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expression regarding being "laundered" into the mouth of his former
employer. When excited or surprised by anything he smiled vaguely and
muttered: "I'll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed
and starched."
When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially
interested in the sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also were
cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth and
apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.
Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and
waving his arms about. "You don't understand what's the matter with me so of
course you don't care," he declared. "With me it's different. Look how it
has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was queer, too. Even the
clothes mother used to wear were not like other people's clothes, and look
at that coat in which father goes about there in town, thinking he's dressed
up, too. Why don't he get a new one? It wouldn't cost much. I'll tell you
why. Father doesn't know and when mother was alive she didn't know either.
Mabel is different. She knows but she won't say anything. I will, though.
I'm not going to be stared at any longer. Why look here, Mook, father
doesn't know that his store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he'll
never sell the stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it. Sometimes he's a
little worried that trade doesn't come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will come
after a while. He isn't worried. He's queer. He doesn't know enough to be
worried."
The excited young man became more excited. "He don't know but I know,"
he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of the
half-wit. "I know too well. I can't stand it. When we lived out here it was
different. I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I wasn't always
seeing people and thinking as I am now. In the evening, there in town, I go
to the post office or to the depot to see the train come in, and no one says
anything to me. Everyone stands around and laughs and they talk but they say
nothing to me. Then I feel so queer that I can't talk either. I go away. I
don't say anything. I can't."
The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. "I won't stand it," he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. "I'm not made to stand
it."
Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the town of
Winesburg. "Go on back to work," he screamed. "What good does it do me to
talk to you?" A thought came to him and his voice dropped. "I'm a coward
too, eh?" he muttered. "Do you know why I came clear out here afoot? I had
to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell. I hunted out another
queer one, you see. I ran away, that's what I did. I couldn't stand up to
someone like that George Willard. I had to come to you. I ought to tell him
and I will."
Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about. "I will tell
him. I won't be queer. I don't care what they think. I won't stand it."
Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the fence
went back to his work in the corn. "I'll be washed and ironed and starched,"
he declared. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed." Mook was interested.
He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood nibbling at a straw
stack. "Elmer was here," he said to the cows. "Elmer is crazy. You better
get behind the stack where he don't see you. He'll hurt someone yet, Elmer
will."
At eight o'clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat writing.
His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined look was on
his face. "You come on outside with me," he said, stepping in and closing
the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though prepared to resist anyone
else coming in. "You just come along outside. I want to see you."
George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of
Winesburg. The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat and
looked very spruce and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the overcoat
pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long been wanting to
make friends with the young merchant and find out what was in his mind. Now
he thought he saw a chance and was delighted. "I wonder what he's up to?
Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for the paper. It can't be a fire
because I haven't heard the fire bell and there isn't anyone running," he
thought.
In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few
citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove at
the back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and the wind
rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the stairway leading to
Doctor Welling's office. Before Hern's Grocery a basket of apples and a rack
filled with new brooms stood on the sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood
facing George Willard. He tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and
down. His face worked spasmodically. He seemed about to shout. "Oh, you go
on back," he cried. "Don't stay out here with me. I ain't got anything to
tell you. I don't want to see you at all."
For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his failure to
declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the sense of defeat
settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours of futile sputtering
at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and his failure in the
presence of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope of a future
for himself.
And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley & Son
had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept stealthily in
and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the rear. In the
barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley & Son's cash. Every
evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel when he closed the store
and went upstairs to bed. "They wouldn't never think of a careless place
like that," he told himself, thinking of robbers.
Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of the
farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly out at the
front door and walked again in the streets.
The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. "I will get out of here, run away from home," he told himself.
He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at midnight and
went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would steal a ride on the
local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowds there.
He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and
would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer
be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning
for him as it had for others.
The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at
himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter before he
left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps challenge him,
challenge all of Winesburg through him.
Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard
House and pounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the
office. He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore with
pride the title of "night clerk." Before the boy Elmer was bold, insistent.
"You 'wake him up," he commanded. "You tell him to come down by the depot. I
got to see him and I'm going away on the local. Tell him to dress and come
on down. I ain't got much time."
The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their flight
east. George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new overcoat,
ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity. "Well, here I am.
What do you want? You've got something to tell me, eh?" he said.
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at
the train that had begun to groan and get under way. "Well, you see," he
began, and then lost control of his tongue. "I'll be washed and ironed. I'll
be washed and ironed and starched," he muttered half incoherently.
Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and down
before his eyes. Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket he thrust
them into George Willard's hand. "Take them," he cried. "I don't want them.
Give them to father. I stole them." With a snarl of rage he turned and his
long arms began to flay the air. Like one struggling for release from hands
that held him he struck out, hitting George Willard blow after blow on the
breast, the neck, the mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the blows. Springing
aboard the passing train and running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang
down to a flat car and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the
fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up in him. "I showed him," he
cried. "I guess I showed him. I ain't so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't
so queer."
THE UNTOLD LIE
RAY PEARSON and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on a farm three
miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday afternoons they came into town and
wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the country.
Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty with a brown beard
and shoulders rounded by too much and too hard labor. In his nature he was
as unlike Hal Winters as two men can be unlike.
Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife
who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged children,
lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end of the
Wills farm where Ray was employed.
Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow. He was not of the
Ned Winters family, who were very respectable people in Winesburg, but was
one of the three sons of the old man called Windpeter Winters who had a
sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who was looked upon by everyone
in Winesburg as a confirmed old reprobate.
People from the part of Northern Ohio in which Winesburg lies will
remember old Windpeter by his unusual and tragic death. He got drunk one
evening in town and started to drive home to Unionville along the railroad
tracks. Henry Brattenburg, the butcher, who lived out that way, stopped him
at the edge of the town and told him he was sure to meet the down train but
Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and drove on. When the train struck
and killed him and his two horses a farmer and his wife who were driving
home along a nearby road saw the accident. They said that old Windpeter
stood up on the seat of his wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing
locomotive, and that he fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened
by his incessant slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death.
