Андерсон Шервуд. Уайнсбург, Огайо (engl)

loneliness that had visited him earlier in the evening returned and colored
his thoughts of the adventure through which he had just passed. "Huh!" he
exclaimed, turning and staring in the direction taken by Helen White.
"That's how things'll turn out. She'll be like the rest. I suppose she'll
begin now to look at me in a funny way." He looked at the ground and
pondered this thought. "She'll be embarrassed and feel strange when I'm
around," he whispered to himself. "That's how it'll be. That's how
everything'll turn out. When it comes to loving someone, it won't never be
me. It'll be someone else--some fool--someone who talks a lot--someone like
that George Willard."

TANDY
UNTIL SHE WAS seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an
unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little
attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and
thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed
in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his
neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child
that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead
mother's relatives.
A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did
not see. He was a tall, redhaired young man who was almost always drunk.
Sometimes he sat in a chair before the New Willard House with Tom Hard, the
father. As Tom talked, declaring there could be no God, the stranger smiled
and winked at the bystanders. He and Tom became friends and were much
together.
The stranger was the son of a rich merchant of Cleveland and had come
to Winesburg on a mission. He wanted to cure himself of the habit of drink,
and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living in a rural
community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the appetite
that was destroying him.
His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing
hours led to his drinking harder than ever. But he did succeed in doing
something. He gave a name rich with meaning to Tom Hard's daughter.
One evening when he was recovering from a long debauch the stranger
came reeling along the main street of the town. Tom Hard sat in a chair
before the New Willard House with his daughter, then a child of five, on his
knees. Beside him on the board sidewalk sat young George Willard. The
stranger dropped into a chair beside them. His body shook and when he tried
to talk his voice trembled.
It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the
railroad that ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel.
Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from
the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the
roadway arose and barked. The stranger began to babble and made a prophecy
concerning the child that lay in the arms of the agnostic.
"I came here to quit drinking," he said, and tears began to run down
his cheeks. He did not look at Tom Hard, but leaned forward and stared into
the darkness as though seeing a vision. "I ran away to the country to be
cured, but I am not cured. There is a reason." He turned to look at the
child who sat up very straight on her father's knee and returned the look.
The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. "Drink is not the only thing
to which I am addicted," he said. "There is something else. I am a lover and
have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to
realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are
few who understand that."
The stranger became silent and seemed overcome with sadness, but
another blast from the whistle of the passenger engine aroused him. "I have
not lost faith. I proclaim that. I have only been brought to the place where
I know my faith will not be realized," he declared hoarsely. He looked hard
at the child and began to address her, paying no more attention to the
father. "There is a woman coming," he said, and his voice was now sharp and
earnest. "I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may
be the woman. It would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on
such an evening as this, when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is
as yet only a child."
The shoulders of the stranger shook violently, and when he tried to
roll a cigarette the paper fell from his trembling fingers. He grew angry
and scolded. "They think it's easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know
better," he declared. Again he turned to the child. "I understand," he
cried. "Perhaps of all men I alone understand."
His glance again wandered away to the darkened street. "I know about
her, although she has never crossed my path," he said softly. "I know about
her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to
me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman.
I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true
dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to
be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get. "
The stranger arose and stood before Tom Hard. His body rocked back and
forth and he seemed about to fall, but instead he dropped to his knees on
the sidewalk and raised the hands of the little girl to his drunken lips. He
kissed them ecstatically. "Be Tandy, little one," he pleaded. "Dare to be
strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough
to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy."
The stranger arose and staggered off down the street. A day or two
later he got aboard a train and returned to his home in Cleveland. On the
summer evening, after the talk before the hotel, Tom Hard took the girl
child to the house of a relative where she had been invited to spend the
night. As he went along in the darkness under the trees he forgot the
babbling voice of the stranger and his mind returned to the making of
arguments by which he might destroy men's faith in God. He spoke his
daughter's name and she began to weep.
"I don't want to be called that," she declared. "I want to be called
Tandy--Tandy Hard." The child wept so bitterly that Tom Hard was touched and
tried to comfort her. He stopped beneath a tree and, taking her into his
arms, began to caress her. "Be good, now," he said sharply; but she would
not be quieted. With childish abandon she gave herself over to grief, her
voice breaking the evening stillness of the street. "I want to be Tandy. I
want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy Hard," she cried, shaking her head and
sobbing as though her young strength were not enough to bear the vision the
words of the drunkard had brought to her.

