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road that you might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning of
everything. There is a clump of elders there such as used to grow beside the
road before our house back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there
is something hidden. It is a woman, that's what it is. She has been thrown
from a horse and the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see how the
old man who drives a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who
has a farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be ground into
meal at Comstock's mill. He knows there is something in the elders,
something hidden away, and yet he doesn't quite know.
"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a woman and, oh, she is
lovely! She is hurt and is suffering but she makes no sound. Don't you see
how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty comes out
from her and spreads over everything. It is in the sky back there and all
around everywhere. I didn't try to paint the woman, of course. She is too
beautiful to be painted. How dull to talk of composition and such things!
Why do you not look at the sky and then run away as I used to do when I was
a boy back there in Winesburg, Ohio?"
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the
guests who came into his room when he was a young fellow in New York City,
but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his own mind.
He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed in the pictures
he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his
room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think
that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more.
With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could
really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to
explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of
men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though
everyone Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of
himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy,
something that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind
the elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all
children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple reason
that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own
mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and
scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he
was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even
have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like
a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king
he was, in a sixdollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New
York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to
touch actual flesh-andbone people with his hands. Days passed when his room
seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind. At night
strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a girl who sat in
a chair next to his own in the art school and went to live in an apartment
house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the woman he married, and Enoch
got a job in a place where illustrations are made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch's life. He began to play at a new
game. For a while he was very proud of himself in the role of producing
citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things and played with
realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he had a newspaper thrown
on his porch each morning. When in the evening he came home from work he got
off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind some business man, striving
to look very substantial and important. As a payer of taxes he thought he
should post himself on how things are run. "I'm getting to be of some
moment, a real part of things, of the state and the city and all that," he
told himself with an amusing miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home
from Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train. Enoch
talked about the advisability of the government's owning and operating the
railroads and the man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that such a
move on the part of the government would be a good thing, and he grew quite
excited as he talked. Later he remembered his own words with pleasure. "I
gave him something to think about, that fellow," he muttered to himself as
he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He himself brought it to
an end. He began to feel choked and walled in by the life in the apartment,
and to feel toward his wife and even toward his children as he had felt
concerning the friends who once came to visit him. He began to tell little
lies about business engagements that would give him freedom to walk alone in
the street at night and, the chance offering, he secretly re-rented the room
facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al Robinson died on the farm near
Winesburg, and he got eight thousand dollars from the bank that acted as
trustee of her estate. That took Enoch out of the world of men altogether.
He gave the money to his wife and told her he could not live in the
apartment any more. She cried and was angry and threatened, but he only
stared at her and went his own way. In reality the wife did not care much.
She thought Enoch slightly insane and was a little afraid of him. When it
was quite sure that he would never come back, she took the two children and
went to a village in Connecticut where she had lived as a girl. In the end
she married a man who bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.
And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of
his fancy, playing with them, talking to them, happy as a child is happy.
They were an odd lot, Enoch's people. They were made, I suppose, out of real
people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason made an appeal to
him. There was a woman with a sword in her hand, an old man with a long
white beard who went about followed by a dog, a young girl whose stockings
were always coming down and hanging over her shoe tops. There must have been
two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch
Robinson, who lived in the room with him.
And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked the door. With an
absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go on making his living in
the advertising place until something happened. Of course something did
happen. That is why he went back to live in Winesburg and why we know about
him. The thing that happened was a woman. It would be that way. He was too
happy. Something had to come into his world. Something had to drive him out
of the New York room to live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure,
bobbing up and down on the streets of an Ohio town at evening when the sun
was going down behind the roof of Wesley Moyer's livery barn.
About the thing that happened. Enoch told George Willard about it one
night. He wanted to talk to someone, and he chose the young newspaper
reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when the
younger man was in a mood to understand.
Youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in
a village at the year's end, opened the lips of the old man. The sadness was
in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but it appealed to
Enoch Robinson.
It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a drizzly wet
October rain. The fruition of the year had come and the night should have
been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the
air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone
under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond
the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees. Beneath the trees wet
leaves were pasted against tree roots that protruded from the ground. In
gardens back of houses in Winesburg dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling
on the ground. Men who had finished the evening meal and who had planned to
go uptown to talk the evening away with other men at the back of some store
changed their minds. George Willard tramped about in the rain and was glad
that it rained. He felt that way. He was like Enoch Robinson on the evenings
when the old man came down out of his room and wandered alone in the
streets. He was like that only that George Willard had become a tall young
man and did not think it manly to weep and carry on. For a month his mother
had been very ill and that had something to do with his sadness, but not
much. He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.
Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that
extended out over the sidewalk before Voight's wagon shop on Maumee Street
just off the main street of Winesburg. They went together from there through
the rain-washed streets to the older man's room on the third floor of the
Heffner Block. The young reporter went willingly enough. Enoch Robinson
asked him to go after the two had talked for ten minutes. The boy was a
little afraid but had never been more curious in his life. A hundred times
he had heard the old man spoken of as a little off his head and he thought
himself rather brave and manly to go at all. From the very beginning, in the
street in the rain, the old man talked in a queer way, trying to tell the
story of the room in Washington Square and of his life in the room. "You'll
understand if you try hard enough," he said conclusively. "I have looked at
you when you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It
isn't hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and
believe, that's all there is to it."
It was past eleven o'clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to
George Willard in the room in the Heffner Block, came to the vital thing,
the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to live out his
life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by the window with his
head in his hand and George Willard was in a chair by a table. A kerosene
lamp sat on the table and the room, although almost bare of furniture, was
scrupulously clean. As the man talked George Willard began to feel that he
would like to get out of the chair and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put
his arms about the little old man. In the half darkness the man talked and
the boy listened, filled with sadness.
"She got to coming in there after there hadn't been anyone in the room
for years," said Enoch Robinson. "She saw me in the hallway of the house and
we got acquainted. I don't know just what she did in her own room. I never
went there. I think she was a musician and played a violin. Every now and
then she came and knocked at the door and I opened it. In she came and sat
down beside me, just sat and looked about and said nothing. Anyway, she said
nothing that mattered."
The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat
he wore was wet from the rain and drops of water kept falling with a soft
thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard got out of
the chair and sat beside him.
"I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she
was too big for the room. I felt that she was driving everything else away.
We just talked of little things, but I couldn't sit still. I wanted to touch
her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so strong and her face
was so good and she looked at me all the time."
The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as
from a chill. "I was afraid," he whispered. "I was terribly afraid. I didn't
want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I couldn't sit
still. 'No, no,' I said to myself, but I got up and opened the door just the
same. She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman. I thought she would be
bigger than I was there in that room."
Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes
shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. "I wanted her and all the time
I didn't want her," he explained. "Then I began to tell her about my people,
about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep
myself to myself, but I couldn't. I felt just as I did about opening the
door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never come back any more."
The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with excitement.
"One night something happened. I became mad to make her understand me and to
know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see how important
I was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go away, I ran and locked
the door. I followed her about. I talked and talked and then all of a sudden
things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she did
understand. Maybe she had understood all the time. I was furious. I couldn't
stand it. I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her
understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be
submerged, drowned out, you see. That's how it is. I don't know why."
The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the boy listened,
filled with awe. "Go away, boy," said the man. "Don't stay here with me any
more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you but it isn't. I don't
want to talk any more. Go away."
George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his
voice. "Don't stop now. Tell me the rest of it," he commanded sharply. "What
happened? Tell me the rest of the story."
Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window that looked
down into the deserted main street of Winesburg. George Willard followed. By
the window the two stood, the tall awkward boyman and the little wrinkled
man-boy. The childish, eager voice carried forward the tale. "I swore at
her," he explained. "I said vile words. I ordered her to go away and not to
come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first she pretended not to
understand but I kept at it. I screamed and stamped on the floor. I made the
house ring with my curses. I didn't want ever to see her again and I knew,
after some of the things I said, that I never would see her again."
The old man's voice broke and he shook his head. "Things went to
smash," he said quietly and sadly. "Out she went through the door and all
the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my
people away. They all went out through the door after her. That's the way it
was."
George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson's room. In the
darkness by the window, as he went through the door, he could hear the thin
old voice whimpering and complaining. "I'm alone, all alone here," said the
voice. "It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone."
AN AWAKENING
BELLE CARPENTER had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was
tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished
she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in the
millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats
by a window at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry
Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and lived
with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street. The
house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees.
A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the
house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed,
making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the
night.
When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power
over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a
closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age. At
night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca coat.
Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had invented an
arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were
placed between the boards and the boards were clamped together with heavy
screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a damp cloth and stood them
upright behind the dining room door. If they were moved during the day he
was speechless with anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.
The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.
She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother and
hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of
soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud she smeared the
face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and then went back to
her work feeling relieved and happy.
Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about which no
one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender
in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of
relief to her feelings. She did not think that her station in life would
permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender and walked about under
the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that
was very insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep the younger
man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.
Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's saloon. His fists were large and
his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the
power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.
At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle
in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars, which Ed
spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy of
dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe.
Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages through
the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women, playing cards
for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of
dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and
ran amuck like a wild thing. With his fist he broke a large mirror in the
wash room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking
chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor
and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to
spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.
The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface
amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her
company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's livery
barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his
nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon him and he told her of
his desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn
money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he
found it difficult to explain his intentions. His body ached with physical
longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his
arms and holding her tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until
she became helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the
buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll not let you go. You can't play
with me," he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the
buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. "I'll keep you for
good the next time," he said. "You might as well make up your mind to that.
It's you and me for it and I'm going to have you before I get through."
One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was
in Ed Handby's mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter, went
for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's pool room
with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher. Seth Richmond
stood with his back against the wall and remained silent, but George Willard
talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they talked of
women. The young reporter got into that vein. He said that women should look
out for themselves, that the fellow who went out with a girl was not
responsible for what happened. As he talked he looked about, eager for
attention. He held the floor for five minutes and then Art Wilson began to
talk. Art was learning the barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already
began to consider himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse
racing, drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of a night
when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as
he talked spat on the floor. "The women in the place couldn't embarrass me
although they tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house
tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she began to talk I went
and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I taught
her to let me alone."
George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the town
from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind had
died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely. Without thinking
where he was going or what he wanted to do, George went out of Main Street
and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame houses.
Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he began
to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a
drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in shining boots that
reached to the knees and wearing a sword that jingled as he walked. As a
soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long line of
men who stood at attention. He began to examine the accoutrements of the
men. Before a tree he stopped and began to scold. "Your pack is not in
order," he said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of this
matter? Everything must be in order here. We have a difficult task before us
and no difficult task can be done without order."
Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. "There is a law for armies and for men too," he
muttered, lost in reflection. "The law begins with little things and spreads
out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order,
in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself
must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch with
something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star. In my
little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with
life, with the law."
George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his
body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just
come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For the moment
it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he
walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on
again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of Ransom Surbeck's pool
room and think things like that," he whispered. "It is better to be alone.
If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn't
understand what I've been thinking down here."
In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not yet
come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the
railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the
long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply
constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more comfortable
among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear
of the garden.
With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked
into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly lighted
and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there
was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year he had been
devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and now some tale he
had read concerning fife in old world towns of the middle ages came sharply
back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one
revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence. On an
impulse he turned out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway
behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.
For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new
thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in the
clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor little houses
lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up
into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico
dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out
of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the
dogs barking and the children crying--all of these things made him seem, as
he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.
The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to
be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of the
houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and throwing back
his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big and remade by the
simple experience through which he had been passing and in a kind of fervor
of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head
and muttering words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said words
without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because
they were brave words, full of meaning. "Death," he muttered, night, the
sea, fear, loveliness."
George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the
sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the little
street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage
to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands. "If there were
only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we would run until we
were both tired out," he thought. "That would make me feel better." With the
thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went toward
the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He thought she would understand his
mood and that he could achieve in her presence a position he had long been
wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her
lips he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one
being used for some obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he
thought he had suddenly become too big to be used.
When George got to Belle Carpenter's house there had already been a
visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling Belle
out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the woman to
come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came and stood by the
door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen. "You stay away from that
kid," he growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not knowing what
else to say, turned to go away. "If I catch you together I will break your
bones and his too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to
threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure.
When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly
upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed Handby
cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a
neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in his
hands. She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard came to the
door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought
that, as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would
follow and she wanted to make him suffer.
For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under
the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words. The
sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness in the
alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering along and
swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that he
was aware of his former weakness and that he had changed. "You'll find me
different," he declared, thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking
boldly into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've got to take me
for a man or let me alone. That's how it is."
Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street and
went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The hill
began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg Fair Grounds.
On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and among the bushes were
little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and frozen.
As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard's heart began
to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided that
Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new force that
had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon her and had led
to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with the sense of masculine
power. Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about she had not
seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she had accompanied him
to this place took all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has
become different," he thought and taking hold of her shoulder turned her
about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.
Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she
leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the darkness.
In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as in the
alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into words and, holding the woman
tightly he whispered the words into the still night. "Lust," he whispered,
"lust and night and women."
George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on
the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and then
grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was sure
that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the hillside he had led
the woman to one of the little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped
to his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the laborers' houses, he
had put up his hands in gratitude for the new power in himself and was
waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.
The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power
within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists. Gripping
George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held him with one
hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a
quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away into
the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're
no good," he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you. I'd let
you alone if I didn't want you so much."
On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man who had
humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be thus
hurled ignominiously aside.
Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the
bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes.
The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but
George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he lay still. Then Ed
Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.