Boys like young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident
quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man
would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him,
they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his
foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously
instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.
But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal
who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray's story. It will,
however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you will get
into the spirit of it.
Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters
boys in that family, John, Hal, and Edward, all broad-shouldered big fellows
like old Windpeter himself and all fighters and woman-chasers and generally
all-around bad ones.
Hal was the worst of the lot and always up to some devilment. He once
stole a load of boards from his father's mill and sold them in Winesburg.
With the money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy clothes. Then he
got drunk and when his father came raving into town to find him, they met
and fought with their fists on Main Street and were arrested and put into
jail together.
Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a country school
teacher out that way who had taken his fancy. He was only twenty-two then
but had already been in two or three of what were spoken of in Winesburg as
"women scrapes." Everyone who heard of his infatuation for the school
teacher was sure it would turn out badly. "He'll only get her into trouble,
you'll see," was the word that went around.
And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a field on a day in
the late October. They were husking corn and occasionally something was said
and they laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who was the more sensitive and
always minded things more, had chapped hands and they hurt. He put them into
his coat pockets and looked away across the fields. He was in a sad,
distracted mood and was affected by the beauty of the country. If you knew
the Winesburg country in the fall and how the low hills are all splashed
with yellows and reds you would understand his feeling. He began to think of
the time, long ago when he was a young fellow living with his father, then a
baker in Winesburg, and how on such days he had wandered away into the woods
to gather nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about and smoke his pipe. His
marriage had come about through one of his days of wandering. He had induced
a girl who waited on trade in his father's shop to go with him and something
had happened. He was thinking of that afternoon and how it had affected his
whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him. He had forgotten about Hal
and muttered words. "Tricked by Gad, that's what I was, tricked by life and
made a fool of," he said in a low voice.
As though understanding his thoughts, Hal Winters spoke up. "Well, has
it been worth while? What about it, eh? What about marriage and all that?"
he asked and then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he too was in
an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. "Has a fellow got to do it?" he
asked. "Has he got to be harnessed up and driven through life like a horse?"
Hal didn't wait for an answer but sprang to his feet and began to walk
back and forth between the corn shocks. He was getting more and more
excited. Bending down suddenly he picked up an ear of the yellow corn and
threw it at the fence. "I've got Nell Gunther in trouble," he said. "I'm
telling you, but you keep your mouth shut."
Ray Pearson arose and stood staring. He was almost a foot shorter than
Hal, and when the younger man came and put his two hands on the older man's
shoulders they made a picture. There they stood in the big empty field with
the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow
hills in the distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had
become all alive to each other. Hal sensed it and because that was his way
he laughed. "Well, old daddy," he said awkwardly, "come on, advise me. I've
got Nell in trouble. Perhaps you've been in the same fix yourself. I know
what everyone would say is the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall
I marry and settle down? Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out
like an old horse? You know me, Ray. There can't anyone break me but I can
break myself. Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come
on, you tell me. Whatever you say, Ray, I'll do."
Ray couldn't answer. He shook Hal's hands loose and turning walked
straight away toward the barn. He was a sensitive man and there were tears
in his eyes. He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal Winters, son of
old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own training and all the
beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but for his life he couldn't
say what he knew he should say.
At half-past four that afternoon Ray was puttering about the barnyard
when his wife came up the lane along the creek and called him. After the
talk with Hal he hadn't returned to the cornfield but worked about the barn.
He had already done the evening chores and had seen Hal, dressed and ready
for a roistering night in town, come out of the farmhouse and go into the
road. Along the path to his own house he trudged behind his wife, looking at
the ground and thinking. He couldn't make out what was wrong. Every time he
raised his eyes and saw the beauty of the country in the failing light he
wanted to do something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his
wife with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying. Along
the path he went scratching his head and trying to make it out. He looked
hard at his wife's back but she seemed all right.
She only wanted him to go into town for groceries and as soon as she
had told him what she wanted began to scold. "You're always puttering," she
said. "Now I want you to hustle. There isn't anything in the house for
supper and you've got to get to town and back in a hurry."
Ray went into his own house and took an overcoat from a hook back of
the door. It was torn about the pockets and the collar was shiny. His wife
went into the bedroom and presently came out with a soiled cloth in one hand
and three silver dollars in the other. Somewhere in the house a child wept
bitterly and a dog that had been sleeping by the stove arose and yawned.
Again the wife scolded. "The children will cry and cry. Why are you always
puttering?" she asked.
Ray went out of the house and climbed the fence into a field. It was
just growing dark and the scene that lay before him was lovely. All the low
hills were washed with color and even the little clusters of bushes in the
corners of the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world seemed to Ray
Pearson to have become alive with something just as he and Hal had suddenly
become alive when they stood in the corn field stating into each other's
eyes.
The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on that
fall evening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand it. Of a
sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the
torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a protest
against his life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.
"There was no promise made," he cried into the empty spaces that lay about
him. "I didn't promise my Minnie anything and Hal hasn't made any promise to
Nell. I know he hasn't. She went into the woods with him because she wanted
to go. What he wanted she wanted. Why should I pay? Why should Hal pay? Why
should anyone pay? I don't want Hal to become old and worn out. I'll tell
him. I won't let it go on. I'll catch Hal before he gets to town and I'll
tell him."
