Андерсон Шервуд. Уайнсбург, Огайо (engl)

son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and then she
began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to
think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to
her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him
turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she
dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping.
She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way to the one
who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion actually did
bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her
that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one
morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened
to her.
In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country
practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a
handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the
tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on the woman's
white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When the woman
and the man had gone the doctor smiled. "I will take you driving into the
country with me," he said.
For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together
almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an
illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the
twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round
perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments. In the fall after the
beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in
the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all of the
odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper. After he
had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become
round hard balls.

MOTHER
ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and
her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but forty-five,
some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. Listlessly she
went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the
ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about, doing the work of a
chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of fat traveling men. Her
husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick
military step, and a black mustache trained to turn sharply up at the ends,
tried to put the wife out of his mind. The presence of the tall ghostly
figure, moving slowly through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself.
When he thought of her he grew angry and swore. The hotel was unprofitable
and forever on the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. He
thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things
defeated and done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was
now a mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he went spruce and
business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped and
turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and of
the woman would follow him even into the streets. "Damn such a life, damn
it!" he sputtered aimlessly.
Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been
the leading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. Some day, he told
himself, the fide of things political will turn in my favor and the years of
ineffectual service count big in the bestowal of rewards. He dreamed of
going to Congress and even of becoming governor. Once when a younger member
of the party arose at a political conference and began to boast of his
faithful service, Tom Willard grew white with fury. "Shut up, you," he
roared, glaring about. "What do you know of service? What are you but a boy?
Look at what I've done here! I was a Democrat here in Winesburg when it was
a crime to be a Democrat. In the old days they fairly hunted us with guns."
Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed
bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In the
son's presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he hurried
about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into his room and
closing the door knelt by a little desk, made of a kitchen table, that sat
near a window. In the room by the desk she went through a ceremony that was
half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the skies. In the boyish figure
she yearned to see something half forgotten that had once been a part of
herself recreated. The prayer concerned that. "Even though I die, I will in
some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination
that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I
am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will
come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand
it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow
that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us
both." Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about the boy's room. "And do
not let him become smart and successful either," she added vaguely.
The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a
formal thing without meaning. When she was ill and sat by the window in her
room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat by a
window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into Main Street.
By turning their heads they could see through another window, along an
alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and into the back door of
Abner Groff's bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus a picture of village life
presented itself to them. At the back door of his shop appeared Abner Groff
with a stick or an empty milk bottle in his hand. For a long time there was
a feud between the baker and a grey cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the
druggist. The boy and his mother saw the cat creep into the door of the
bakery and presently emerge followed by the baker, who swore and waved his
arms about. The baker's eyes were small and red and his black hair and beard
were filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the
cat had disappeared, he hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even some
of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at the back of
Sinning's Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched behind barrels
filled with torn paper and broken bottles above which flew a black swarm of
flies. Once when she was alone, and after watching a prolonged and
ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker, Elizabeth Willard put her
head down on her long white hands and wept. After that she did not look
along the alleyway any more, but tried to forget the contest between the
bearded man and the cat. It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life,
terrible in its vividness.
In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the
silence made them both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening train
came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and down upon a
board sidewalk. In the station yard, after the evening train had gone, there
was a heavy silence. Perhaps Skinner Leason, the express agent, moved a
truck the length of the station platform. Over on Main Street sounded a
man's voice, laughing. The door of the express office banged. George Willard
arose and crossing the room fumbled for the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked
against a chair, making it scrape along the floor. By the window sat the
sick woman, perfectly still, listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless,
could be seen drooping over the ends of the arms of the chair. "I think you
had better be out among the boys. You are too much indoors," she said,
striving to relieve the embarrassment of the departure. "I thought I would
take a walk," replied George Willard, who felt awkward and confused.
One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard
House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted only
by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth Willard had
an adventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and her son had not
come to visit her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of life that remained
in her body was blown into a flame by her anxiety and she crept out of bed,
dressed and hurried along the hallway toward her son's room, shaking with
exaggerated fears. As she went along she steadied herself with her hand,
slipped along the papered walls of the hall and breathed with difficulty.
The air whistled through her teeth. As she hurried forward she thought how
foolish she was. "He is concerned with boyish affairs," she told herself.
"Perhaps he has now begun to walk about in the evening with girls."