THE STRENGTH OF GOD
THE REVEREND Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of
Winesburg, and had been in that position ten years. He was forty years old,
and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in the
pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from Wednesday
morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the two sermons
that must be preached on Sunday. Early on Sunday morning he went into a
little room called a study in the bell tower of the church and prayed. In
his prayers there was one note that always predominated. "Give me strength
and courage for Thy work, O Lord!" he pleaded, kneeling on the bare floor
and bowing his head in the presence of the task that lay before him.
The Reverend Hartman was a tall man with a brown beard. His wife, a
stout, nervous woman, was the daughter of a manufacturer of underwear at
Cleveland, Ohio. The minister himself was rather a favorite in the town. The
elders of the church liked him because he was quiet and unpretentious and
Mrs. White, the banker's wife, thought him scholarly and refined.
The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other
churches of Winesburg. It was larger and more imposing and its minister was
better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on summer evenings
sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street and up and
down Buckeye Street he went, bowing gravely to the people, while his wife,
afire with secret pride, looked at him out of the corners of her eyes and
worried lest the horse become frightened and run away.
For a good many years after he came to Winesburg things went well with
Curtis Hartman. He was not one to arouse keen enthusiasm among the
worshippers in his church but on the other hand he made no enemies. In
reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of
remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and
byways of the town. He wondered if the flame of the spirit really burned in
him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new current of power would come
like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would tremble
before the spirit of God made manifest in him. "I am a poor stick and that
will never really happen to me," he mused dejectedly, and then a patient
smile lit up his features. "Oh well, I suppose I'm doing well enough," he
added philosophically.
The room in the bell tower of the church, where on Sunday mornings the
minister prayed for an increase in him of the power of God, had but one
window. It was long and narrow and swung outward on a hinge like a door. On
the window, made of little leaded panes, was a design showing the Christ
laying his hand upon the head of a child. One Sunday morning in the summer
as he sat by his desk in the room with a large Bible opened before him, and
the sheets of his sermon scattered about, the minister was shocked to see,
in the upper room of the house next door, a woman lying in her bed and
smoking a cigarette while she read a book. Curtis Hartman went on tiptoe to
the window and closed it softly. He was horror stricken at the thought of a
woman smoking and trembled also to think that his eyes, just raised from the
pages of the book of God, had looked upon the bare shoulders and white
throat of a woman. With his brain in a whirl he went down into the pulpit
and preached a long sermon without once thinking of his gestures or his
voice. The sermon attracted unusual attention because of its power and
clearness. "I wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying a message
into her soul," he thought and began to hope that on future Sunday mornings
he might be able to say words that would touch and awaken the woman
apparently far gone in secret sin.
The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through the windows of
which the minister had seen the sight that had so upset him, was occupied by
two women. Aunt Elizabeth Swift, a grey competentlooking widow with money in
the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with her daughter Kate Swift, a
school teacher. The school teacher was thirty years old and had a neat
trim-looking figure. She had few friends and bore a reputation of having a
sharp tongue. When he began to think about her, Curtis Hartman remembered
that she had been to Europe and had lived for two years in New York City.
"Perhaps after all her smoking means nothing," he thought. He began to
remember that when he was a student in college and occasionally read novels,
good although somewhat worldly women, had smoked through the pages of a book
that had once fallen into his hands. With a rush of new determination he
worked on his sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to reach
the ears and the soul of this new listener, both his embarrassment in the
pulpit and the necessity of prayer in the study on Sunday mornings.
Reverend Hartman's experience with women had been somewhat limited. He
was the son of a wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his way
through college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer had boarded in a
house where he lived during his school days and he had married her after a
formal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by the girl
herself. On his marriage day the underwear manufacturer had given his
daughter five thousand dollars and he promised to leave her at least twice
that amount in his will. The minister had thought himself fortunate in
marriage and had never permitted himself to think of other women. He did not
want to think of other women. What he wanted was to do the work of God
quietly and earnestly.
In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke. From wanting to reach the
ears of Kate Swift, and through his sermons to delve into her soul, he began
to want also to look again at the figure lying white and quiet in the bed.
On a Sunday morning when he could not sleep because of his thoughts he arose
and went to walk in the streets. When he had gone along Main Street almost
to the old Richmond place he stopped and picking up a stone rushed off to
the room in the bell tower. With the stone he broke out a corner of the
window and then locked the door and sat down at the desk before the open
Bible to wait. When the shade of the window to Kate Swift's room was raised
he could see, through the hole, directly into her bed, but she was not
there. She also had arisen and had gone for a walk and the hand that raised
the shade was the hand of Aunt Elizabeth Swift.
