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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 twentyfive 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 presence. When she did speak sharply to him he had only
to look steadily into her eyes to see dawning there the puzzled look he had
already noticed in the eyes of others when he looked at them.
The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the
mother did not. She expected from all people certain conventional reactions
to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and looked at
the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all was forgiven. After
the weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept into his room and kissed
him.
Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did not do these
things. After the severest reprimand, he did not tremble and look at the
floor but instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to invade
her mind. As for creeping into his room-- after Seth had passed his
fifteenth year, she would have been half afraid to do anything of the kind.
Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys
ran away from home. The three boys climbed into the open door of an empty
freight car and rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was being held.
One of the boys had a bottle filled with a combination of whiskey and
blackberry wine, and the three sat with legs dangling out of the car door
drinking from the bottle. Seth's two companions sang and waved their hands
to idlers about the stations of the towns through which the train passed.
They planned raids upon the baskets of farmers who had come with their
families to the fair. "We will five like kings and won't have to spend a
penny to see the fair and horse races," they declared boastfully.
After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down
the floor of her home filled with vague alarms. Although on the next day she
discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on what adventure
the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All through the night she
lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling herself that Seth, like his
father, would come to a sudden and violent end. So determined was she that
the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she
would not allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a
pencil and paper and wrote down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she
intended to pour out upon him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going
about the garden and saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part.
And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a little weary and
with coal soot in his ears and about his eyes, she again found herself
unable to reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail by
the kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her. "I wanted to turn back
within an hour after we had started," he explained. "I didn't know what to
do. I knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if I didn't go on I
would be ashamed of myself. I went through with the thing for my own good.
It was uncomfortable, sleeping on wet straw, and two drunken Negroes came
and slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket out of a farmer's wagon I
couldn't help thinking of his children going all day without food. I was
sick of the whole affair, but I was determined to stick it out until the
other boys were ready to come back."
"I'm glad you did stick it out," replied the mother, half resentfully,
and kissing him upon the forehead pretended to busy herself with the work
about the house.
On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New Willard House to
visit his friend, George Willard. It had rained during the afternoon, but as
he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and a golden
glow lit up the west. Going around a corner, he turned in at the door of the
hotel and began to climb the stairway leading up to his friend's room. In
the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men were engaged in a
discussion of politics.
On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices of the men
below. They were excited and talked rapidly. Tom Willard was berating the
traveling men. "I am a Democrat but your talk makes me sick," he said. "You
don't understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are friends. It is
impossible perhaps for your mind to grasp that. If anyone tells you that a
friendship can be deeper and bigger and more worth while than dollars and
cents, or even more worth while than state politics, you snicker and laugh."
The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a tall,
grey-mustached man who worked for a wholesale grocery house. "Do you think
that I've lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark Hanna?" he
demanded. "Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money and nothing else. This
McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and don't you forget it."
The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the rest of the
discussion, but went on up the stairway and into the little dark hall.
Something in the voices of the men talking in the hotel office started a
chain of thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to think that
loneliness was a part of his character, something that would always stay
with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by a window that looked into an
alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner Groff, the town baker. His
tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and down the alleyway. In his shop someone
called the baker, who pretended not to hear. The baker had an empty milk
bottle in his hand and an angry sullen look in his eyes.
In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the "deep one." "He's like his
father," men said as he went through the streets. "He'll break out some of
these days. You wait and see."
The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys
instinctively greeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected Seth
Richmond's outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was deeper
than boys are given credit for being, but he was not what the men of the
town, and even his mother, thought him to be. No great underlying purpose
lay back of his habitual silence, and he had no definite plan for his life.
When the boys with whom he associated were noisy and quarrelsome, he stood
quietly at one side. With calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively
figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in what was
going on, and sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested
in anything. Now, as he stood in the half-darkness by the window watching
the baker, he wished that he himself might become thoroughly stirred by
something, even by the fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted.
"It would be better for me if I could become excited and wrangle about
politics like windy old Tom Willard," he thought, as he left the window and
went again along the hallway to the room occupied by his friend, George
Willard.