Elizabeth Willard had a dread of being seen by guests in the hotel that
had once belonged to her father and the ownership of which still stood
recorded in her name in the county courthouse. The hotel was continually
losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as
also shabby. Her own room was in an obscure corner and when she felt able to
work she voluntarily worked among the beds, preferring the labor that could
be done when the guests were abroad seeking trade among the merchants of
Winesburg.
By the door of her son's room the mother knelt upon the floor and
listened for some sound from within. When she heard the boy moving about and
talking in low tones a smile came to her lips. George Willard had a habit of
talking aloud to himself and to hear him doing so had always given his
mother a peculiar pleasure. The habit in him, she felt, strengthened the
secret bond that existed between them. A thousand times she had whispered to
herself of the matter. "He is groping about, trying to find himself," she
thought. "He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there
is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be
killed in myself."
In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and
started again toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would open
and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance and was
about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and bracing herself
with her hands waited, thinking to shake off a trembling fit of weakness
that had come upon her. The presence of the boy in the room had made her
happy. In her bed, during the long hours alone, the little fears that had
visited her had become giants. Now they were all gone. "When I get back to
my room I shall sleep," she murmured gratefully.
But Elizabeth Willard was not to return to her bed and to sleep. As she
stood trembling in the darkness the door of her son's room opened and the
boy's father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed out at the
door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he said infuriated
the woman.
Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself
as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out
successfully. However, when he was out of sight of the New Willard House and
had no fear of coming upon his wife, he swaggered and began to dramatize
himself as one of the chief men of the town. He wanted his son to succeed.
He it was who had secured for the boy the position on the Winesburg Eagle.
Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he was advising concerning
some course of conduct. "I tell you what, George, you've got to wake up," he
said sharply. "Will Henderson has spoken to me three times concerning the
matter. He says you go along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to
and acting like a gawky girl. What ails you?" Tom Willard laughed
good-naturedly. "Well, I guess you'll get over it," he said. "I told Will
that. You're not a fool and you're not a woman. You're Tom Willard's son and
you'll wake up. I'm not afraid. What you say clears things up. If being a
newspaper man had put the notion of becoming a writer into your mind that's
all right. Only I guess you'll have to wake up to do that too, eh?"
Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a flight of stairs
to the office. The woman in the darkness could hear him laughing and talking
with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by dozing in a
chair by the office door. She returned to the door of her son's room. The
weakness had passed from her body as by a miracle and she stepped boldly
along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When she heard the scraping
of a chair and the sound of a pen scratching upon paper, she again turned
and went back along the hallway to her own room.
A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of
the Winesburg hotel keeper. The determination was the result of long years
of quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. "Now," she told herself, "I will
act. There is something threatening my boy and I will ward it off." The fact
that the conversation between Tom Willard and his son had been rather quiet
and natural, as though an understanding existed between them, maddened her.
Although for years she had hated her husband, her hatred had always before
been a quite impersonal thing. He had been merely a part of something else
that she hated. Now, and by the few words at the door, he had become the
thing personified. In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists
and glared about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she
took out a long pair of sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a
dagger. "I will stab him," she said aloud. "He has chosen to be the voice of
evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him something will snap within
myself and I will die also. It will be a release for all of us."
In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had
borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been what
is called "stage-struck" and had paraded through the streets with traveling
men guests at her father's hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to
tell her of life in the cities out of which they had come. Once she startled
the town by putting on men's clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street.
In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much
confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in two
ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big definite
movement to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her mind to the
stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering over the world,
seeing always new faces and giving something out of herself to all people.
Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself with the thought, but when
she tried to talk of the matter to the members of the theatrical companies
that came to Winesburg and stopped at her father's hotel, she got nowhere.
They did not seem to know what she meant, or if she did get something of her
passion expressed, they only laughed. "It's not like that," they said. "It's
as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it."
With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with
Tom Willard, it was quite different. Always they seemed to understand and
sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the darkness
under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought that something
unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed
something in them.
And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that
came she felt for a time released and happy. She did not blame the men who
walked with her and later she did not blame Tom Willard. It was always the
same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild emotions, with
peace and then sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she put her hand upon the
face of the man and had always the same thought. Even though he were large
and bearded she thought he had become suddenly a little boy. She wondered
why he did not sob also.