The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal
desire to "peep" and went back to his own house praising God. In an ill
moment he forgot, however, to stop the hole in the window. The piece of
glass broken out at the corner of the window just nipped off the bare heel
of the boy standing motionless and looking with rapt eyes into the face of
the Christ.
Curtis Hartman forgot his sermon on that Sunday morning. He talked to
his congregation and in his talk said that it was a mistake for people to
think of their minister as a man set aside and intended by nature to lead a
blameless life. "Out of my own experience I know that we, who are the
ministers of God's word, are beset by the same temptations that assail you,"
he declared. "I have been tempted and have surrendered to temptation. It is
only the hand of God, placed beneath my head, that has raised me up. As he
has raised me so also will he raise you. Do not despair. In your hour of sin
raise your eyes to the skies and you will be again and again saved."
Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of
his mind and began to be something like a lover in the presence of his wife.
One evening when they drove out together he turned the horse out of Buckeye
Street and in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks Pond, put his
arm about Sarah Hartman's waist. When he had eaten breakfast in the morning
and was ready to retire to his study at the back of his house he went around
the table and kissed his wife on the cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came
into his head, he smiled and raised his eyes to the skies. "Intercede for
me, Master," he muttered, "keep me in the narrow path intent on Thy work."
And now began the real struggle in the soul of the brown-bearded
minister. By chance he discovered that Kate Swift was in the habit of lying
in her bed in the evenings and reading a book. A lamp stood on a table by
the side of the bed and the light streamed down upon her white shoulders and
bare throat. On the evening when he made the discovery the minister sat at
the desk in the dusty room from nine until after eleven and when her light
was put out stumbled out of the church to spend two more hours walking and
praying in the streets. He did not want to kiss the shoulders and the throat
of Kate Swift and had not allowed his mind to dwell on such thoughts. He did
not know what he wanted. "I am God's child and he must save me from myself,"
he cried, in the darkness under the trees as he wandered in the streets. By
a tree he stood and looked at the sky that was covered with hurrying clouds.
He began to talk to God intimately and closely. "Please, Father, do not
forget me. Give me power to go tomorrow and repair the hole in the window.
Lift my eyes again to the skies. Stay with me, Thy servant, in his hour of
need."
Up and down through the silent streets walked the minister and for days
and weeks his soul was troubled. He could not understand the temptation that
had come to him nor could he fathom the reason for its coming. In a way he
began to blame God, saying to himself that he had tried to keep his feet in
the true path and had not run about seeking sin. "Through my days as a young
man and all through my life here I have gone quietly about my work," he
declared. "Why now should I be tempted? What have I done that this burden
should be laid on me?"
Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis
Hartman crept out of his house to the room in the bell tower to sit in the
darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and later went
to walk and pray in the streets. He could not understand himself. For weeks
he would go along scarcely thinking of the school teacher and telling
himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to look at her body. And
then something would happen. As he sat in the study of his own house, hard
at work on a sermon, he would become nervous and begin to walk up and down
the room. "I will go out into the streets," he told himself and even as he
let himself in at the church door he persistently denied to himself the
cause of his being there. "I will not repair the hole in the window and I
will train myself to come here at night and sit in the presence of this
woman without raising my eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The
Lord has devised this temptation as a test of my soul and I will grope my
way out of darkness into the light of righteousness."
One night in January when it was bitter cold and snow lay deep on the
streets of Winesburg Curtis Hartman paid his last visit to the room in the
bell tower of the church. It was past nine o'clock when he left his own
house and he set out so hurriedly that he forgot to put on his overshoes. In
Main Street no one was abroad but Hop Higgins the night watchman and in the
whole town no one was awake but the watchman and young George Willard, who
sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle trying to write a story. Along the
street to the church went the minister, plowing through the drifts and
thinking that this time he would utterly give way to sin. "I want to look at
the woman and to think of kissing her shoulders and I am going to let myself
think what I choose," he declared bitterly and tears came into his eyes. He
began to think that he would get out of the ministry and try some other way
of life. "I shall go to some city and get into business," he declared. "If
my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give myself over to sin.
At least I shall not be a hypocrite, preaching the word of God with my mind
thinking of the shoulders and neck of a woman who does not belong to me."