Ray ran clumsily and once he stumbled and fell down. "I must catch Hal
and tell him," he kept thinking, and although his breath came in gasps he
kept running harder and harder. As he ran he thought of things that hadn't
come into his mind for years--how at the time he married he had planned to
go west to his uncle in Portland, Oregon--how he hadn't wanted to be a farm
hand, but had thought when he got out West he would go to sea and be a
sailor or get a job on a ranch and ride a horse into Western towns, shouting
and laughing and waking the people in the houses with his wild cries. Then
as he ran he remembered his children and in fancy felt their hands clutching
at him. All of his thoughts of himself were involved with the thoughts of
Hal and he thought the children were clutching at the younger man also.
"They are the accidents of life, Hal," he cried. "They are not mine or
yours. I had nothing to do with them."
Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.
His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge of the
road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he
walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he
wanted.
Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of
what happened to him. It was almost dark when he got to the fence and he put
his hands on the top bar and stood staring. Hal Winters jumped a ditch and
coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and laughed. He seemed
to have lost his own sense of what had happened in the corn field and when
he put up a strong hand and took hold of the lapel of Ray's coat he shook
the old man as he might have shaken a dog that had misbehaved.
"You came to tell me, eh?" he said. "Well, never mind telling me
anything. I'm not a coward and I've already made up my mind." He laughed
again and jumped back across the ditch. "Nell ain't no fool," he said. "She
didn't ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want to settle down and
have kids."
Ray Pearson also laughed. He felt like laughing at himself and all the
world.
As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk that lay over the
road that led to Winesburg, he turned and walked slowly back across the
fields to where he had left his torn overcoat. As he went some memory of
pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the tumble-down
house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he muttered words.
"It's just as well. Whatever I told him would have been a lie," he said
softly, and then his form also disappeared into the darkness of the fields.
DRINK
TOM FOSTER came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young
and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a
farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when
Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a
general store on the Trunion Pike.
What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier
settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had been
in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with her
husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with her
daughter, who had also married a mechanic and lived in Covington, Kentucky,
across the river from Cincinnati.
Then began the hard years for Tom Foster's grandmother. First her
son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a strike and then Tom's mother
became an invalid and died also. The grandmother had saved a little money,
but it was swept away by the illness of the daughter and by the cost of the
two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman worker and lived with the
grandson above a junk shop on a side street in Cincinnati. For five years
she scrubbed the floors in an office building and then got a place as dish
washer in a restaurant. Her hands were all twisted out of shape. When she
took hold of a mop or a broom handle the hands looked like the dried stems
of an old creeping vine clinging to a tree.
The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One
evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book containing
thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was a great
adventure for the boy. It was past seven o'clock at night when the
grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old hands and
she was so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on leaving
Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning the owner of
the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble. Tom, who was then
sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the station with the old woman,
bearing all of their earthly belongings done up in a worn-out blanket and
slung across his back. By his side walked the grandmother urging him
forward. Her toothless old mouth twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary
and wanted to put the pack down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and
if he had not prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they
got into the train and it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a
girl and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.
All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told
Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in the
fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not believe
that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a thriving town
in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to Winesburg did not
want to get off. "It isn't what I thought. It may be hard for you here," she
said, and then the train went on its way and the two stood confused, not
knowing where to turn, in the presence of Albert Longworth, the Winesburg
baggage master.
But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to get along
anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker's wife, employed his grandmother to work in
the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker's new brick barn.
In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who wanted help in
her housework employed a "hired girl" who insisted on sitting at the table
with the family. Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched at the
chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished a room for the boy
Tom upstairs in the barn. "He can mow the lawn and run errands when the
horses do not need attention," she explained to her husband.
Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered
with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the
bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he was
himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the town
without attracting the least bit of attention.
One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness. In
Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough boys prowled
through the streets, and all through his early formative years he ran about
with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a telegraph company and
delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled with houses of prostitution.
The women in the houses knew and loved Tom Foster and the tough boys in the
gangs loved him also.
He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.
In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand
in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed their
casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and listened to their
tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.
Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in the city. The
grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There was
nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on a side
street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash drawer.
The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the
boy lurking about and thought nothing of it. When he went out into the
street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the money
walked away. Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the matter by
offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop. The boy was
ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. "It is all right to be ashamed and
makes me understand new things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know
what the boy was talking about but loved him so much that it didn't matter
whether she understood or not.
For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker's stable and then lost his
place there. He didn't take very good care of the horses and he was a
constant source of irritation to the banker's wife. She told him to mow the
lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post office and
he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole
afternoon with them, standing about, listening and occasionally, when
addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the houses of prostitution
and with the rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in
Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet
distinctly apart from the life about him.
After Tom lost his place at Banker White's he did not live with his
grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him. He rented
a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old Rufus
Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street, and had
been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had become too
feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but did not realize
his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the room for a dollar a
month. In the late afternoon when the lawyer had gone home the boy had the
place to himself and spent hours lying on the floor by the stove and
thinking of things. In the evening the grandmother came and sat in the
lawyer's chair to smoke a pipe while Tom remained silent, as he always, did
in the presence of everyone.
Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry
about some happening at the banker's house and scolded away for hours. Out
of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the lawyer's
office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled clean she
lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together. "When you get
ready to die then I will die also," she said to the boy lying on the floor
beside her chair.
Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting
wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses. In late May and
early June he picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to loaf and he
enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat which was too
large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat,
got at the same place, that was lined with fur. The fur was worn away in
spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter Tom slept in it. He thought
his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied with the
way fife in Winesburg had turned out for him.
The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose,
was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery they would be roasting coffee on
Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich
odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the
rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still,
filling his being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with
happiness. "I like it," he said gently. "It makes me think of things far
away, places and things like that."
One night Tom Foster got drunk. That came about in a curious way. He
never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his fife had never taken a
drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that one
time and so went and did it.
In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things,
things about ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these
things than anyone else in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular had
presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep
impression on his mind. He thought, after what he had seen of the women
standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen
in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex
altogether out of his own life. One of the women of the neighborhood tempted
him once and he went into a room with her. He never forgot the smell of the
room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of the woman. It sickened
him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always before
thought of women as quite innocent things, much like his grandmother, but
after that one experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind. So
gentle was his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to
understand he decided to forget.
And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there
for two years something began to stir in him. On all sides he saw youth
making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had happened he
was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White, daughter of the man for
whom he had worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.
That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way. He let
himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and only
concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight, a quiet
determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where
he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was victorious.
And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that
night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of
some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in one
night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for
Tom's outbreak.
In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.
The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in
soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about
in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of
silence very stirring to the blood.
Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make
itself felt. First he walked through the streets, going softly and quietly
along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He said that Helen
White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a little tree without
leaves standing out sharply against the sky. Then he said that she was a
wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the darkness of a stormy sea and
that he was a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman.
That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it. He
went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker's tobacco store.
For an hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it did not
interest him much and he slipped away. Then he decided to get drunk and went
into Willy's saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey. Putting the bottle into
his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to think more
thoughts and to drink the whiskey.
Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a
mile north of town. Before him was a white road and at his back an apple
orchard in full bloom. He took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down
on the grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how the stones in
the graveled driveway by Banker White's house were wet with dew and
glistened in the morning light. He thought of the nights in the barn when it
rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the raindrops and smelling
the warm smell of horses and of hay. Then he thought of a storm that had
gone roaring through Winesburg several days before and, his mind going back,
he relived the night he had spent on the train with his grandmother when the
two were coming from Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it had
seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel the power of the engine
hurling the train along through the night.
Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking drinks from the
bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his head began to reel got up
and walked along the road going away from Winesburg. There was a bridge on
the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie and the drunken boy
made his way along the road to the bridge. There he sat down. He tried to
drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he became ill
and put it quickly back. His head was rocking back and forth and so he sat
on the stone approach to the bridge and sighed. His head seemed to be flying
about like a pinwheel and then projecting itself off into space and his arms
and legs flopped helplessly about.
At eleven o'clock Tom got back into town. George Willard found him
wandering about and took him into the Eagle printshop. Then he became afraid
that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped him into the
alleyway.
The reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The drunken boy talked of
Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore of a sea and had made
love to her. George had seen Helen White walking in the street with her
father during the evening and decided that Tom was out of his head. A
sentiment concerning Helen White that lurked in his own heart flamed up and
he became angry. "Now you quit that," he said. "I won't let Helen White's
name be dragged into this. I won't let that happen." He began shaking Tom's
shoulder, trying to make him understand. "You quit it," he said again.
For three hours the two young men, thus strangely thrown together,
stayed in the printshop. When he had a little recovered George took Tom for
a walk. They went into the country and sat on a log near the edge of a wood.
Something in the still night drew them together and when the drunken boy's
head began to clear they talked.
"It was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught me something. I
won't have to do it again. I will think more dearly after this. You see how
it is."
George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed
and he felt drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had never before been
drawn toward anyone. With motherly solicitude, he insisted that Tom get to
his feet and walk about. Again they went back to the printshop and sat in
silence in the darkness.
The reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster's action
straightened out in his mind. When Tom spoke again of Helen White he again
grew angry and began to scold. "You quit that," he said sharply. "You
haven't been with her. What makes you say you have? What makes you keep
saying such things? Now you quit it, do you hear?"
Tom was hurt. He couldn't quarrel with George Willard because he was
incapable of quarreling, so he got up to go away. When George Willard was
insistent he put out his hand, laying it on the older boy's arm, and tried
to explain.
"Well," he said softly, "I don't know how it was. I was happy. You see
how that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did too. I wanted to
suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I wanted to
suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. I thought of a lot
of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt someone else."
Tom Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost
excited. "It was like making love, that's what I mean," he explained. "Don't
you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange.
That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught me something, that's it,
that's what I wanted. Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you
see. That's why I did it."
DEATH
THE STAIRWAY LEADING up to Doctor Reefy's office, in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of the
stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to
the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with
dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet
of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under
the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way.
At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the
doctor's door. To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish. Old
chairs, carpenter's horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the darkness
waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of rubbish belonged to the Paris
Dry Goods Company. When a counter or a row of shelves in the store became
useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it on the pile.
Doctor Reefy's office was as large as a barn. A stove with a round
paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled sawdust,
held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a huge
table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrick's Clothing Store
and that had been used for displaying custom-made clothes. It was covered
with books, bottles, and surgical instruments. Near the edge of the table
lay three or four apples left by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was
Doctor Reefy's friend, and who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as
he came in at the door.
At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he
later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache.
He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much occupied with
the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.
On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her
son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went
up the worn steps to Doctor Reefy's office. Already the woman's naturally
tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly about.
Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but on the half
dozen occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of the visits did
not primarily concern her health. She and the doctor talked of that but they
talked most of her life, of their two lives and of the ideas that had come
to them as they lived their lives in Winesburg.
In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other
and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also
the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of
their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the
same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an
onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a young wife, the doctor
often talked to her of the hours spent with the sick woman and expressed a
good many things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a
poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. "I
had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I
invented gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my prayers in
words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late
afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the
days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped
also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she
thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone
just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I
suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places."
On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the
office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.
Sometimes the doctor made philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a hint
given that strangely illuminated the fife of the speaker, a wish became a
desire, or a dream, half dead, flared suddenly into life. For the most part
the words came from the woman and she said them without looking at the man.
Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's wife talked a
little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down the
stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the
dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing to her
body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by the window
employer. When excited or surprised by anything he smiled vaguely and
muttered: "I'll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed
and starched."
When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially
interested in the sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also were
cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth and
apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.
Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and
waving his arms about. "You don't understand what's the matter with me so of
course you don't care," he declared. "With me it's different. Look how it
has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was queer, too. Even the
clothes mother used to wear were not like other people's clothes, and look
at that coat in which father goes about there in town, thinking he's dressed
up, too. Why don't he get a new one? It wouldn't cost much. I'll tell you
why. Father doesn't know and when mother was alive she didn't know either.
Mabel is different. She knows but she won't say anything. I will, though.
I'm not going to be stared at any longer. Why look here, Mook, father
doesn't know that his store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he'll
never sell the stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it. Sometimes he's a
little worried that trade doesn't come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will come
after a while. He isn't worried. He's queer. He doesn't know enough to be
worried."
The excited young man became more excited. "He don't know but I know,"
he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of the
half-wit. "I know too well. I can't stand it. When we lived out here it was
different. I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I wasn't always
seeing people and thinking as I am now. In the evening, there in town, I go
to the post office or to the depot to see the train come in, and no one says
anything to me. Everyone stands around and laughs and they talk but they say
nothing to me. Then I feel so queer that I can't talk either. I go away. I
don't say anything. I can't."
The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. "I won't stand it," he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. "I'm not made to stand
it."
Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the town of
Winesburg. "Go on back to work," he screamed. "What good does it do me to
talk to you?" A thought came to him and his voice dropped. "I'm a coward
too, eh?" he muttered. "Do you know why I came clear out here afoot? I had
to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell. I hunted out another
queer one, you see. I ran away, that's what I did. I couldn't stand up to
someone like that George Willard. I had to come to you. I ought to tell him
and I will."
Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about. "I will tell
him. I won't be queer. I don't care what they think. I won't stand it."
Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the fence
went back to his work in the corn. "I'll be washed and ironed and starched,"
he declared. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed." Mook was interested.
He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood nibbling at a straw
stack. "Elmer was here," he said to the cows. "Elmer is crazy. You better
get behind the stack where he don't see you. He'll hurt someone yet, Elmer
will."
At eight o'clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat writing.
His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined look was on
his face. "You come on outside with me," he said, stepping in and closing
the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though prepared to resist anyone
else coming in. "You just come along outside. I want to see you."
George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of
Winesburg. The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat and
looked very spruce and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the overcoat
pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long been wanting to
make friends with the young merchant and find out what was in his mind. Now
he thought he saw a chance and was delighted. "I wonder what he's up to?
Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for the paper. It can't be a fire
because I haven't heard the fire bell and there isn't anyone running," he
thought.
In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few
citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove at
the back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and the wind
rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the stairway leading to
Doctor Welling's office. Before Hern's Grocery a basket of apples and a rack
filled with new brooms stood on the sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood
facing George Willard. He tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and
down. His face worked spasmodically. He seemed about to shout. "Oh, you go
on back," he cried. "Don't stay out here with me. I ain't got anything to
tell you. I don't want to see you at all."
For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his failure to
declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the sense of defeat
settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours of futile sputtering
at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and his failure in the
presence of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope of a future
for himself.
And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley & Son
had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept stealthily in
and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the rear. In the
barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley & Son's cash. Every
evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel when he closed the store
and went upstairs to bed. "They wouldn't never think of a careless place
like that," he told himself, thinking of robbers.
Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of the
farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly out at the
front door and walked again in the streets.
The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. "I will get out of here, run away from home," he told himself.
He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at midnight and
went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would steal a ride on the
local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowds there.
He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and
would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer
be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning
for him as it had for others.
The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at
himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter before he
left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps challenge him,
challenge all of Winesburg through him.
Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard
House and pounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the
office. He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore with
pride the title of "night clerk." Before the boy Elmer was bold, insistent.
"You 'wake him up," he commanded. "You tell him to come down by the depot. I
got to see him and I'm going away on the local. Tell him to dress and come
on down. I ain't got much time."
The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their flight
east. George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new overcoat,
ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity. "Well, here I am.
What do you want? You've got something to tell me, eh?" he said.
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at
the train that had begun to groan and get under way. "Well, you see," he
began, and then lost control of his tongue. "I'll be washed and ironed. I'll
be washed and ironed and starched," he muttered half incoherently.
Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and down
before his eyes. Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket he thrust
them into George Willard's hand. "Take them," he cried. "I don't want them.
Give them to father. I stole them." With a snarl of rage he turned and his
long arms began to flay the air. Like one struggling for release from hands
that held him he struck out, hitting George Willard blow after blow on the
breast, the neck, the mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the blows. Springing
aboard the passing train and running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang
down to a flat car and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the
fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up in him. "I showed him," he
cried. "I guess I showed him. I ain't so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't
so queer."
THE UNTOLD LIE
RAY PEARSON and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on a farm three
miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday afternoons they came into town and
wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the country.
Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty with a brown beard
and shoulders rounded by too much and too hard labor. In his nature he was
as unlike Hal Winters as two men can be unlike.
Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife
who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged children,
lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end of the
Wills farm where Ray was employed.
Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow. He was not of the
Ned Winters family, who were very respectable people in Winesburg, but was
one of the three sons of the old man called Windpeter Winters who had a
sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who was looked upon by everyone
in Winesburg as a confirmed old reprobate.
People from the part of Northern Ohio in which Winesburg lies will
remember old Windpeter by his unusual and tragic death. He got drunk one
evening in town and started to drive home to Unionville along the railroad
tracks. Henry Brattenburg, the butcher, who lived out that way, stopped him
at the edge of the town and told him he was sure to meet the down train but
Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and drove on. When the train struck
and killed him and his two horses a farmer and his wife who were driving
home along a nearby road saw the accident. They said that old Windpeter
stood up on the seat of his wagon, raving and swearing at the onrushing
locomotive, and that he fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened
by his incessant slashing at them, rushed straight ahead to certain death.
Boys like young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the incident
quite vividly because, although everyone in our town said that the old man
would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him,
they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his
foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously
instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.
But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal
who worked on the Wills farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray's story. It will,
however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you will get
into the spirit of it.
Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters
boys in that family, John, Hal, and Edward, all broad-shouldered big fellows
like old Windpeter himself and all fighters and woman-chasers and generally
all-around bad ones.
Hal was the worst of the lot and always up to some devilment. He once
stole a load of boards from his father's mill and sold them in Winesburg.
With the money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy clothes. Then he
got drunk and when his father came raving into town to find him, they met
and fought with their fists on Main Street and were arrested and put into
jail together.
Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a country school
teacher out that way who had taken his fancy. He was only twenty-two then
but had already been in two or three of what were spoken of in Winesburg as
"women scrapes." Everyone who heard of his infatuation for the school
teacher was sure it would turn out badly. "He'll only get her into trouble,
you'll see," was the word that went around.
And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a field on a day in
the late October. They were husking corn and occasionally something was said
and they laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who was the more sensitive and
always minded things more, had chapped hands and they hurt. He put them into
his coat pockets and looked away across the fields. He was in a sad,
distracted mood and was affected by the beauty of the country. If you knew
the Winesburg country in the fall and how the low hills are all splashed
with yellows and reds you would understand his feeling. He began to think of
the time, long ago when he was a young fellow living with his father, then a
baker in Winesburg, and how on such days he had wandered away into the woods
to gather nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about and smoke his pipe. His
marriage had come about through one of his days of wandering. He had induced
a girl who waited on trade in his father's shop to go with him and something
had happened. He was thinking of that afternoon and how it had affected his
whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him. He had forgotten about Hal
and muttered words. "Tricked by Gad, that's what I was, tricked by life and
made a fool of," he said in a low voice.
As though understanding his thoughts, Hal Winters spoke up. "Well, has
it been worth while? What about it, eh? What about marriage and all that?"
he asked and then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he too was in
an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. "Has a fellow got to do it?" he
asked. "Has he got to be harnessed up and driven through life like a horse?"
Hal didn't wait for an answer but sprang to his feet and began to walk
back and forth between the corn shocks. He was getting more and more
excited. Bending down suddenly he picked up an ear of the yellow corn and
threw it at the fence. "I've got Nell Gunther in trouble," he said. "I'm
telling you, but you keep your mouth shut."
Ray Pearson arose and stood staring. He was almost a foot shorter than
Hal, and when the younger man came and put his two hands on the older man's
shoulders they made a picture. There they stood in the big empty field with
the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow
hills in the distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had
become all alive to each other. Hal sensed it and because that was his way
he laughed. "Well, old daddy," he said awkwardly, "come on, advise me. I've
got Nell in trouble. Perhaps you've been in the same fix yourself. I know
what everyone would say is the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall
I marry and settle down? Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out
like an old horse? You know me, Ray. There can't anyone break me but I can
break myself. Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come
on, you tell me. Whatever you say, Ray, I'll do."
Ray couldn't answer. He shook Hal's hands loose and turning walked
straight away toward the barn. He was a sensitive man and there were tears
in his eyes. He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal Winters, son of
old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own training and all the
beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but for his life he couldn't
say what he knew he should say.
At half-past four that afternoon Ray was puttering about the barnyard
when his wife came up the lane along the creek and called him. After the
talk with Hal he hadn't returned to the cornfield but worked about the barn.
He had already done the evening chores and had seen Hal, dressed and ready
for a roistering night in town, come out of the farmhouse and go into the
road. Along the path to his own house he trudged behind his wife, looking at
the ground and thinking. He couldn't make out what was wrong. Every time he
raised his eyes and saw the beauty of the country in the failing light he
wanted to do something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his
wife with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying. Along
the path he went scratching his head and trying to make it out. He looked
hard at his wife's back but she seemed all right.
She only wanted him to go into town for groceries and as soon as she
had told him what she wanted began to scold. "You're always puttering," she
said. "Now I want you to hustle. There isn't anything in the house for
supper and you've got to get to town and back in a hurry."
Ray went into his own house and took an overcoat from a hook back of
the door. It was torn about the pockets and the collar was shiny. His wife
went into the bedroom and presently came out with a soiled cloth in one hand
and three silver dollars in the other. Somewhere in the house a child wept
bitterly and a dog that had been sleeping by the stove arose and yawned.
Again the wife scolded. "The children will cry and cry. Why are you always
puttering?" she asked.
Ray went out of the house and climbed the fence into a field. It was
just growing dark and the scene that lay before him was lovely. All the low
hills were washed with color and even the little clusters of bushes in the
corners of the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world seemed to Ray
Pearson to have become alive with something just as he and Hal had suddenly
become alive when they stood in the corn field stating into each other's
eyes.
The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on that
fall evening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand it. Of a
sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the
torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a protest
against his life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.
"There was no promise made," he cried into the empty spaces that lay about
him. "I didn't promise my Minnie anything and Hal hasn't made any promise to
Nell. I know he hasn't. She went into the woods with him because she wanted
to go. What he wanted she wanted. Why should I pay? Why should Hal pay? Why
should anyone pay? I don't want Hal to become old and worn out. I'll tell
him. I won't let it go on. I'll catch Hal before he gets to town and I'll
tell him."
Ray ran clumsily and once he stumbled and fell down. "I must catch Hal
and tell him," he kept thinking, and although his breath came in gasps he
kept running harder and harder. As he ran he thought of things that hadn't
come into his mind for years--how at the time he married he had planned to
go west to his uncle in Portland, Oregon--how he hadn't wanted to be a farm
hand, but had thought when he got out West he would go to sea and be a
sailor or get a job on a ranch and ride a horse into Western towns, shouting
and laughing and waking the people in the houses with his wild cries. Then
as he ran he remembered his children and in fancy felt their hands clutching
at him. All of his thoughts of himself were involved with the thoughts of
Hal and he thought the children were clutching at the younger man also.
"They are the accidents of life, Hal," he cried. "They are not mine or
yours. I had nothing to do with them."
Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.
His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge of the
road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he
walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he
wanted.
Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end of the story of
what happened to him. It was almost dark when he got to the fence and he put
his hands on the top bar and stood staring. Hal Winters jumped a ditch and
coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and laughed. He seemed
to have lost his own sense of what had happened in the corn field and when
he put up a strong hand and took hold of the lapel of Ray's coat he shook
the old man as he might have shaken a dog that had misbehaved.
"You came to tell me, eh?" he said. "Well, never mind telling me
anything. I'm not a coward and I've already made up my mind." He laughed
again and jumped back across the ditch. "Nell ain't no fool," he said. "She
didn't ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want to settle down and
have kids."
Ray Pearson also laughed. He felt like laughing at himself and all the
world.
As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk that lay over the
road that led to Winesburg, he turned and walked slowly back across the
fields to where he had left his torn overcoat. As he went some memory of
pleasant evenings spent with the thin-legged children in the tumble-down
house by the creek must have come into his mind, for he muttered words.
"It's just as well. Whatever I told him would have been a lie," he said
softly, and then his form also disappeared into the darkness of the fields.
DRINK
TOM FOSTER came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he was still young
and could get many new impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a
farm near the town and as a young girl had gone to school there when
Winesburg was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered about a
general store on the Trunion Pike.
What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier
settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had been
in Kansas, in Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with her
husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to stay with her
daughter, who had also married a mechanic and lived in Covington, Kentucky,
across the river from Cincinnati.
Then began the hard years for Tom Foster's grandmother. First her
son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a strike and then Tom's mother
became an invalid and died also. The grandmother had saved a little money,
but it was swept away by the illness of the daughter and by the cost of the
two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman worker and lived with the
grandson above a junk shop on a side street in Cincinnati. For five years
she scrubbed the floors in an office building and then got a place as dish
washer in a restaurant. Her hands were all twisted out of shape. When she
took hold of a mop or a broom handle the hands looked like the dried stems
of an old creeping vine clinging to a tree.
The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One
evening as she was coming home from work she found a pocket-book containing
thirty-seven dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was a great
adventure for the boy. It was past seven o'clock at night when the
grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old hands and
she was so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on leaving
Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning the owner of
the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble. Tom, who was then
sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the station with the old woman,
bearing all of their earthly belongings done up in a worn-out blanket and
slung across his back. By his side walked the grandmother urging him
forward. Her toothless old mouth twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary
and wanted to put the pack down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and
if he had not prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they
got into the train and it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a
girl and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.
All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told
Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in the
fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not believe
that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a thriving town
in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to Winesburg did not
want to get off. "It isn't what I thought. It may be hard for you here," she
said, and then the train went on its way and the two stood confused, not
knowing where to turn, in the presence of Albert Longworth, the Winesburg
baggage master.
But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to get along
anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker's wife, employed his grandmother to work in
the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker's new brick barn.
In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who wanted help in
her housework employed a "hired girl" who insisted on sitting at the table
with the family. Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched at the
chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished a room for the boy
Tom upstairs in the barn. "He can mow the lawn and run errands when the
horses do not need attention," she explained to her husband.
Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large head covered
with stiff black hair that stood straight up. The hair emphasized the
bigness of his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he was
himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the life of the town
without attracting the least bit of attention.
One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his gentleness. In
Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where gangs of tough boys prowled
through the streets, and all through his early formative years he ran about
with tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a telegraph company and
delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled with houses of prostitution.
The women in the houses knew and loved Tom Foster and the tough boys in the
gangs loved him also.
He never asserted himself. That was one thing that helped him escape.
In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand
in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed their
casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and listened to their
tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.
Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in the city. The
grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work. There was
nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on a side
street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash drawer.
The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the
boy lurking about and thought nothing of it. When he went out into the
street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the money
walked away. Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the matter by
offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop. The boy was
ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. "It is all right to be ashamed and
makes me understand new things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know
what the boy was talking about but loved him so much that it didn't matter
whether she understood or not.
For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker's stable and then lost his
place there. He didn't take very good care of the horses and he was a
constant source of irritation to the banker's wife. She told him to mow the
lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post office and
he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole
afternoon with them, standing about, listening and occasionally, when
addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the houses of prostitution
and with the rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in
Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet
distinctly apart from the life about him.
After Tom lost his place at Banker White's he did not live with his
grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him. He rented
a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old Rufus
Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street, and had
been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had become too
feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but did not realize
his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him have the room for a dollar a
month. In the late afternoon when the lawyer had gone home the boy had the
place to himself and spent hours lying on the floor by the stove and
thinking of things. In the evening the grandmother came and sat in the
lawyer's chair to smoke a pipe while Tom remained silent, as he always, did
in the presence of everyone.
Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes she was angry
about some happening at the banker's house and scolded away for hours. Out
of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the lawyer's
office. Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled clean she
lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together. "When you get
ready to die then I will die also," she said to the boy lying on the floor
beside her chair.
Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting
wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses. In late May and
early June he picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to loaf and he
enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a cast-off coat which was too
large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat,
got at the same place, that was lined with fur. The fur was worn away in
spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter Tom slept in it. He thought
his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied with the
way fife in Winesburg had turned out for him.
The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose,
was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery they would be roasting coffee on
Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich
odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the
rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still,
filling his being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with
happiness. "I like it," he said gently. "It makes me think of things far
away, places and things like that."
One night Tom Foster got drunk. That came about in a curious way. He
never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his fife had never taken a
drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that one
time and so went and did it.
In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things,
things about ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these
things than anyone else in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular had
presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep
impression on his mind. He thought, after what he had seen of the women
standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen
in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex
altogether out of his own life. One of the women of the neighborhood tempted
him once and he went into a room with her. He never forgot the smell of the
room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of the woman. It sickened
him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always before
thought of women as quite innocent things, much like his grandmother, but
after that one experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind. So
gentle was his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to
understand he decided to forget.
And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there
for two years something began to stir in him. On all sides he saw youth
making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had happened he
was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White, daughter of the man for
whom he had worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.
That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way. He let
himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and only
concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight, a quiet
determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where
he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was victorious.
And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that
night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of
some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in one
night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for
Tom's outbreak.
In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.
The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in
soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about
in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of
silence very stirring to the blood.
Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make
itself felt. First he walked through the streets, going softly and quietly
along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He said that Helen
White was a flame dancing in the air and that he was a little tree without
leaves standing out sharply against the sky. Then he said that she was a
wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the darkness of a stormy sea and
that he was a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman.
That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along playing with it. He
went into Main Street and sat on the curbing before Wacker's tobacco store.
For an hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it did not
interest him much and he slipped away. Then he decided to get drunk and went
into Willy's saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey. Putting the bottle into
his pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to think more
thoughts and to drink the whiskey.
Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a
mile north of town. Before him was a white road and at his back an apple
orchard in full bloom. He took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down
on the grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how the stones in
the graveled driveway by Banker White's house were wet with dew and
glistened in the morning light. He thought of the nights in the barn when it
rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the raindrops and smelling
the warm smell of horses and of hay. Then he thought of a storm that had
gone roaring through Winesburg several days before and, his mind going back,
he relived the night he had spent on the train with his grandmother when the
two were coming from Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it had
seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel the power of the engine
hurling the train along through the night.
Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking drinks from the
bottle as the thoughts visited him and when his head began to reel got up
and walked along the road going away from Winesburg. There was a bridge on
the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie and the drunken boy
made his way along the road to the bridge. There he sat down. He tried to
drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he became ill
and put it quickly back. His head was rocking back and forth and so he sat
on the stone approach to the bridge and sighed. His head seemed to be flying
about like a pinwheel and then projecting itself off into space and his arms
and legs flopped helplessly about.
At eleven o'clock Tom got back into town. George Willard found him
wandering about and took him into the Eagle printshop. Then he became afraid
that the drunken boy would make a mess on the floor and helped him into the
alleyway.
The reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The drunken boy talked of
Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore of a sea and had made
love to her. George had seen Helen White walking in the street with her
father during the evening and decided that Tom was out of his head. A
sentiment concerning Helen White that lurked in his own heart flamed up and
he became angry. "Now you quit that," he said. "I won't let Helen White's
name be dragged into this. I won't let that happen." He began shaking Tom's
shoulder, trying to make him understand. "You quit it," he said again.
For three hours the two young men, thus strangely thrown together,
stayed in the printshop. When he had a little recovered George took Tom for
a walk. They went into the country and sat on a log near the edge of a wood.
Something in the still night drew them together and when the drunken boy's
head began to clear they talked.
"It was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught me something. I
won't have to do it again. I will think more dearly after this. You see how
it is."
George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed
and he felt drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had never before been
drawn toward anyone. With motherly solicitude, he insisted that Tom get to
his feet and walk about. Again they went back to the printshop and sat in
silence in the darkness.
The reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster's action
straightened out in his mind. When Tom spoke again of Helen White he again
grew angry and began to scold. "You quit that," he said sharply. "You
haven't been with her. What makes you say you have? What makes you keep
saying such things? Now you quit it, do you hear?"
Tom was hurt. He couldn't quarrel with George Willard because he was
incapable of quarreling, so he got up to go away. When George Willard was
insistent he put out his hand, laying it on the older boy's arm, and tried
to explain.
"Well," he said softly, "I don't know how it was. I was happy. You see
how that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did too. I wanted to
suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I wanted to
suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. I thought of a lot
of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt someone else."
Tom Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost
excited. "It was like making love, that's what I mean," he explained. "Don't
you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange.
That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught me something, that's it,
that's what I wanted. Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you
see. That's why I did it."
DEATH
THE STAIRWAY LEADING up to Doctor Reefy's office, in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of the
stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to
the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and covered with
dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet
of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under
the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way.
At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the
doctor's door. To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish. Old
chairs, carpenter's horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the darkness
waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of rubbish belonged to the Paris
Dry Goods Company. When a counter or a row of shelves in the store became
useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it on the pile.
Doctor Reefy's office was as large as a barn. A stove with a round
paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled sawdust,
held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a huge
table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrick's Clothing Store
and that had been used for displaying custom-made clothes. It was covered
with books, bottles, and surgical instruments. Near the edge of the table
lay three or four apples left by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was
Doctor Reefy's friend, and who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as
he came in at the door.
At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he
later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache.
He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much occupied with
the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.
On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her
son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went
up the worn steps to Doctor Reefy's office. Already the woman's naturally
tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly about.
Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but on the half
dozen occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of the visits did
not primarily concern her health. She and the doctor talked of that but they
talked most of her life, of their two lives and of the ideas that had come
to them as they lived their lives in Winesburg.
In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other
and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also
the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of
their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the
same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an
onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a young wife, the doctor
often talked to her of the hours spent with the sick woman and expressed a
good many things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a
poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. "I
had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I
invented gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my prayers in
words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late
afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the
days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped
also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she
thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone
just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I
suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places."
On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the
office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.
Sometimes the doctor made philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a hint
given that strangely illuminated the fife of the speaker, a wish became a
desire, or a dream, half dead, flared suddenly into life. For the most part
the words came from the woman and she said them without looking at the man.
Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's wife talked a
little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down the
stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the
dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing to her
body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by the window