George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the rather odd
friendship between the two, it was he who was forever courting and the
younger boy who was being courted. The paper on which George worked had one
policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as possible of
the inhabitants of the village. Like an excited dog, George Willard ran here
and there, noting on his pad of paper who had gone on business to the county
seat or had returned from a visit to a neighboring village. All day he wrote
little facts upon the pad. "A. P. Wringlet had received a shipment of straw
hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom
Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road."
The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given
him a place of distinction in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked
continually of the matter, "It's the easiest of all lives to live," he
declared, becoming excited and boastful. "Here and there you go and there is
no one to boss you. Though you are in India or in the South Seas in a boat,
you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my name up and then
see what fun I shall have."
In George Willard's room, which had a window looking down into an
alleyway and one that looked across railroad tracks to Biff Carter's Lunch
Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and looked at
the floor. George Willard, who had been sitting for an hour idly playing
with a lead pencil, greeted him effusively. "I've been trying to write a
love story," he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he began
walking up and down the room. "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to
fall in love. I've been sitting here and thinking it over and I'm going to
do it."
As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went to a window and
turning his back to his friend leaned out. "I know who I'm going to fall in
love with," he said sharply. "It's Helen White. She is the only girl in town
with any 'get-up' to her."
Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked toward his
visitor. "Look here," he said. "You know Helen White better than I do. I
want you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking to her and say
that I'm in love with her. See what she says to that. See how she takes it,
and then you come and tell me."
Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door. The words of his comrade
irritated him unbearably. "Well, good-bye," he said briefly.
George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to
look into Seth's face. "What's the matter? What are you going to do? You
stay here and let's talk," he urged.
A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the men of the town
who were, he thought, perpetually talking of nothing, and most of all,
against his own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. "Aw, speak to
her yourself," he burst forth and then, going quickly through the door,
slammed it sharply in his friend's face. "I'm going to find Helen White and
talk to her, but not about him," he muttered.
Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door of the hotel
muttering with wrath. Crossing a little dusty street and climbing a low iron
railing, he went to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George Willard
he thought a profound fool, and he wished that he had said so more
vigorously. Although his acquaintanceship with Helen White, the banker's
daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the subject of his
thoughts and he felt that she was something private and personal to himself.
"The busy fool with his love stories," he muttered, staring back over his
shoulder at George Willard's room, "why does he never tire of his eternal
talking."
It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the station platform
men and boys loaded the boxes of red, fragrant berries into two express cars
that stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although in the west
a storm threatened, and no street lamps were lighted. In the dim light the
figures of the men standing upon the express truck and pitching the boxes in
at the doors of the cars were but dimly discernible. Upon the iron railing
that protected the station lawn sat other men. Pipes were lighted. Village
jokes went back and forth. Away in the distance a train whistled and the men
loading the boxes into the cars worked with renewed activity.
Seth arose from his place on the grass and went silently past the men
perched upon the railing and into Main Street. He had come to a resolution.
"I'll get out of here," he told himself. "What good am I here? I'm going to
some city and go to work. I'll tell mother about it tomorrow."
Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past Wacker's Cigar Store
and the Town Hall, and into Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the thought
that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the depression did
not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. In the heavy
shadows of a big tree before Doctor Welling's house, he stopped and stood
watching half-witted Turk Smollet, who was pushing a wheelbarrow in the
road. The old man with his absurdly boyish mind had a dozen long boards on
the wheelbarrow, and, as he hurried along the road, balanced the load with
extreme nicety. "Easy there, Turk! Steady now, old boy!" the old man shouted
to himself, and laughed so that the load of boards rocked dangerously.
Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood chopper whose
peculiarities added so much of color to the life of the village. He knew
that when Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of a
whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old man was going far out
of his way in order to pass through Main Street and exhibit his skill in
wheeling the boards. "If George Willard were here, he'd have something to
say," thought Seth. "George belongs to this town. He'd shout at Turk and
Turk would shout at him. They'd both be secretly pleased by what they had
said. It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not make a fuss about it,
but I'm going to get out of here."
Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness, feeling himself an
outcast in his own town. He began to pity himself, but a sense of the
absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was
simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity. "I'm
made to go to work. I may be able to make a place for myself by steady
working, and I might as well be at it," he decided.
Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the darkness by the
front door. On the door hung a heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced
into the village by Helen White's mother, who had also organized a women's
club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. Its
heavy clatter sounded like a report from distant guns. "How awkward and
foolish I am," he thought. "If Mrs. White comes to the door, I won't know
what to say."