It was cold in the room of the bell tower of the church on that January
night and almost as soon as he came into the room Curtis Hartman knew that
if he stayed he would be ill. His feet were wet from tramping in the snow
and there was no fire. In the room in the house next door Kate Swift had not
yet appeared. With grim determination the man sat down to wait. Sitting in
the chair and gripping the edge of the desk on which lay the Bible he stared
into the darkness thinking the blackest thoughts of his life. He thought of
his wife and for the moment almost hated her. "She has always been ashamed
of passion and has cheated me," he thought. "Man has a right to expect
living passion and beauty in a woman. He has no right to forget that he is
an animal and in me there is something that is Greek. I will throw off the
woman of my bosom and seek other women. I will besiege this school teacher.
I will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I
will live then for my lusts."
The distracted man trembled from head to foot, partly from cold, partly
from the struggle in which he was engaged. Hours passed and a fever assailed
his body. His throat began to hurt and his teeth chattered. His feet on the
study floor felt like two cakes of ice. Still he would not give up. "I will
see this woman and will think the thoughts I have never dared to think," he
told himself, gripping the edge of the desk and waiting.
Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that night of
waiting in the church, and also he found in the thing that happened what he
took to be the way of life for him. On other evenings when he had waited he
had not been able to see, through the little hole in the glass, any part of
the school teacher's room except that occupied by her bed. In the darkness
he had waited until the woman suddenly appeared sitting in the bed in her
white nightrobe. When the light was turned up she propped herself up among
the' pillows and read a book. Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes.
Only her bare shoulders and throat were visible.
On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after
his mind had two or three times actually slipped away into an odd land of
fantasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself back
into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next door a lamp was
lighted and the waiting man stared into an empty bed. Then upon the bed
before his eyes a naked woman threw herself. Lying face downward she wept
and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final outburst of weeping
she half arose, and in the presence of the man who had waited to look and
not to think thoughts the woman of sin began to pray. In the lamplight her
figure, slim and strong, looked like the figure of the boy in the presence
of the Christ on the leaded window.
Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a
cry he arose, dragging the heavy desk along the floor. The Bible fell,
making a great clatter in the silence. When the light in the house next door
went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along the street
he went and ran in at the door of the Winesburg Eagle. To George Willard,
who was tramping up and down in the office undergoing a struggle of his own,
he began to talk half incoherently. "The ways of God are beyond human
understanding," he cried, running in quickly and closing the door. He began
to advance upon the young man, his eyes glowing and his voice ringing with
fervor. "I have found the light," he cried. "After ten years in this town,
God has manifested himself to me in the body of a woman." His voice dropped
and he began to whisper. "I did not understand," he said. "What I took to be
a trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more beautiful
fervor of the spirit. God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift,
the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift?
Although she may not be aware of it, she is an instrument of God, bearing
the message of truth."
Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door
he stopped, and after looking up and down the deserted street, turned again
to George Willard. "I am delivered. Have no fear." He held up a bleeding
fist for the young man to see. "I smashed the glass of the window," he
cried. "Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in
me and I broke it with my fist."

THE TEACHER
SNOW LAY DEEP in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about
ten o'clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds
along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were fairly
smooth and in places ice covered the mud. "There will be good sleighing,"
said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith's saloon. Out of the
saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist stumbling along in the
kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. "Snow will bring the people into
town on Saturday," said the druggist. The two men stopped and discussed
their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on a light overcoat and no overshoes,
kicked the heel of his left foot with the toe of the right. "Snow will be
good for the wheat," observed the druggist sagely.
Young George Willard, who had nothing to do, was glad because he did
not feel like working that day. The weekly paper had been printed and taken
to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow began to fall on Thursday.
At eight o'clock, after the morning train had passed, he put a pair of
skates in his pocket and went up to Waterworks Pond but did not go skating.
Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine Creek he went until he
came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a fire against the side of a
log and sat down at the end of the log to think. When the snow began to fall
and the wind to blow he hurried about getting fuel for the fire.
The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his
school teacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a book
she wanted him to read and had been alone with her for an hour. For the
fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with great earnestness and
he could not make out what she meant by her talk. He began to believe she
must be in love with him and the thought was both pleasing and annoying.
Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on the fire. Looking
about to be sure he was alone he talked aloud pretending he was in the
presence of the woman, "Oh,, you're just letting on, you know you are," he
declared. "I am going to find out about you. You wait and see."