In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House,
Elizabeth Willard lighted a lamp and put it on a dressing table that stood
by the door. A thought had come into her mind and she went to a closet and
brought out a small square box and set it on the table. The box contained
material for makeup 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 hardbaked ground. A cat sprang
from under George Willard's feet and ran away into the night. The young man
was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed by a blow. In
the alleyway he trembled as though with fright.
In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going
carefully and cautiously. The back doors of the Winesburg stores were open
and he could see men sitting about under the store lamps. In Myerbaum's
Notion Store Mrs. Willy the saloon keeper's wife stood by the counter with a
basket on her arm. Sid Green the clerk was waiting on her. He leaned over
the counter and talked earnestly.
George Willard crouched and then jumped through the path of light that
came out at the door. He began to run forward in the darkness. Behind Ed
Griffith's saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the ground.
The runner stumbled over the sprawling legs. He laughed brokenly.
George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been
trying to make up his mind to go through with the adventure and now he was
acting. In the office of the Winesburg Eagle he had been sitting since six
o'clock trying to think.
There had been no decision. He had just jumped to his feet, hurried
past Will Henderson who was reading proof in the printshop and started to
run along the alleyway.
Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people
who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street lamp
he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In his mind
there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid the adventure
on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would lose courage and
turn back.
George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father's
house. She was washing dishes by the light of a kerosene lamp. There she
stood behind the screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the back of
the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried to control the
shaking of his body. Only a narrow potato patch separated him from the
adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt sure enough of himself to call
to her. "Louise! Oh, Louise!" he called. The cry stuck in his throat. His
voice became a hoarse whisper.
Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth
in her hand. "How do you know I want to go out with you," she said sulkily.
"What makes you so sure?"
George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness
with the fence between them. "You go on along," she said. "Pa's in there.
I'll come along. You wait by Williams' barn."
The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise
Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The
letter was brief. "I'm yours if you want me," it said. He thought it
annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was
nothing between them. "She has a nerve! Well, gracious sakes, she has a
nerve," he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of vacant
lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had been planted right
down to the sidewalk.
When Louise Trunnion came out of the front door of her house she still
wore the gingham dress in which she had been washing dishes. There was no
hat on her head. The boy could see her standing with the doorknob in her
hand talking to someone within, no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her father.
Old Jake was half deaf and she shouted. The door closed and everything was
dark and silent in the little side street. George Willard trembled more
violently than ever.
In the shadows by Williams' barn George and Louise stood, not daring to
talk. She was not particularly comely and there was a black smudge on the
side of her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose with her
finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.
The young man began to laugh nervously. "It's warm," he said. He wanted
to touch her with his hand. "I'm not very bold," he thought. Just to touch
the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided, be an exquisite
pleasure. She began to quibble. "You think you're better than I am. Don't
tell me, I guess I know," she said drawing closer to him.
A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that
had lurked in the girl's eyes when they had met on the streets and thought
of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered tales concerning
her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male,
bold and aggressive. In his heart there was no sympathy for her. "Ah, come
on, it'll be all right. There won't be anyone know anything. How can they
know?" he urged.
They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the cracks of
which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks were missing and the sidewalk was
rough and irregular. He took hold of her hand that was also rough and
thought it delightfully small. "I can't go far," she said and her voice was
quiet, unperturbed.
They crossed a bridge that ran over a tiny stream and passed another
vacant lot in which corn grew. The street ended. In the path at the side of
the road they were compelled to walk one behind the other. Will Overton's
berry field lay beside the road and there was a pile of boards. "Will is
going to build a shed to store berry crates here," said George and they sat
down upon the boards.
When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o'clock
and had begun to rain. Three times he walked up and down the length of Main
Street. Sylvester West's Drug Store was still open and he went in and bought
a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was
pleased. For five minutes the two stood in the shelter of the store awning
and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had wanted more than anything
else to talk to some man. Around a corner toward the New Willard House he
went whistling softly.
On the sidewalk at the side of Winney's Dry Goods Store where there was
a high board fence covered with circus pictures, he stopped whistling and
stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as though for a
voice calling his name. Then again he laughed nervously. "She hasn't got
anything on me. Nobody knows," he muttered doggedly and went on his way.

GODLINESS
A Tale in Four Parts
THERE WERE ALWAYS three or four old people sitting on the front porch
of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the
old people were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a colorless, soft
voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with thin white hair who was
Jesse's uncle.
The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outercovering 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 animallike 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