George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As
he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated himself
and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation. When his mind
went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and stopping in
the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the voice outside himself that
had so short a time before put new courage into his heart. When his way
homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the
sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that
now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.
"QUEER"
FROM HIS SEAT on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr
on the rear of Cowley & Son's store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior
member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of
the Winesburg Eagle. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They did
not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his
hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings.
Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter
in Winesburg, standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and staring
absentmindedly about. "Well, well, what next!" exclaimed the young man with
the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the
window.
A flush crept into Elmer Cowley's face and his hands began to tremble.
In Cowley & Son's store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the counter
talking to his father. He imagined the reporter could hear what was being
said and the thought made him furious. With one of the shoes still held in
his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot
upon the board floor.
Cowley & Son's store did not face the main street of Winesburg. The
front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight's wagon shop and a shed
for the sheltering of farmers' horses. Beside the store an alleyway ran
behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent
on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and down. The store itself
was indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything
and nothing. In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as
large as an apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and
beside the black mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and
dirty in their wooden frames.
The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale
as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof paint,
bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that companioned the
honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.
Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager
patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall and
lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen partially
covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat. The coat had
been purchased to serve as a wedding garment. Before he became a merchant
Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore the Prince Albert coat
to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons when he came into town to
trade. When he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the coat
constantly. It had become brown with age and was covered with grease spots,
but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.
As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not
been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family, consisting of
a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the store
and it did not cost them much to live. His troubles were not financial. His
unhappiness as a merchant lay in the fact that when a traveling man with
wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid. Behind the counter
he stood shaking his head. He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly
refuse to buy and thus lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he
would not be stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what
could not be sold.
In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard
standing and apparently listening at the back door of the Eagle printshop, a
situation had arisen that always stirred the son's wrath. The traveling man
talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty. "You
see how quickly it is done," said the traveling man, who had for sale a
small flat metal substitute for collar buttons. With one hand he quickly
unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed
a flattering wheedling tone. "I tell you what, men have come to the end of
all this fooling with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out
of the change that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for
this town. Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I'll not visit any other
store. I'll leave the field to you."
The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on
Ebenezer's breast. "It's an opportunity and I want you to take it," he
urged. "A friend of mine told me about you. 'See that man Cowley,' he said.
'He's a live one.'"
The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book from his pocket he
began writing out the order. Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley
went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass showcase near
the front door. He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it
about. "You get out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar
fasteners here." An idea came to him. "Mind, I'm not making any threat," he
added. "I don't say I'll shoot. Maybe I just took this gun out of the case
to look at it. But you better get out. Yes sir, I'll say that. You better
grab up your things and get out."
The young storekeeper's voice rose to a scream and going behind the
counter he began to advance upon the two men. "We're through being fools
here!" he cried. "We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to
sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and
listening. You get out of here!"
The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the
counter into a black leather bag, he ran. He was a small man and very
bow-legged and he ran awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door and
he stumbled and fell. "Crazy, that's what he is--crazy!" he sputtered as he
arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.
In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that
the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was embarrassed.
"Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough," he declared, going
to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting on a barrel he pulled on
and fastened the shoe he had been holding in his hand. He was waiting for
some word of understanding from his father but when Ebenezer spoke his words
only served to reawaken the wrath in the son and the young man ran out of
the store without replying. Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty
fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain
stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. "I'll be starched," he
said softly. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!"
Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or what he
was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after turning
sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped and the passion
that had been the cause of his outburst in the store began to again find
expression. "I will not be queer--one to be looked at and listened to," he
declared aloud. "I'll be like other people. I'll show that George Willard.
He'll find out. I'll show him!"
The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared
back at the town. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had no
special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the
town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and
in the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young
merchant's mind. He thought the boy who passed and repassed Cowley & Son's
store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must be thinking of
him and perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belonged to the
town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town.
Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days
of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also
his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion
of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walk whistling
and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person
strike also the greater enemy--the thing that smiled and went its own
way--the judgment of Winesburg?
Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow
upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded from
between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness of the
marbles called "aggies" that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.
Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends. He was, he
felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the
thought.
Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands
stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was cold with a raw wind, but
presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy. The
tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt and the
mud clung to Elmer's shoes. His feet became cold. When he had gone several
miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood. In the
wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat trying to warm
himself, miserable in body and in mind.
For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and
creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence and
looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds. A smile
came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who
was husking corn in one of the fields.
In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to whom
he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a half-witted old
fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had
stayed on the farm when it was sold. The old man lived in one of the
unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered about all day in the
fields.
Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and when
he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with
the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had put the
everything. There is a clump of elders there such as used to grow beside the
road before our house back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there
is something hidden. It is a woman, that's what it is. She has been thrown
from a horse and the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see how the
old man who drives a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who
has a farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be ground into
meal at Comstock's mill. He knows there is something in the elders,
something hidden away, and yet he doesn't quite know.
"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a woman and, oh, she is
lovely! She is hurt and is suffering but she makes no sound. Don't you see
how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty comes out
from her and spreads over everything. It is in the sky back there and all
around everywhere. I didn't try to paint the woman, of course. She is too
beautiful to be painted. How dull to talk of composition and such things!
Why do you not look at the sky and then run away as I used to do when I was
a boy back there in Winesburg, Ohio?"
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the
guests who came into his room when he was a young fellow in New York City,
but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his own mind.
He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed in the pictures
he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his
room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think
that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more.
With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could
really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to
explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of
men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though
everyone Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of
himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy,
something that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind
the elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all
children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple reason
that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own
mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and
scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he
was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even
have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like
a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king
he was, in a sixdollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New
York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to
touch actual flesh-andbone people with his hands. Days passed when his room
seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind. At night
strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a girl who sat in
a chair next to his own in the art school and went to live in an apartment
house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the woman he married, and Enoch
got a job in a place where illustrations are made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch's life. He began to play at a new
game. For a while he was very proud of himself in the role of producing
citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things and played with
realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he had a newspaper thrown
on his porch each morning. When in the evening he came home from work he got
off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind some business man, striving
to look very substantial and important. As a payer of taxes he thought he
should post himself on how things are run. "I'm getting to be of some
moment, a real part of things, of the state and the city and all that," he
told himself with an amusing miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home
from Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train. Enoch
talked about the advisability of the government's owning and operating the
railroads and the man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that such a
move on the part of the government would be a good thing, and he grew quite
excited as he talked. Later he remembered his own words with pleasure. "I
gave him something to think about, that fellow," he muttered to himself as
he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He himself brought it to
an end. He began to feel choked and walled in by the life in the apartment,
and to feel toward his wife and even toward his children as he had felt
concerning the friends who once came to visit him. He began to tell little
lies about business engagements that would give him freedom to walk alone in
the street at night and, the chance offering, he secretly re-rented the room
facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al Robinson died on the farm near
Winesburg, and he got eight thousand dollars from the bank that acted as
trustee of her estate. That took Enoch out of the world of men altogether.
He gave the money to his wife and told her he could not live in the
apartment any more. She cried and was angry and threatened, but he only
stared at her and went his own way. In reality the wife did not care much.
She thought Enoch slightly insane and was a little afraid of him. When it
was quite sure that he would never come back, she took the two children and
went to a village in Connecticut where she had lived as a girl. In the end
she married a man who bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.
And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of
his fancy, playing with them, talking to them, happy as a child is happy.
They were an odd lot, Enoch's people. They were made, I suppose, out of real
people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason made an appeal to
him. There was a woman with a sword in her hand, an old man with a long
white beard who went about followed by a dog, a young girl whose stockings
were always coming down and hanging over her shoe tops. There must have been
two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch
Robinson, who lived in the room with him.
And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked the door. With an
absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go on making his living in
the advertising place until something happened. Of course something did
happen. That is why he went back to live in Winesburg and why we know about
him. The thing that happened was a woman. It would be that way. He was too
happy. Something had to come into his world. Something had to drive him out
of the New York room to live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure,
bobbing up and down on the streets of an Ohio town at evening when the sun
was going down behind the roof of Wesley Moyer's livery barn.
About the thing that happened. Enoch told George Willard about it one
night. He wanted to talk to someone, and he chose the young newspaper
reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when the
younger man was in a mood to understand.
Youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in
a village at the year's end, opened the lips of the old man. The sadness was
in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but it appealed to
Enoch Robinson.
It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a drizzly wet
October rain. The fruition of the year had come and the night should have
been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the
air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone
under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond
the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees. Beneath the trees wet
leaves were pasted against tree roots that protruded from the ground. In
gardens back of houses in Winesburg dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling
on the ground. Men who had finished the evening meal and who had planned to
go uptown to talk the evening away with other men at the back of some store
changed their minds. George Willard tramped about in the rain and was glad
that it rained. He felt that way. He was like Enoch Robinson on the evenings
when the old man came down out of his room and wandered alone in the
streets. He was like that only that George Willard had become a tall young
man and did not think it manly to weep and carry on. For a month his mother
had been very ill and that had something to do with his sadness, but not
much. He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.
Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that
extended out over the sidewalk before Voight's wagon shop on Maumee Street
just off the main street of Winesburg. They went together from there through
the rain-washed streets to the older man's room on the third floor of the
Heffner Block. The young reporter went willingly enough. Enoch Robinson
asked him to go after the two had talked for ten minutes. The boy was a
little afraid but had never been more curious in his life. A hundred times
he had heard the old man spoken of as a little off his head and he thought
himself rather brave and manly to go at all. From the very beginning, in the
street in the rain, the old man talked in a queer way, trying to tell the
story of the room in Washington Square and of his life in the room. "You'll
understand if you try hard enough," he said conclusively. "I have looked at
you when you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It
isn't hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and
believe, that's all there is to it."
It was past eleven o'clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to
George Willard in the room in the Heffner Block, came to the vital thing,
the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to live out his
life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by the window with his
head in his hand and George Willard was in a chair by a table. A kerosene
lamp sat on the table and the room, although almost bare of furniture, was
scrupulously clean. As the man talked George Willard began to feel that he
would like to get out of the chair and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put
his arms about the little old man. In the half darkness the man talked and
the boy listened, filled with sadness.
"She got to coming in there after there hadn't been anyone in the room
for years," said Enoch Robinson. "She saw me in the hallway of the house and
we got acquainted. I don't know just what she did in her own room. I never
went there. I think she was a musician and played a violin. Every now and
then she came and knocked at the door and I opened it. In she came and sat
down beside me, just sat and looked about and said nothing. Anyway, she said
nothing that mattered."
The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat
he wore was wet from the rain and drops of water kept falling with a soft
thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard got out of
the chair and sat beside him.
"I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she
was too big for the room. I felt that she was driving everything else away.
We just talked of little things, but I couldn't sit still. I wanted to touch
her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so strong and her face
was so good and she looked at me all the time."
The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as
from a chill. "I was afraid," he whispered. "I was terribly afraid. I didn't
want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I couldn't sit
still. 'No, no,' I said to myself, but I got up and opened the door just the
same. She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman. I thought she would be
bigger than I was there in that room."
Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes
shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. "I wanted her and all the time
I didn't want her," he explained. "Then I began to tell her about my people,
about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep
myself to myself, but I couldn't. I felt just as I did about opening the
door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never come back any more."
The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with excitement.
"One night something happened. I became mad to make her understand me and to
know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see how important
I was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go away, I ran and locked
the door. I followed her about. I talked and talked and then all of a sudden
things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she did
understand. Maybe she had understood all the time. I was furious. I couldn't
stand it. I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her
understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be
submerged, drowned out, you see. That's how it is. I don't know why."
The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the boy listened,
filled with awe. "Go away, boy," said the man. "Don't stay here with me any
more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you but it isn't. I don't
want to talk any more. Go away."
George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his
voice. "Don't stop now. Tell me the rest of it," he commanded sharply. "What
happened? Tell me the rest of the story."
Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window that looked
down into the deserted main street of Winesburg. George Willard followed. By
the window the two stood, the tall awkward boyman and the little wrinkled
man-boy. The childish, eager voice carried forward the tale. "I swore at
her," he explained. "I said vile words. I ordered her to go away and not to
come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first she pretended not to
understand but I kept at it. I screamed and stamped on the floor. I made the
house ring with my curses. I didn't want ever to see her again and I knew,
after some of the things I said, that I never would see her again."
The old man's voice broke and he shook his head. "Things went to
smash," he said quietly and sadly. "Out she went through the door and all
the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my
people away. They all went out through the door after her. That's the way it
was."
George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson's room. In the
darkness by the window, as he went through the door, he could hear the thin
old voice whimpering and complaining. "I'm alone, all alone here," said the
voice. "It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone."
AN AWAKENING
BELLE CARPENTER had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was
tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished
she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in the
millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats
by a window at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry
Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and lived
with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street. The
house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees.
A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the back of the
house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed,
making a dismal drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the
night.
When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power
over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a
closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age. At
night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca coat.
Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had invented an
arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were
placed between the boards and the boards were clamped together with heavy
screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a damp cloth and stood them
upright behind the dining room door. If they were moved during the day he
was speechless with anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.
The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.
She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother and
hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of
soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud she smeared the
face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and then went back to
her work feeling relieved and happy.
Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about which no
one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender
in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of
relief to her feelings. She did not think that her station in life would
permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender and walked about under
the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that
was very insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep the younger
man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.
Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's saloon. His fists were large and
his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the
power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.
At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle
in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars, which Ed
spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy of
dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe.
Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages through
the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women, playing cards
for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of
dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and
ran amuck like a wild thing. With his fist he broke a large mirror in the
wash room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking
chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor
and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to
spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.
