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Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

by Sherwood Anderson · English · Gutenberg #416 · 414,768 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

Author: Sherwood Anderson


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #416]
                Most recently updated: January 30, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/416

Credits: Judith Boss


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINESBURG, OHIO: A GROUP OF TALES OF OHIO SMALL TOWN LIFE ***




Winesburg, Ohio

by Sherwood Anderson


Contents

 INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe

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




INTRODUCTION


by Irving Howe

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




To the memory of my mother,
EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,


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




THE TALES AND THE PERSONS




THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




HANDS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




PAPER PILLS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




MOTHER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE PHILOSOPHER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




NOBODY KNOWS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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




GODLINESS

A TALE IN FOUR PARTS

PART ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




GODLINESS

PART TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




SURRENDER

PART THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




TERROR

PART FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A MAN OF IDEAS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




ADVENTURE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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




RESPECTABILITY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE THINKER


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

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

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

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

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

In the relationship between Seth Richmond and his mother, there was a
quality that even at eighteen had begun to color all of his traffic
with men. An almost unhealthy respect for the youth kept the mother for
the most part silent in his 

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