now.” The words echoed and re-echoed through the mindof the maturing woman. Tears came into her eyes. Sometimes when her employerhad gone out and she was alone in the store she put her head on the counter andwept. “Oh, Ned, I am waiting,” she whispered over and over, and allthe time the creeping fear that he would never come back grew stronger withinher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on herbody. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted toleap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him. Onthe brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled homeward. Alice started torun. A wild, desperate mood took possession of her. “What do I care whoit is. He is alone, and I will go to him,” she thought; and then withoutstopping to consider the possible result of her madness, called softly.“Wait!” she cried. “Don’t go away. Whoever you are, youmust wait.”

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

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

RESPECTABILITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Winesburg no attention was paid to Wash Williams and his hatred of hisfellows. Once Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, complained to the telegraphcompany, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and smelled abominably,but nothing came of her complaint. Here and there a man respected the operator.Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had notthe courage to resent. When Wash walked through the streets such a one had aninstinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him. Thesuperintendent who had supervision over the telegraph operators on the railroadthat went through Winesburg felt that way. He had put Wash into the obscureoffice at Winesburg to avoid discharging him, and he meant to keep him there.When he received the letter of complaint from the banker’s wife, he toreit up and laughed unpleasantly. For some reason he thought of his own wife ashe tore up the letter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE THINKER

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the mother didnot. She expected from all people certain conventional reactions to life. A boywas your son, you scolded him and he trembled and looked at the floor. When youhad scolded enough he wept and all was forgiven. After the weeping and when hehad gone to bed, you crept into his room and kissed him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys instinctivelygreeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected Seth Richmond’soutlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was deeper than boys aregiven credit for being, but he was not what the men of the town, and even hismother, thought him to be. No great underlying purpose lay back of his habitualsilence, and he had no definite plan for his life. When the boys with whom heassociated were noisy and quarrelsome, he stood quietly at one side. With calmeyes he watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. Hewasn’t particularly interested in what was going on, and sometimeswondered if he would ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as hestood in the half-darkness by the window watching the baker, he wished that hehimself might become thoroughly stirred by something, even by the fits ofsullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted. “It would be better for meif I could become excited and wrangle about politics like windy old TomWillard,” he thought, as he left the window and went again along thehallway to the room occupied by his friend, George Willard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s Belle Turner,” whispered Helen, and put her handboldly into Seth’s hand. “I didn’t know she had a fellow. Ithought she was too old for that.” Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of thegirl was warm and a strange, dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came adesire to tell her something he had been determined not to tell. “GeorgeWillard’s in love with you,” he said, and in spite of his agitationhis voice was low and quiet. “He’s writing a story, and he wants tobe in love. He wants to know how it feels. He wanted me to tell you and seewhat you said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TANDY

Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unusedroad that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention andher mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking ofreligion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroyingthe ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he neversaw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, livedhere and there on the bounty of her dead mother’s relatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STRENGTH OF GOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverend Hartman’s experience with women had been somewhat limited. Hewas the son of a wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his waythrough college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer had boarded in ahouse where he lived during his school days and he had married her after aformal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by the girlherself. On his marriage day the underwear manufacturer had given his daughterfive thousand dollars and he promised to leave her at least twice that amountin his will. The minister had thought himself fortunate in marriage and hadnever permitted himself to think of other women. He did not want to think ofother women. What he wanted was to do the work of God quietly and earnestly.

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

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

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

Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of hismind and began to be something like a lover in the presence of his wife. Oneevening when they drove out together he turned the horse out of Buckeye Streetand in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks Pond, put his arm aboutSarah Hartman’s waist. When he had eaten breakfast in the morning and wasready to retire to his study at the back of his house he went around the tableand kissed his wife on the cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came into hishead, he smiled and raised his eyes to the skies. “Intercede for me,Master,” he muttered, “keep me in the narrow path intent on Thywork.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a cry hearose, dragging the heavy desk along the floor. The Bible fell, making a greatclatter in the silence. When the light in the house next door went out hestumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along the street he went andran in at the door of the Winesburg Eagle. To George Willard, who wastramping up and down in the office undergoing a struggle of his own, he beganto talk half incoherently. “The ways of God are beyond humanunderstanding,” he cried, running in quickly and closing the door. Hebegan to advance upon the young man, his eyes glowing and his voice ringingwith fervor. “I have found the light,” he cried. “After tenyears in this town, God has manifested himself to me in the body of awoman.” His voice dropped and he began to whisper. “I did notunderstand,” he said. “What I took to be a trial of my soul wasonly a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit. God hasappeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling nakedon a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not be aware of it, she isan instrument of God, bearing the message of truth.”

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

THE TEACHER

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

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

The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his schoolteacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a book shewanted him to read and had been alone with her for an hour. For the fourth orfifth time the woman had talked to him with great earnestness and he could notmake out what she meant by her talk. He began to believe she must be in lovewith him and the thought was both pleasing and annoying.