The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface
amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her
company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's livery
barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his
nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon him and he told her of
his desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying to earn
money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he
found it difficult to explain his intentions. His body ached with physical
longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his
arms and holding her tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until
she became helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the
buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll not let you go. You can't play
with me," he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the
buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. "I'll keep you for
good the next time," he said. "You might as well make up your mind to that.
It's you and me for it and I'm going to have you before I get through."
One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was
in Ed Handby's mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter, went
for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's pool room
with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher. Seth Richmond
stood with his back against the wall and remained silent, but George Willard
talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they talked of
women. The young reporter got into that vein. He said that women should look
out for themselves, that the fellow who went out with a girl was not
responsible for what happened. As he talked he looked about, eager for
attention. He held the floor for five minutes and then Art Wilson began to
talk. Art was learning the barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already
began to consider himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse
racing, drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of a night
when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as
he talked spat on the floor. "The women in the place couldn't embarrass me
although they tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house
tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she began to talk I went
and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I taught
her to let me alone."
George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the town
from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind had
died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely. Without thinking
where he was going or what he wanted to do, George went out of Main Street
and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame houses.
Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he began
to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a
drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in shining boots that
reached to the knees and wearing a sword that jingled as he walked. As a
soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long line of
men who stood at attention. He began to examine the accoutrements of the
men. Before a tree he stopped and began to scold. "Your pack is not in
order," he said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of this
matter? Everything must be in order here. We have a difficult task before us
and no difficult task can be done without order."
Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. "There is a law for armies and for men too," he
muttered, lost in reflection. "The law begins with little things and spreads
out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order,
in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself
must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch with
something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star. In my
little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with
life, with the law."
George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his
body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just
come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For the moment
it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he
walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on
again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of Ransom Surbeck's pool
room and think things like that," he whispered. "It is better to be alone.
If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn't
understand what I've been thinking down here."
In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not yet
come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the
railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the
long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply
constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more comfortable
among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear
of the garden.
With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked
into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly lighted
and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there
was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year he had been
devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and now some tale he
had read concerning fife in old world towns of the middle ages came sharply
back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one
revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence. On an
impulse he turned out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway
behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.
For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new
thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in the
clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor little houses
lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up
into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico
dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out
of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the
dogs barking and the children crying--all of these things made him seem, as
he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.
The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to
be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of the
houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and throwing back
his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big and remade by the
simple experience through which he had been passing and in a kind of fervor
of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head
and muttering words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said words
without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue and saying them because
they were brave words, full of meaning. "Death," he muttered, night, the
sea, fear, loveliness."
George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the
sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the little
street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage
to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands. "If there were
only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we would run until we
were both tired out," he thought. "That would make me feel better." With the
thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went toward
the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He thought she would understand his
mood and that he could achieve in her presence a position he had long been
wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her
lips he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one
being used for some obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he
thought he had suddenly become too big to be used.
When George got to Belle Carpenter's house there had already been a
visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling Belle
out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the woman to
come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came and stood by the
door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen. "You stay away from that
kid," he growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not knowing what
else to say, turned to go away. "If I catch you together I will break your
bones and his too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to
threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure.
When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly
upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed Handby
cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a
neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in his
hands. She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard came to the
door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought
that, as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would
follow and she wanted to make him suffer.
For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under
the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words. The
sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness in the
alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering along and
swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that he
was aware of his former weakness and that he had changed. "You'll find me
different," he declared, thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking
boldly into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've got to take me
for a man or let me alone. That's how it is."
Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street and
went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The hill
began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg Fair Grounds.
On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and among the bushes were
little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and frozen.
As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard's heart began
to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided that
Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new force that
had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon her and had led
to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with the sense of masculine
power. Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about she had not
seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she had accompanied him
to this place took all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has
become different," he thought and taking hold of her shoulder turned her
about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.
Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she
leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the darkness.
In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as in the
alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into words and, holding the woman
tightly he whispered the words into the still night. "Lust," he whispered,
"lust and night and women."
George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on
the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and then
grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was sure
that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the hillside he had led
the woman to one of the little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped
to his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the laborers' houses, he
had put up his hands in gratitude for the new power in himself and was
waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.
The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power
within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists. Gripping
George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held him with one
hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a
quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away into
the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're
no good," he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you. I'd let
you alone if I didn't want you so much."
On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man who had
humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be thus
hurled ignominiously aside.
Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the
bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes.
The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but
George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he lay still. Then Ed
Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.