It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth standing at the
edge of the porch. Blushing with pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the
door softly. "I'm going to get out of town. I don't know what I'll do, but
I'm going to get out of here and go to work. I think I'll go to Columbus,"
he said. "Perhaps I'll get into the State University down there. Anyway, I'm
going. I'll tell mother tonight." He hesitated and looked doubtfully about.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind coming to walk with me?"
Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy
clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the deep
twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward,
the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the
wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so that their way was half
lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by
the low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play,
disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively.
In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled,
pursuing the gathering swarm of night flies.
Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had been a half
expressed intimacy between him and the maiden who now for the first time
walked beside him. For a time she had been beset with a madness for writing
notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found them concealed in his books
at school and one had been given him by a child met in the street, while
several had been delivered through the village post office.
The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a
mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth had not answered them, although he had
been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil upon
the stationery of the banker's wife. Putting them into the pocket of his
coat, he went through the street or stood by the fence in the school yard
with something burning at his side. He thought it fine that he should be
thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in
town.
Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced
the street. The building had once been a factory for the making of barrel
staves but was now vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a house a man
and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming dearly across to
the half-embarrassed youth and maiden. There was the sound of scraping
chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel path to a wooden gate.
Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed the woman. "For
old times' sake," he said and, turning, walked rapidly away along the
sidewalk.
"That's Belle Turner," whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into
Seth's hand. "I didn't know she had a fellow. I thought she was too old for
that." Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a strange,
dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came a desire to tell her
something he had been determined not to tell. "George Willard's in love with
you," he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice was low and quiet.
"He's writing a story, and he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it
feels. He wanted me to tell you and see what you said."
Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden
surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge sat
on a wooden bench beneath a bush.
On the street as he walked beside the girl new and daring thoughts had
come into Seth Richmond's mind. He began to regret his decision to get out
of town. "It would be something new and altogether delightful to remain and
walk often through the streets with Helen White," he thought. In imagination
he saw himself putting his arm about her waist and feeling her arms clasped
tightly about his neck. One of those odd combinations of events and places
made him connect the idea of love-making with this girl and a spot he had
visited some days before. He had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer
who lived on a hillside beyond the Fair Ground and had returned by a path
through a field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer's house Seth had
stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming noise
had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home
of a swarm of bees.
And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him
in the long grass. He stood in a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in the
field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with tiny
purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds the
bees were gathered in armies, singing as they worked.
Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the
weeds beneath the tree. Beside him, in the scene built in his fancy, lay
Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept him from
kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished. Instead,
he lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening to the army of bees
that sang the sustained masterful song of labor above his head.
On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily. Releasing the hand of
the girl, he thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. A desire to impress
the mind of his companion with the importance of the resolution he had made
came over him and he nodded his head toward the house. "Mother'll make a
fuss, I suppose," he whispered. "She hasn't thought at all about what I'm
going to do in life. She thinks I'm going to stay on here forever just being
a boy."
Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness. "You see, I've got
to strike out. I've got to get to work. It's what I'm good for."
Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of
admiration swept over her. "This is as it should be," she thought. "This boy
is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires
that had been invading her body were swept away and she sat up very straight
on the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning
lit up the eastern sky. The garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a
place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange
and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back
yard, quite definite and limited in its outlines.
"What will you do up there?" she whispered.
Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the
darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than
George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A feeling of
impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to
tell her of it. "Everyone talks and talks," he began. "I'm sick of it. I'll
do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll
just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I
just want to work and keep quiet. That's all I've got in my mind."
Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did not want to
bring the meeting to an end but could not think of anything more to say.
"It's the last time we'll see each other," he whispered.
A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand upon Seth's
shoulder, she started to draw his face down toward her own upturned face.
The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague
adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never
be realized. "I think I'd better be going along," she said, letting her hand
fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her. "Don't you go with me; I
want to be alone," she said. "You go and talk with your mother. You'd better
do that now."
Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away
through the hedge. A desire to run after her came to him, but he only stood
staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and
puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come. Walking
slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow of a large tree and looked
at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily sewing. The feeling of
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 twentyfive 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 presence. When she did speak sharply to him he had only
to look steadily into her eyes to see dawning there the puzzled look he had
already noticed in the eyes of others when he looked at them.
The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the
mother did not. She expected from all people certain conventional reactions
to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and looked at
the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all was forgiven. After
the weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept into his room and kissed
him.
Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did not do these
things. After the severest reprimand, he did not tremble and look at the
floor but instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to invade
her mind. As for creeping into his room-- after Seth had passed his
fifteenth year, she would have been half afraid to do anything of the kind.
Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys
ran away from home. The three boys climbed into the open door of an empty
freight car and rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was being held.
One of the boys had a bottle filled with a combination of whiskey and
blackberry wine, and the three sat with legs dangling out of the car door
drinking from the bottle. Seth's two companions sang and waved their hands
to idlers about the stations of the towns through which the train passed.
They planned raids upon the baskets of farmers who had come with their
families to the fair. "We will five like kings and won't have to spend a
penny to see the fair and horse races," they declared boastfully.
After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down
the floor of her home filled with vague alarms. Although on the next day she
discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on what adventure
the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All through the night she
lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling herself that Seth, like his
father, would come to a sudden and violent end. So determined was she that
the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she
would not allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a
pencil and paper and wrote down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she
intended to pour out upon him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going
about the garden and saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part.
And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a little weary and
with coal soot in his ears and about his eyes, she again found herself
unable to reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail by
the kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her. "I wanted to turn back
within an hour after we had started," he explained. "I didn't know what to
do. I knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if I didn't go on I
would be ashamed of myself. I went through with the thing for my own good.
It was uncomfortable, sleeping on wet straw, and two drunken Negroes came
and slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket out of a farmer's wagon I
couldn't help thinking of his children going all day without food. I was
sick of the whole affair, but I was determined to stick it out until the
other boys were ready to come back."
"I'm glad you did stick it out," replied the mother, half resentfully,
and kissing him upon the forehead pretended to busy herself with the work
about the house.
On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New Willard House to
visit his friend, George Willard. It had rained during the afternoon, but as
he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and a golden
glow lit up the west. Going around a corner, he turned in at the door of the
hotel and began to climb the stairway leading up to his friend's room. In
the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men were engaged in a
discussion of politics.
On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices of the men
below. They were excited and talked rapidly. Tom Willard was berating the
traveling men. "I am a Democrat but your talk makes me sick," he said. "You
don't understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are friends. It is
impossible perhaps for your mind to grasp that. If anyone tells you that a
friendship can be deeper and bigger and more worth while than dollars and
cents, or even more worth while than state politics, you snicker and laugh."
The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a tall,
grey-mustached man who worked for a wholesale grocery house. "Do you think
that I've lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark Hanna?" he
demanded. "Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money and nothing else. This
McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and don't you forget it."
The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the rest of the
discussion, but went on up the stairway and into the little dark hall.
Something in the voices of the men talking in the hotel office started a
chain of thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to think that
loneliness was a part of his character, something that would always stay
with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by a window that looked into an
alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner Groff, the town baker. His
tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and down the alleyway. In his shop someone
called the baker, who pretended not to hear. The baker had an empty milk
bottle in his hand and an angry sullen look in his eyes.
In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the "deep one." "He's like his
father," men said as he went through the streets. "He'll break out some of
these days. You wait and see."
The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys
instinctively greeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected Seth
Richmond's outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was deeper
than boys are given credit for being, but he was not what the men of the
town, and even his mother, thought him to be. No great underlying purpose
lay back of his habitual silence, and he had no definite plan for his life.
When the boys with whom he associated were noisy and quarrelsome, he stood
quietly at one side. With calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively
figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in what was
going on, and sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested
in anything. Now, as he stood in the half-darkness by the window watching
the baker, he wished that he himself might become thoroughly stirred by
something, even by the fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted.
"It would be better for me if I could become excited and wrangle about
politics like windy old Tom Willard," he thought, as he left the window and
went again along the hallway to the room occupied by his friend, George
Willard.