The young man got up and went back along the path toward town leaving
the fire blazing in the wood. As he went through the streets the skates
clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he built a
fire in the stove and lay down on top of the bed. He began to have lustful
thoughts and pulling down the shade of the window closed his eyes and turned
his face to the wall. He took a pillow into his arms and embraced it
thinking first of the school teacher, who by her words had stirred something
within him, and later of Helen White, the slim daughter of the town banker,
with whom he had been for a long time half in love.
By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the
weather had become bitter cold. It was difficult to walk about. The stores
were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses. The evening train
from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in its arrival. By
ten o'clock all but four of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were
in bed.
Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake. He was lame and
carried a heavy stick. On dark nights he carried a lantern. Between nine and
ten o'clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he stumbled through
the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then he went into alleyways and
tried the back doors. Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the
New Willard House and beat on the door. Through the rest of the night he
intended to stay by the stove. "You go to bed. I'll keep the stove going,"
he said to the boy who slept on a cot in the hotel office.
Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his shoes. When the boy
had gone to sleep he began to think of his own affairs. He intended to paint
his house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost of paint
and labor. That led him into other calculations. The night watchman was
sixty years old and wanted to retire. He had been a soldier in the Civil War
and drew a small pension. He hoped to find some new method of making a
living and aspired to become a professional breeder of ferrets. Already he
had four of the strangely shaped savage little creatures, that are used by
sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits, in the cellar of his house. "Now I have
one male and three females," he mused. "If I am lucky by spring I shall have
twelve or fifteen. In another year I shall be able to begin advertising
ferrets for sale in the sporting papers."
The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank.
He did not sleep. By years of practice he had trained himself to sit for
hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the morning he
was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.
With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only
three people were awake in Winesburg. George Willard was in the office of
the Eagle pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but in reality
continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood. In the bell
tower of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was sitting in
the darkness preparing himself for a revelation from God, and Kate Swift,
the school teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in the storm.
It was past ten o'clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was
unpremeditated. It was as though the man and the boy, by thinking of her,
had driven her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth Swift had gone
to the county seat concerning some business in connection with mortgages in
which she had money invested and would not be back until the next day. By a
huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room of the house sat the
daughter reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and, snatching a
cloak from a rack by the front door, ran out of the house.
At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty
woman. Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with blotches
that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the winter streets she was
lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square, and her features were
as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden in the dim light
of a summer evening.
During the afternoon the school teacher had been to see Doctor Welling
concerning her health. The doctor had scolded her and had declared she was
in danger of losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to be abroad
in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous.
The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and
would not have turned back had she remembered. She was very cold but after
walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she went to the
end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales set in the ground
before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along Trunion Pike she went to Ned
Winters' barn and turning east followed a street of low frame houses that
led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road that ran down a shallow valley
past Ike Smead's chicken farm to Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the
bold, excited mood that had driven her out of doors passed and then returned
again.
There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate
Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and stern,
and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long while
something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of the
children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a time they
did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.
With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and
down in the schoolroom and talked very rapidly. It did not seem to matter
what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children of Charles
Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning the life of the
dead writer. The stories were told with the air of one who had lived in a
house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of his private life. The
children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles Lamb must be someone who
had once lived in Winesburg.
On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto
Cellini. That time they laughed. What a bragging, blustering, brave, lovable
fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she invented
anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a room above
Cellini's lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys guffaw. Sugars
McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that he became dizzy and
fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him. Then suddenly she became
again cold and stern.
On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snow-covered
streets, a crisis had come into the life of the school teacher. Although no
one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been very
adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in the
schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought within
her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in her
mind. The people of the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid and
because she spoke sharply and went her own way thought her lacking in all
the human feeling that did so much to make and mar their own lives. In
reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them, and more than
once, in the five years since she had come back from her travels to settle
in Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been compelled to go out of
the house and walk half through the night fighting out some battle raging
within. Once on a night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when
she came home had a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift. "I am glad you're not
a man," said the mother sharply. "More than once I've waited for your father
to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I've had my share
of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst
side of him reproduced in you."
Kate Swift's mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In
something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized the
spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the summer she
had gone to the Eagle office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken him
out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank and
talked. The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy some
conception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer. "You will
have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness.
She took hold of George Willard's shoulders and turned him about so that she
could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to
embrace. "If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with
words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing
until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to
frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you
think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing
to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."
On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend
Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of the church waiting to look at her
body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a book. It
was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy. He had the
book under his arm and was preparing to depart. Again Kate Swift talked with
great earnestness. Night was coming on and the light in the room grew dim.