George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As
he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated himself
and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation. When his mind
went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and stopping in
the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the voice outside himself that
had so short a time before put new courage into his heart. When his way
homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the
sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that
now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.
"QUEER"
FROM HIS SEAT on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr
on the rear of Cowley & Son's store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior
member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the printshop of
the Winesburg Eagle. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They did
not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his
hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of his stockings.
Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter
in Winesburg, standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and staring
absentmindedly about. "Well, well, what next!" exclaimed the young man with
the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the
window.
A flush crept into Elmer Cowley's face and his hands began to tremble.
In Cowley & Son's store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the counter
talking to his father. He imagined the reporter could hear what was being
said and the thought made him furious. With one of the shoes still held in
his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot
upon the board floor.
Cowley & Son's store did not face the main street of Winesburg. The
front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight's wagon shop and a shed
for the sheltering of farmers' horses. Beside the store an alleyway ran
behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent
on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and down. The store itself
was indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything
and nothing. In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as
large as an apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and
beside the black mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and
dirty in their wooden frames.
The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale
as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof paint,
bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that companioned the
honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.
Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager
patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall and
lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen partially
covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat. The coat had
been purchased to serve as a wedding garment. Before he became a merchant
Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore the Prince Albert coat
to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons when he came into town to
trade. When he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the coat
constantly. It had become brown with age and was covered with grease spots,
but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.
As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not
been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family, consisting of
a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the store
and it did not cost them much to live. His troubles were not financial. His
unhappiness as a merchant lay in the fact that when a traveling man with
wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid. Behind the counter
he stood shaking his head. He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly
refuse to buy and thus lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he
would not be stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what
could not be sold.
In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard
standing and apparently listening at the back door of the Eagle printshop, a
situation had arisen that always stirred the son's wrath. The traveling man
talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty. "You
see how quickly it is done," said the traveling man, who had for sale a
small flat metal substitute for collar buttons. With one hand he quickly
unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed
a flattering wheedling tone. "I tell you what, men have come to the end of
all this fooling with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out
of the change that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for
this town. Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I'll not visit any other
store. I'll leave the field to you."
The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on
Ebenezer's breast. "It's an opportunity and I want you to take it," he
urged. "A friend of mine told me about you. 'See that man Cowley,' he said.
'He's a live one.'"
The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book from his pocket he
began writing out the order. Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley
went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass showcase near
the front door. He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it
about. "You get out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar
fasteners here." An idea came to him. "Mind, I'm not making any threat," he
added. "I don't say I'll shoot. Maybe I just took this gun out of the case
to look at it. But you better get out. Yes sir, I'll say that. You better
grab up your things and get out."
The young storekeeper's voice rose to a scream and going behind the
counter he began to advance upon the two men. "We're through being fools
here!" he cried. "We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to
sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and
listening. You get out of here!"
The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the
counter into a black leather bag, he ran. He was a small man and very
bow-legged and he ran awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door and
he stumbled and fell. "Crazy, that's what he is--crazy!" he sputtered as he
arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.
In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that
the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was embarrassed.
"Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough," he declared, going
to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting on a barrel he pulled on
and fastened the shoe he had been holding in his hand. He was waiting for
some word of understanding from his father but when Ebenezer spoke his words
only served to reawaken the wrath in the son and the young man ran out of
the store without replying. Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty
fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain
stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. "I'll be starched," he
said softly. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!"
Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or what he
was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after turning
sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped and the passion
that had been the cause of his outburst in the store began to again find
expression. "I will not be queer--one to be looked at and listened to," he
declared aloud. "I'll be like other people. I'll show that George Willard.
He'll find out. I'll show him!"
The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared
back at the town. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had no
special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the
town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and
in the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young
merchant's mind. He thought the boy who passed and repassed Cowley & Son's
store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must be thinking of
him and perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belonged to the
town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town.
Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days
of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also
his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion
of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walk whistling
and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person
strike also the greater enemy--the thing that smiled and went its own
way--the judgment of Winesburg?
Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow
upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded from
between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness of the
marbles called "aggies" that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.
Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends. He was, he
felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the
thought.
Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands
stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was cold with a raw wind, but
presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy. The
tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt and the
mud clung to Elmer's shoes. His feet became cold. When he had gone several
miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood. In the
wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat trying to warm
himself, miserable in body and in mind.
For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and
creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence and
looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds. A smile
came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who
was husking corn in one of the fields.
In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to whom
he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a half-witted old
fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had
stayed on the farm when it was sold. The old man lived in one of the
unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered about all day in the
fields.
Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and when
he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with
the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had put the