George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the rather odd
friendship between the two, it was he who was forever courting and the
younger boy who was being courted. The paper on which George worked had one
policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as possible of
the inhabitants of the village. Like an excited dog, George Willard ran here
and there, noting on his pad of paper who had gone on business to the county
seat or had returned from a visit to a neighboring village. All day he wrote
little facts upon the pad. "A. P. Wringlet had received a shipment of straw
hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom
Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road."
The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given
him a place of distinction in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked
continually of the matter, "It's the easiest of all lives to live," he
declared, becoming excited and boastful. "Here and there you go and there is
no one to boss you. Though you are in India or in the South Seas in a boat,
you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my name up and then
see what fun I shall have."
In George Willard's room, which had a window looking down into an
alleyway and one that looked across railroad tracks to Biff Carter's Lunch
Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and looked at
the floor. George Willard, who had been sitting for an hour idly playing
with a lead pencil, greeted him effusively. "I've been trying to write a
love story," he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he began
walking up and down the room. "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to
fall in love. I've been sitting here and thinking it over and I'm going to
do it."
As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went to a window and
turning his back to his friend leaned out. "I know who I'm going to fall in
love with," he said sharply. "It's Helen White. She is the only girl in town
with any 'get-up' to her."
Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked toward his
visitor. "Look here," he said. "You know Helen White better than I do. I
want you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking to her and say
that I'm in love with her. See what she says to that. See how she takes it,
and then you come and tell me."
Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door. The words of his comrade
irritated him unbearably. "Well, good-bye," he said briefly.
George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to
look into Seth's face. "What's the matter? What are you going to do? You
stay here and let's talk," he urged.
A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the men of the town
who were, he thought, perpetually talking of nothing, and most of all,
against his own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. "Aw, speak to
her yourself," he burst forth and then, going quickly through the door,
slammed it sharply in his friend's face. "I'm going to find Helen White and
talk to her, but not about him," he muttered.
Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door of the hotel
muttering with wrath. Crossing a little dusty street and climbing a low iron
railing, he went to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George Willard
he thought a profound fool, and he wished that he had said so more
vigorously. Although his acquaintanceship with Helen White, the banker's
daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the subject of his
thoughts and he felt that she was something private and personal to himself.
"The busy fool with his love stories," he muttered, staring back over his
shoulder at George Willard's room, "why does he never tire of his eternal
talking."
It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the station platform
men and boys loaded the boxes of red, fragrant berries into two express cars
that stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although in the west
a storm threatened, and no street lamps were lighted. In the dim light the
figures of the men standing upon the express truck and pitching the boxes in
at the doors of the cars were but dimly discernible. Upon the iron railing
that protected the station lawn sat other men. Pipes were lighted. Village
jokes went back and forth. Away in the distance a train whistled and the men
loading the boxes into the cars worked with renewed activity.
Seth arose from his place on the grass and went silently past the men
perched upon the railing and into Main Street. He had come to a resolution.
"I'll get out of here," he told himself. "What good am I here? I'm going to
some city and go to work. I'll tell mother about it tomorrow."
Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past Wacker's Cigar Store
and the Town Hall, and into Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the thought
that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the depression did
not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. In the heavy
shadows of a big tree before Doctor Welling's house, he stopped and stood
watching half-witted Turk Smollet, who was pushing a wheelbarrow in the
road. The old man with his absurdly boyish mind had a dozen long boards on
the wheelbarrow, and, as he hurried along the road, balanced the load with
extreme nicety. "Easy there, Turk! Steady now, old boy!" the old man shouted
to himself, and laughed so that the load of boards rocked dangerously.
Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood chopper whose
peculiarities added so much of color to the life of the village. He knew
that when Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of a
whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old man was going far out
of his way in order to pass through Main Street and exhibit his skill in
wheeling the boards. "If George Willard were here, he'd have something to
say," thought Seth. "George belongs to this town. He'd shout at Turk and
Turk would shout at him. They'd both be secretly pleased by what they had
said. It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not make a fuss about it,
but I'm going to get out of here."
Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness, feeling himself an
outcast in his own town. He began to pity himself, but a sense of the
absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was
simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity. "I'm
made to go to work. I may be able to make a place for myself by steady
working, and I might as well be at it," he decided.
Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the darkness by the
front door. On the door hung a heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced
into the village by Helen White's mother, who had also organized a women's
club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. Its
heavy clatter sounded like a report from distant guns. "How awkward and
foolish I am," he thought. "If Mrs. White comes to the door, I won't know
what to say."