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

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

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

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

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

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank. He didnot sleep. By years of practice he had trained himself to sit for hours throughthe long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the morning he was almost asrefreshed as though he had slept.

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only threepeople were awake in Winesburg. George Willard was in the office of theEaglepretending to be at work on the writing of a story but in realitycontinuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood. In the bell towerof the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was sitting in thedarkness preparing himself for a revelation from God, and Kate Swift, theschool teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in the storm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Swift’s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. Insomething he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized thespark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the summer she hadgone to the Eagleoffice and finding the boy unoccupied had taken himout Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank andtalked. The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy someconception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer. “Youwill have to know life,” she declared, and her voice trembled withearnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned himabout so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought themabout to embrace. “If you are to become a writer you’ll have tostop fooling with words,” she explained. “It would be better togive up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’stime to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to makeyou understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not becomea mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinkingabout, not what they say.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONELINESS

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

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

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

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

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

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends. There wasnothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of thekind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of theknown history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk ofart and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think itmatters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and EnochRobinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in acorner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike eyesstared about! On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, halffinished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in their chairs, theytalked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side. Words were saidabout line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always beingsaid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN AWAKENING

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

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

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter. She, herealized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother and hated himfor it. One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of soft mud, takenfrom the road, into the house. With the mud she smeared the face of the boardsused for the pressing of trousers and then went back to her work feelingrelieved and happy.

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

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

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

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted tonothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her company. On thatevening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer’s livery barn and tookher for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his nature demanded andthat he must get her settled upon him and he told her of his desires. Thebartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn money for the supportof his wife, but so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explainhis intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body heexpressed himself. Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly inspite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became helpless. Then hebrought her back to town and let her out of the buggy. “When I get holdof you again I’ll not let you go. You can’t play with me,” hedeclared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the buggy, he grippedher shoulders with his strong hands. “I’ll keep you for good thenext time,” he said. “You might as well make up your mind to that.It’s you and me for it and I’m going to have you before I getthrough.”

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

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

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

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

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body beganto tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just come into hishead and he wondered where they had come from. For the moment it seemed to himthat some voice outside of himself had been talking as he walked. He was amazedand delighted with his own mind and when he walked on again spoke of the matterwith fervor. “To come out of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and thinkthings like that,” he whispered. “It is better to be alone. If Italked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn’tunderstand what I’ve been thinking down here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“QUEER”

From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr on therear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the juniormember of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of theWinesburg Eagle. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They didnot go in readily and he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his handhe sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings. Thenlooking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter inWinesburg, standing at the back door of the Eagleprintshop and staringabsentmindedly about. “Well, well, what next!” exclaimed the youngman with the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from thewindow.

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

Cowley & Son’s store did not face the main street of Winesburg. Thefront was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight’s wagon shop and ashed for the sheltering of farmers’ horses. Beside the store an alleywayran behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intenton bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and down. The store itself wasindescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything andnothing. In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as large asan apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and beside theblack mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and dirty intheir wooden frames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared back at thetown. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had no special feelingconcerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the town news. Thereporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and in the printshop ofthe Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the youngmerchant’s mind. He thought the boy who passed and repassed Cowley &Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must bethinking of him and perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belongedto the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of thetown. Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also hisdays of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visitedalso his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the publicopinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walkwhistling and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking hisperson strike also the greater enemy—the thing that smiled and went itsown way—the judgment of Winesburg?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At eight o’clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the frontdoor of the office of the Winesburg Eaglewhere George Willard satwriting. His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined look wason his face. “You come on outside with me,” he said, stepping inand closing the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though prepared to resistanyone else coming in. “You just come along outside. I want to seeyou.”

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

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

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

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

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

The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was verysimple. “I will get out of here, run away from home,” he toldhimself. He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg atmidnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would steal aride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowdsthere. He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmenand would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would nolonger be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth andmeaning for him as it had for others.

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

Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard House andpounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the office. He receivedno salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore with pride the title of“night clerk.” Before the boy Elmer was bold, insistent. “You‘wake him up,” he commanded. “You tell him to come down bythe depot. I got to see him and I’m going away on the local. Tell him todress and come on down. I ain’t got much time.”

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

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

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

THE UNTOLD LIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She only wanted him to go into town for groceries and as soon as she had toldhim what she wanted began to scold. “You’re alwaysputtering,” she said. “Now I want you to hustle. There isn’tanything in the house for supper and you’ve got to get to town and backin a hurry.”

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

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

The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on that fallevening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand it. Of a sudden heforgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the torn overcoatbegan to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a protest against his life,against all life, against everything that makes life ugly. “There was nopromise made,” he cried into the empty spaces that lay about him.“I didn’t promise my Minnie anything and Hal hasn’t made anypromise to Nell. I know he hasn’t. She went into the woods with himbecause she wanted to go. What he wanted she wanted. Why should I pay? Whyshould Hal pay? Why should anyone pay? I don’t want Hal to become old andworn out. I’ll tell him. I won’t let it go on. I’ll catch Halbefore he gets to town and I’ll tell him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRINK

Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young and couldget many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a farm near thetown and as a young girl had gone to school there when Winesburg was a villageof twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a general store on the TrunionPike.