As he turned to go she spoke his name softly and with an impulsive movement
took hold of his hand. Because the reporter was rapidly becoming a man
something of his man's appeal, combined with the winsomeness of the boy,
stirred the heart of the lonely woman. A passionate desire to have him
understand the import of life, to learn to interpret it truly and honestly,
swept over her. Leaning forward, her lips brushed his cheek. At the same
moment he for the first time became aware of the marked beauty of her
features. They were both embarrassed, and to relieve her feeling she became
harsh and domineering. "What's the use? It will be ten years before you
begin to understand what I mean when I talk to you," she cried passionately.
On the night of the storm and while the minister sat in the church
waiting for her, Kate Swift went to the office of the Winesburg Eagle,
intending to have another talk with the boy. After the long walk in the snow
she was cold, lonely, and tired. As she came through Main Street she saw the
fight from the printshop window shining on the snow and on an impulse opened
the door and went in. For an hour she sat by the stove in the office talking
of life. She talked with passionate earnestness. The impulse that had driven
her out into the snow poured itself out into talk. She became inspired as
she sometimes did in the presence of the children in school. A great
eagerness to open the door of life to the boy, who had been her pupil and
who she thought might possess a talent for the understanding of life, had
possession of her. So strong was her passion that it became something
physical. Again her hands took hold of his shoulders and she turned him
about. In the dim light her eyes blazed. She arose and laughed, not sharply
as was customary with her, but in a queer, hesitating way. "I must be
going," she said. "In a moment, if I stay, I'll be wanting to kiss you."
In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked
to the door. She was a teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked at
George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had a
thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took possession of
her. In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a boy, but a man ready
to play the part of a man.
The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the
warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went out
of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited. When he
came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body fall heavily
against him. For George Willard the confusion was immediately increased. For
a moment he held the body of the woman tightly against his body and then it
stiffened. Two sharp little fists began to beat on his face. When the school
teacher had run away and left him alone, he walked up and down the office
swearing furiously.
It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded
himself. When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad.
Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman George
had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God bearing a
message of truth.
George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the
printshop went home. Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in his
dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room. The fire
in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When he got into bed
the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.
George Willard rolled about in the bed on which had lain in the
afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The words
of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his ears.
His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to the baffled male,
passed and he tried to understand what had happened. He could not make it
out. Over and over he turned the matter in his mind. Hours passed and he
began to think it must be time for another day to come. At four o'clock he
pulled the covers up about his neck and tried to sleep. When he became
drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it groped about in the
darkness. "I have missed something. I have missed something Kate Swift was
trying to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg
he was the last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.

LONELINESS
HE WAS THE son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road
leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the town
limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of the windows
facing the road were kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of
chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived
in the house with his mother in those days and when he was a young boy went
to school at the Winesburg High School. Old citizens remembered him as a
quiet, smiling youth inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the
road when he came into town and sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had
to shout and swear to make him realize where he was so that he would turn
out of the beaten track and let them pass.
When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York City and was a
city man for fifteen years. He studied French and went to an art school,
hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind he planned
to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the masters there, but
that never turned out.
Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could draw well enough
and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might
have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he was always
a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development. He never grew up
and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people
understand him. The child in him kept bumping against things, against
actualities like money and sex and opinions. Once he was hit by a street car
and thrown against an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of the many
things that kept things from turning out for Enoch Robinson
In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became
confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal
with young men. He got into a group of other young artists, both men and
women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in his room.
Once he got drunk and was taken to a police station where a police
magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an affair with
a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging house. The woman
and Enoch walked together three blocks and then the young man grew afraid
and ran away. The woman had been drinking and the incident amused her. She
leaned against the wall of a building and laughed so heartily that another
man stopped and laughed with her. The two went away together, still
laughing, and Enoch crept off to his room trembling and vexed.
The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington
Square and was long and narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that
fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost
more than it is the story of a man.
And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch's friends. There
was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists
of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all
of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked.
They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about
it. They think it matters much more than it does.
And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch
Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a
corner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike eyes
stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half
finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in their chairs, they
talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side. Words were
said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are
always being said.
Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how. He was too excited to
talk coherently. When he tried he sputtered and stammered and his voice
sounded strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He knew what
he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could never by any possibility
say it. When a picture he had painted was under discussion, he wanted to
burst out with something like this: "You don't get the point," he wanted to
explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist of the things you see and say
words about. There is something else, something you don't see at all,
something you aren't intended to see. Look at this one over here, by the
door here, where the light from the window falls on it. The dark spot by the