It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth standing at the
edge of the porch. Blushing with pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the
door softly. "I'm going to get out of town. I don't know what I'll do, but
I'm going to get out of here and go to work. I think I'll go to Columbus,"
he said. "Perhaps I'll get into the State University down there. Anyway, I'm
going. I'll tell mother tonight." He hesitated and looked doubtfully about.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind coming to walk with me?"
Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy
clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the deep
twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward,
the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the
wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so that their way was half
lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by
the low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play,
disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively.
In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled,
pursuing the gathering swarm of night flies.
Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had been a half
expressed intimacy between him and the maiden who now for the first time
walked beside him. For a time she had been beset with a madness for writing
notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found them concealed in his books
at school and one had been given him by a child met in the street, while
several had been delivered through the village post office.
The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a
mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth had not answered them, although he had
been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil upon
the stationery of the banker's wife. Putting them into the pocket of his
coat, he went through the street or stood by the fence in the school yard
with something burning at his side. He thought it fine that he should be
thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in
town.
Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced
the street. The building had once been a factory for the making of barrel
staves but was now vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a house a man
and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming dearly across to
the half-embarrassed youth and maiden. There was the sound of scraping
chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel path to a wooden gate.
Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed the woman. "For
old times' sake," he said and, turning, walked rapidly away along the
sidewalk.
"That's Belle Turner," whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into
Seth's hand. "I didn't know she had a fellow. I thought she was too old for
that." Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a strange,
dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came a desire to tell her
something he had been determined not to tell. "George Willard's in love with
you," he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice was low and quiet.
"He's writing a story, and he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it
feels. He wanted me to tell you and see what you said."
Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden
surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge sat
on a wooden bench beneath a bush.
On the street as he walked beside the girl new and daring thoughts had
come into Seth Richmond's mind. He began to regret his decision to get out
of town. "It would be something new and altogether delightful to remain and
walk often through the streets with Helen White," he thought. In imagination
he saw himself putting his arm about her waist and feeling her arms clasped
tightly about his neck. One of those odd combinations of events and places
made him connect the idea of love-making with this girl and a spot he had
visited some days before. He had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer
who lived on a hillside beyond the Fair Ground and had returned by a path
through a field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer's house Seth had
stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming noise
had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home
of a swarm of bees.
And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him
in the long grass. He stood in a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in the
field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with tiny
purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds the
bees were gathered in armies, singing as they worked.
Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the
weeds beneath the tree. Beside him, in the scene built in his fancy, lay
Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept him from
kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished. Instead,
he lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening to the army of bees
that sang the sustained masterful song of labor above his head.
On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily. Releasing the hand of
the girl, he thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. A desire to impress
the mind of his companion with the importance of the resolution he had made
came over him and he nodded his head toward the house. "Mother'll make a
fuss, I suppose," he whispered. "She hasn't thought at all about what I'm
going to do in life. She thinks I'm going to stay on here forever just being
a boy."
Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness. "You see, I've got
to strike out. I've got to get to work. It's what I'm good for."
Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of
admiration swept over her. "This is as it should be," she thought. "This boy
is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires
that had been invading her body were swept away and she sat up very straight
on the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning
lit up the eastern sky. The garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a
place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange
and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back
yard, quite definite and limited in its outlines.
"What will you do up there?" she whispered.
Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the
darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than
George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A feeling of
impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to
tell her of it. "Everyone talks and talks," he began. "I'm sick of it. I'll
do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll
just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I
just want to work and keep quiet. That's all I've got in my mind."
Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did not want to
bring the meeting to an end but could not think of anything more to say.
"It's the last time we'll see each other," he whispered.
A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand upon Seth's
shoulder, she started to draw his face down toward her own upturned face.
The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague
adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never
be realized. "I think I'd better be going along," she said, letting her hand
fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her. "Don't you go with me; I
want to be alone," she said. "You go and talk with your mother. You'd better
do that now."
Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away
through the hedge. A desire to run after her came to him, but he only stood
staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and
puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come. Walking
slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow of a large tree and looked
at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily sewing. The feeling of