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

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

The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One eveningas she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book containingthirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was a great adventurefor the boy. It was past seven o’clock at night when the grandmother camehome with the pocket-book held tightly in her old hands and she was so excitedshe could scarcely speak. She insisted on leaving Cincinnati that night, sayingthat if they stayed until morning the owner of the money would be sure to findthem out and make trouble. Tom, who was then sixteen years old, had to gotrudging off to the station with the old woman, bearing all of their earthlybelongings done up in a worn-out blanket and slung across his back. By his sidewalked the grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth twitchednervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted to put the pack down at a streetcrossing, she snatched it up and if he had not prevented would have slung itacross her own back. When they got into the train and it had run out of thecity she was as delighted as a girl and talked as the boy had never heard hertalk before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker’s stable and then lost hisplace there. He didn’t take very good care of the horses and he was aconstant source of irritation to the banker’s wife. She told him to mowthe lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post officeand he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and spent the wholeafternoon with them, standing about, listening and occasionally, whenaddressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the houses of prostitution andwith the rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in Winesburg amongits citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet distinctly apartfrom the life about him.

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

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

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

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

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

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things, things aboutugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these things than anyoneelse in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular had presented itself to himin a quite horrible way and had made a deep impression on his mind. He thought,after what he had seen of the women standing before the squalid houses on coldnights and the look he had seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk tothem, that he would put sex altogether out of his own life. One of the women ofthe neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her. He neverforgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of thewoman. It sickened him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. Hehad always before thought of women as quite innocent things, much like hisgrandmother, but after that one experience in the room he dismissed women fromhis mind. So gentle was his nature that he could not hate anything and notbeing able to understand he decided to forget.

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

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

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

In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk. Thetrees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in softgreen leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about invegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of silencevery stirring to the blood.

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

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

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

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

At eleven o’clock Tom got back into town. George Willard found himwandering about and took him into the Eagleprintshop. Then he becameafraid that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped him intothe alleyway.

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

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

“It was good to be drunk,” Tom Foster said. “It taught mesomething. I won’t have to do it again. I will think more clearly afterthis. You see how it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

DEATH

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

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

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

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

On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her sonGeorge was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went up theworn steps to Doctor Reefy’s office. Already the woman’s naturallytall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly about. Ostensiblyshe went to see the doctor because of her health, but on the half dozenoccasions when she had been to see him the outcome of the visits did notprimarily concern her health. She and the doctor talked of that but they talkedmost of her life, of their two lives and of the ideas that had come to them asthey lived their lives in Winesburg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman’s voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, whowithout realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came an oddillusion. He thought that as she talked the woman’s body was changing,that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he could not shakeoff the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist. “It is good forboth her body and her mind, this talking,” he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to havethoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother’s mind hadplayed with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and imagined that the redyoung lips of Helen White touched his own lips. His body trembled and his handsshook. And then something happened. The boy sprang to his feet and stoodstiffly. He looked at the figure of the dead woman under the sheets and shamefor his thoughts swept over him so that he began to weep. A new notion cameinto his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about as though afraid he wouldbe observed.

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

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

SOPHISTICATION

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

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

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

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

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes thebackward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line intomanhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking ofthe future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regretsawake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waitsas for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into hisconsciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning thelimitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomesnot at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for thefirst time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched inprocession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time havecome out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappearedinto nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With alittle gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through thestreets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of hisfellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, athing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerlyabout. The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space inthe long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his hearthe wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, betouched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, thatis because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand.He wants, most of all, understanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at theback she stopped and stood listening. Her mother began to talk. “There isno one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen’s breeding,” shesaid.

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

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

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

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

There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fairground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after theannual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On allsides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the dayjust passed, have come the people pouring in from the town and the countryaround. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from thehundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Younggirls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of theirlives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched andsquirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. Thesilence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside thetrunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature isintensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life whileat the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loveslife so intensely that tears come into the eyes.

In the darkness under the roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat besideHelen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the scheme ofexistence. Now that he had come out of town where the presence of the peoplestirring about, busy with a multitude of affairs, had been so irritating, theirritation was all gone. The presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. Itwas as though her woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minutereadjustment of the machinery of his life. He began to think of the people inthe town where he had always lived with something like reverence. He hadreverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by her, but he did notwant at the moment to be confused by her womanhood. In the darkness he tookhold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand on her shoulder. A windbegan to blow and he shivered. With all his strength he tried to hold and tounderstand the mood that had come upon him. In that high place in the darknessthe two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In themind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place andhere is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt.

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

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

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

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

DEPARTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scamperedhurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street hoping to have aparting word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see her. When thetrain started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he knewGeorge well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made nocomment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to thecity. It was a commonplace enough incident with him. In the smoking car therewas a man who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky Bay. Hewanted to accept the invitation and talk over details.

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles