of her room and when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel dining
room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow cold. Her thoughts ran
away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she
remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible
thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her
lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a
hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You
dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she
would have liked to have achieved in life.
In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and forth. The
words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. "Love is like a
wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You
must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If
you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees,
where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes
swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed
and made tender by kisses."
Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had died when she
was but five years old. Her girlhood had been lived in the most haphazard
manner imaginable. Her father was a man who had wanted to be let alone and
the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also had lived and died
a sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face, but by ten o'clock in
the morning all the joy had gone out of his heart. When a guest complained
of the fare in the hotel dining room or one of the girls who made up the
beds got married and went away, he stamped on the floor and swore. At night
when he went to bed he thought of his daughter growing up among the stream
of people that drifted in and out of the hotel and was overcome with
sadness. As the girl grew older and began to walk out in the evening with
men he wanted to talk to her, but when he tried was not successful. He
always forgot what he wanted to say and spent the time complaining of his
own affairs.
In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried to be a real
adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she married
Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure prompted by desire
alone. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real lover. Always
there was something she sought blindly, passionately, some hidden wonder in
life. The tall beautiful girl with the swinging stride who had walked under
the trees with men was forever putting out her hand into the darkness and
trying to get hold of some other hand. In all the babble of words that fell
from the lips of the men with whom she adventured she was trying to find
what would be for her the true word,
Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her father's hotel,
because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like most young girls, she
thought marriage would change the face of life. If there was in her mind a
doubt of the outcome of the marriage with Tom she brushed it aside. Her
father was ill and near death at the time and she was perplexed because of
the meaningless outcome of an affair in which she had just been involved.
Other girls of her age in Winesburg were marrying men she had always known,
grocery clerks or young farmers. In the evening they walked in Main Street
with their husbands and when she passed they smiled happily. She began to
think that the fact of marriage might be full of some hidden significance.
Young wives with whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. "It changes things
to have a man of your own," they said.
On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had not
led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and advised the
daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard,
and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became
excited and tried to get out of bed. When she would not let him walk about
he began to complain. "I've never been let alone," he said. "Although I've
worked hard I've not made the hotel pay. Even now I owe money at the bank.
You'll find that out when I'm gone."
The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness. Being unable
to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl's head down beside his
own. "There's a way out," he whispered. "Don't marry Tom Willard or anyone
else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin box in my
trunk. Take it and go away."
Again the sick man's voice became querulous. "You've got to promise,"
he declared. "If you won't promise not to marry, give me your word that
you'll never tell Tom about the money. It is mine and if I give it to you
I've the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is to make up to you
for my failure as a father. Some time it may prove to be a door, a great
open door to you. Come now, I tell you I'm about to die, give me your
promise."
In Doctor Reefy's office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a small
desk near the window sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead pencil
that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a married woman. She
became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as a lay figure to
give point to her tale. "And then I was married and it did not turn out at
all," she said bitterly. "As soon as I had gone into it I began to be
afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then perhaps I found out too much
during my first night with him. I don't remember.
"What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what the
girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also. It wasn't
Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I leaned out of the
window and thought of the life I had led. I didn't want to be a bad woman.
The town was full of stories about me. I even began to be afraid Tom would
change his mind."
The woman's voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came an
odd illusion. He thought that as she talked the woman's body was changing,
that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he could not shake
off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist. "It is good for both
her body and her mind, this talking," he muttered.
The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon
a few months after her marriage. Her voice became steadier. "In the late
afternoon I went for a drive alone," she said. "I had a buggy and a little
grey pony I kept in Moyer's Livery. Tom was painting and repapering rooms in
the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to make up my mind to tell him
about the eight hundred dollars father had given to me. I couldn't decide to
do it. I didn't like him well enough. There was always paint on his hands
and face during those days and he smelled of paint. He was trying to fix up
the old hotel, and make it new and smart."
The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told of the drive alone on the spring
afternoon. "It was cloudy and a storm threatened," she said. "Black clouds
made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so that the colors hurt
my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a mile or more and then turned into a side
road. The little horse went quickly along up hill and down. I was impatient.
Thoughts came and I wanted to get away from my thoughts. I began to beat the
horse. The black clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at
a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get out of town,
out of my clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any more
I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I fell and hurt
my side. I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards
something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"
Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the
office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone walk
before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him.
When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair he took her into his
arms and began to kiss her passionately. "I cried all the way home," she
said, as she tried to continue the story of her wild ride, but he did not
listen. "You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!" he muttered and
thought he held in his arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a
lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to project
herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman.
Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the summer afternoon in the office when he was on the
point of becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident brought his
love-making quickly to an end. As the man and woman held each other tightly
heavy feet came tramping up the office stairs. The two sprang to their feet
and stood listening and trembling. The noise on the stairs was made by a
clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Company. With a loud bang he threw an empty
box on the pile of rubbish in the hallway and then went heavily down the
stairs. Elizabeth followed him almost immediately. The thing that had come
to life in her as she talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was
hysterical, as was also Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk.
Along the street she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when
she turned out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of the New Willard
House, she began to tremble and her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.
The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She personified
the figure of death and made him now a strong blackhaired youth running over
hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living. In
the darkness of her room she put out her hand, thrusting it from under the
covers of her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing put out
his hand to her. "Be patient, lover," she whispered. "Keep yourself young
and beautiful and be patient."
On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon her and defeated
her plans for telling her son George of the eight hundred dollars hidden
away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading with death
for another hour of life. "Wait, dear! The boy! The boy! The boy!" she
pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to fight off the arms of the
lover she had wanted so earnestly.
Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her son George became
eighteen, and the young man had but little sense of the meaning of her
death. Only time could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the doctor
stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.
The young man went into his own room and closed the door. He had a
queer empty feeling in the region of his stomach. For a moment he sat
staring at, the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the station
platform he went, and around through residence streets past the highschool
building, thinking almost entirely of his own affairs. The notion of death
could not get hold of him and he was in fact a little annoyed that his
mother had died on that day. He had just received a note from Helen White,
the daughter of the town banker, in answer to one from him. "Tonight I could
have gone to see her and now it will have to be put off," he thought half
angrily.
Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o'clock. It had been cold
and rainy in the morning but in the afternoon the sun came out. Before she
died she lay paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and with only
her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six days she struggled,
thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard to his future,
and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it kept the
memory of the dying woman in their minds for years. Even Tom Willard, who
had always half resented his wife, forgot his resentment and the tears ran
out of his eyes and lodged in his mustache. The mustache had begun to turn
grey and Tom colored it with dye. There was oil in the preparation he used
for the purpose and the tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed
away by his hand, formed a fine mistlike vapor. In his grief Tom Willard's
face looked like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in
bitter weather.
George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother's
death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes, went
along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was a candle
on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a chair by the
bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out his hand as though
to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it back again. The air of
the room was heavy with the presence of the two selfconscious human beings,
and the man hurried away.
The dead woman's son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a
change in his fife, that he would leave Winesburg. "I will go to some city.
Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper," he thought, and then his mind
turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening and again he
was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented his going to her.
In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to
have thoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother's mind
had played with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and imagined that
the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips. His body trembled
and his hands shook. And then something happened. The boy sprang to his feet
and stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of the dead woman under the
sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over him so that he began to weep. A
new notion came into his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about as
though afraid he would be observed.
George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought that had come into his
mind gripped him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother but
someone else lay in the bed before him. The conviction was so real that it
was almost unbearable. The body under the sheets was long and in death
looked young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange fancy, it was
unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the body before him was alive, that in
another moment a lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront him,
became so overpowering that he could not bear the suspense. Again and again
he put out his hand. Once he touched and half lifted the white sheet that
covered her, but his courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and
went out of the room. In the hallway outside the door he stopped and
trembled so that he had to put a hand against the wall to support himself.
"That's not my mother. That's not my mother in there," he whispered to
himself and again his body shook with fright and uncertainty. When Aunt
Elizabeth Swift, who had come to watch over the body, came out of an
adjoining room he put his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head
from side to side, half blind with grief. "My mother is dead," he said, and
then forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he
had just come. "The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear," the boy, urged by
some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.
As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin
box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had put it
there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick.
Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about
the hotel to mend the wall. "I jammed the corner of the bed against it," she
had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of
release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in
the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.
SOPHISTICATION
IT WAS EARLY evening of a day in, the late fall and the Winesburg
County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been
clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where
the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered
with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds.
Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon
beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The
dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with
colors.
In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the
sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran
madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked
terribly at the task of amusing itself.
Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard
concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy's office and
looked at the people. With feverish eyes he watched the faces drifting past
under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head and he did not
want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply
about. "Well, is she going to stay with him all day? Have I done all this
waiting for nothing?" he muttered.
George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and
new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam of
people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave
Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city
newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken possession of him
was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and a little
tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him
apart, made of him a halftragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the
feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time
takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses
the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He
is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world.
Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops
under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things
creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a
message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself
and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a
door is tom open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing,
as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of
men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived
their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of
sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as
merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows
that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in
uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt
in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years he has
lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity.
Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to
some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of
another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he
believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants,
most of all, understanding.
When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind
turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker's daughter. Always he had been
conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into manhood. Once
on a summer night when he was eighteen, he had walked with her on a country
road and in her presence had given way to an impulse to boast, to make
himself appear big and significant in her eyes. Now he wanted to see her for
another purpose. He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that had come to
him. He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of
manhood and now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the
change he believed had taken place in his nature.
As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change. What
George felt, she in her young woman's way felt also. She was no longer a
girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood. She had
come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to spend a day at
the Fair. She also had begun to have memories. During the day she sat in the
grand-stand with a young man, one of the instructors from the college, who
was a guest of her mother's. The young man was of a pedantic turn of mind
and she felt at once he would not do for her purpose. At the Fair she was
glad to be seen in his company as he was well dressed and a stranger. She
knew that the fact of his presence would create an impression. During the
day she was happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless. She
wanted to drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence. While they
sat together in the grand-stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates
were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew
interested. "A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money," he
mused.
Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily
through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening when
they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again. She thought that
the months she had spent in the city, the going to theaters and the seeing
of great crowds wandering in lighted thoroughfares, had changed her
profoundly. She wanted him to feel and be conscious of the change in her
nature.
The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of
both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather
stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country road. Then they
had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and George had taken off
his coat and let it hang on his arm. "Well, I've stayed here in
Winesburg--yes--I've not yet gone away but I'm growing up," he had said.
"I've been reading books and I've been thinking. I'm going to try to amount
to something in life.
"Well," he explained, "that isn't the point. Perhaps I'd better quit
talking."
The confused boy put his hand on the girl's arm. His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town. In his desperation
George boasted, "I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here
in Winesburg," he declared. "I want you to do something, I don't know what.
Perhaps it is none of my business. I want you to try to be different from
other women. You see the point. It's none of my business I tell you. I want
you to be a beautiful woman. You see what I want."
The boy's voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and
went along the street to Helen White's house. At the gate he tried to say
something impressive. Speeches he had thought out came into his head, but
they seemed utterly pointless. "I thought--I used to think--I had it in my
mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now I know you won't," was all he could
find to say as she went through the gate and toward the door of her house.
On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway and looked at the
crowd drifting through Main Street, George thought of the talk beside the
field of young corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of himself. In
the street the people surged up and down like cattle confined in a pen.
Buggies and wagons almost filled the narrow thoroughfare. A band played and
small boys raced along the sidewalk, diving between the legs of men. Young
men with shining red faces walked awkwardly about with girls on their arms.
In a room above one of the stores, where a dance was to be held, the
fiddlers tuned their instruments. The broken sounds floated down through an
open window and out across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the
horns of the band. The medley of sounds got on young Willard's nerves.
Everywhere, on all sides, the sense of crowding, moving life closed in about
him. He wanted to run away by himself and think. "If she wants to stay with
that fellow she may. Why should I care? What difference does it make to me?"
he growled and went along Main Street and through Hern's Grocery into a side
street.
George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he wanted to weep but
pride made him walk rapidly along, swinging his arms. He came to Wesley
Moyer's livery barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a group of men
who talked of a race Wesley's stallion, Tony Tip, had won at the Fair during
the afternoon. A crowd had gathered in front of the barn and before the
crowd walked Wesley, prancing up and down boasting. He held a whip in his
hand and kept tapping the ground. Little puffs of dust arose in the
lamplight. "Hell, quit your talking," Wesley exclaimed. "I wasn't afraid, I
knew I had 'em beat all the time. I wasn't afraid."
Ordinarily George Willard would have been intensely interested in the
boasting of Moyer, the horseman. Now it made him angry. He turned and
hurried away along the street. "Old windbag," he sputtered. "Why does he
want to be bragging? Why don't he shut up?"
George went into a vacant lot and, as he hurried along, fell over a
pile of rubbish. A nail protruding from an empty barrel tore his trousers.
He sat down on the ground and swore. With a pin he mended the torn place and
then arose and went on. "I'll go to Helen White's house, that's what I'll
do. I'll walk right in. I'll say that I want to see her. I'll walk right in
and sit down, that's what I'll do," he declared, climbing over a fence and
beginning to run.
On the veranda of Banker White's house Helen was restless and
distraught. The instructor sat between the mother and daughter. His talk
wearied the girl. Although he had also been raised in an Ohio town, the
instructor began to put on the airs of the city. He wanted to appear
cosmopolitan. "I like the chance you have given me to study the background
out of which most of our girls come," he declared. "It was good of you, Mrs.
White, to have me down for the day." He turned to Helen and laughed. "Your
life is still bound up with the life of this town?" he asked. "There are
people here in whom you are interested?" To the girl his voice sounded
pompous and heavy.
Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at
the back she stopped and stood listening. Her mother began to talk. "There
is no one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen's breeding," she said.
Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the
garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her
that the world was full of meaningless people saying words. Afire with
eagerness she ran through a garden gate and, turning a corner by the
banker's barn, went into a little side street. "George! Where are you,
George?" she cried, filled with nervous excitement. She stopped running, and
leaned against a tree to laugh hysterically. Along the dark little street
came George Willard, still saying words. "I'm going to walk right into her
house. I'll go right in and sit down, " he declared as he came up to her. He
stopped and stared stupidly. "Come on," he said and took hold of her hand.
With hanging heads they walked away along the street under the trees. Dry
leaves rustled under foot. Now that he had found her George wondered what he
had better do and say.
At the upper end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half
decayed old grand-stand. It has never been painted and the boards are all
warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill rising out
of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can see at night,
over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected against the sky.
George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the
path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that had
come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and
intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her.
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm
unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and
remembers, and the older, the more sophisticated thing had possession of
George Willard. Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled with
respect. When they got to the grand-stand they climbed up under the roof and
sat down on one of the long bench-like seats.
There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into
a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night
after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be
forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people.
Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the
town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all
the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within
these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked
of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with
life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life
has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself
standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a
reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the
thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the
people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears
come into the eyes.
In the darkness under the roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat
beside Helen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the scheme
of existence. Now that he had come out of town where the presence of the
people stirring about, busy with a multitude of affairs, had been so
irritating, the irritation was all gone. The presence of Helen renewed and
refreshed him. It was as though her woman's hand was assisting him to make
some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life. He began to think of
the people in the town where he had always lived with something like
reverence. He had reverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by
her, but he did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood. In
the darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand on
her shoulder. A wind began to blow and he shivered. With all his strength he
tried to hold and to understand the mood that had come upon him. In that
high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each
other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have
come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the
thing felt.
In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of
the late fall. Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads pulling
their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of goods in off
the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores. In the Opera House a crowd had
gathered to see a show and further down Main Street the fiddlers, their
instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the feet of youth flying over
a dance floor.
In the darkness in the grand-stand Helen White and George Willard
remained silent. Now and then the spell that held them was broken and they
turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other's eyes. They kissed
but that impulse did not last. At the upper end of the Fair Ground a half
dozen men worked over horses that had raced during the afternoon. The men
had built a fire and were heating kettles of water. Only their legs could be
seen as they passed back and forth in the light. When the wind blew the
little flames of the fire danced crazily about.
George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went
along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind
whispered among the dry corn blades. For a moment during the walk back into
town the spell that held them was broken. When they had come to the crest of
Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again put his hands on the
girl's shoulders. She embraced him eagerly and then again they drew quickly
back from that impulse. They stopped kissing and stood a little apart.
Mutual respect grew big in them. They were both embarrassed and to relieve
their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth. They laughed and
began to pull and haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by
the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl,
but excited little animals.
It was so they went down the hill. In the darkness they played like two
splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward, Helen
tripped George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with laughter,
he roiled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a moment she stopped
in the darkness. There was no way of knowing what woman's thoughts went
through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came
up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence.
For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their
silent evening together the thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they
had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men
and women in the modern world possible.
DEPARTURE
YOUNG GEORGE WILLARD got out of bed at four in the morning. It was
April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The
trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are
winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and
making a carpet underfoot.
George came downstairs into the hotel office carrying a brown leather
bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o'clock he had been awake
thinking of the journey he was about to take and wondering what he would
find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel office lay on
a cot by the door. His mouth was open and he snored lustily. George crept
past the cot and went out into the silent deserted main street. The east was
pink with the dawn and long streaks of light climbed into the sky where a
few stars still shone.
Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg there is a great
stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and
drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking wagons. In
the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the late afternoon in
the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky
haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like
looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect
is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which
tiny human insects toil up and down.
All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in
the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great
open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon
looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and
on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the
April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He
did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from
town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main
Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. "Hey, you
George. How does it feel to be going away?" they asked.
The westbound train leaves Winesburg at seven forty-five in the
morning. Tom Little is conductor. His train runs from Cleveland to where it
connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New
York. Tom has what in railroad circles is called an "easy run." Every
evening he returns to his family. In the fall and spring he spends his
Sundays fishing in Lake Erie. He has a round red face and small blue eyes.
He knows the people in the towns along his railroad better than a city man
knows the people who live in his apartment building.
George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven
o'clock. Tom Willard carried his bag. The son had become taller than the
father.
On the station platform everyone shook the young man's hand. More than
a dozen people waited about. Then they talked of their own affairs. Even
Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of bed.
George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall thin woman of fifty who
worked in the Winesburg post office, came along the station platform. She
had never before paid any attention to George. Now she stopped and put out
her hand. In two words she voiced what everyone felt. "Good luck," she said
sharply and then turning went on her way.
When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scampered
hurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street hoping to have
a parting word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see her. When
the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he
knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no
comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to
the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him. In the smoking car
there was a man who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky
Bay. He wanted to accept the invitation and talk over details.
George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking, then
took out his pocketbook and counted his money. His mind was occupied with a
desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had said to him
concerned the matter of his behavior when he got to the city. "Be a sharp
one," Tom Willard had said. "Keep your eyes on your money. Be awake. That's
the ticket. Don't let anyone think you're a greenhorn."
After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was
surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg.
The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life,
began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things
like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of
his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did
not come into his mind.
He thought of little things--Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the
main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned,
who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp
lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and
holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the
Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.
The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for
dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp.
With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes
and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when
he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of
Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on
which to paint the dreams of his manhood.
room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow cold. Her thoughts ran
away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she
remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible
thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her
lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a
hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You
dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she
would have liked to have achieved in life.
In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and forth. The
words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. "Love is like a
wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You
must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If
you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees,
where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes
swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed
and made tender by kisses."
Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had died when she
was but five years old. Her girlhood had been lived in the most haphazard
manner imaginable. Her father was a man who had wanted to be let alone and
the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also had lived and died
a sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face, but by ten o'clock in
the morning all the joy had gone out of his heart. When a guest complained
of the fare in the hotel dining room or one of the girls who made up the
beds got married and went away, he stamped on the floor and swore. At night
when he went to bed he thought of his daughter growing up among the stream
of people that drifted in and out of the hotel and was overcome with
sadness. As the girl grew older and began to walk out in the evening with
men he wanted to talk to her, but when he tried was not successful. He
always forgot what he wanted to say and spent the time complaining of his
own affairs.
In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried to be a real
adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she married
Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure prompted by desire
alone. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real lover. Always
there was something she sought blindly, passionately, some hidden wonder in
life. The tall beautiful girl with the swinging stride who had walked under
the trees with men was forever putting out her hand into the darkness and
trying to get hold of some other hand. In all the babble of words that fell
from the lips of the men with whom she adventured she was trying to find
what would be for her the true word,
Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her father's hotel,
because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like most young girls, she
thought marriage would change the face of life. If there was in her mind a
doubt of the outcome of the marriage with Tom she brushed it aside. Her
father was ill and near death at the time and she was perplexed because of
the meaningless outcome of an affair in which she had just been involved.
Other girls of her age in Winesburg were marrying men she had always known,
grocery clerks or young farmers. In the evening they walked in Main Street
with their husbands and when she passed they smiled happily. She began to
think that the fact of marriage might be full of some hidden significance.
Young wives with whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. "It changes things
to have a man of your own," they said.
On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had not
led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and advised the
daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard,
and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became
excited and tried to get out of bed. When she would not let him walk about
he began to complain. "I've never been let alone," he said. "Although I've
worked hard I've not made the hotel pay. Even now I owe money at the bank.
You'll find that out when I'm gone."
The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness. Being unable
to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl's head down beside his
own. "There's a way out," he whispered. "Don't marry Tom Willard or anyone
else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin box in my
trunk. Take it and go away."
Again the sick man's voice became querulous. "You've got to promise,"
he declared. "If you won't promise not to marry, give me your word that
you'll never tell Tom about the money. It is mine and if I give it to you
I've the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is to make up to you
for my failure as a father. Some time it may prove to be a door, a great
open door to you. Come now, I tell you I'm about to die, give me your
promise."
In Doctor Reefy's office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a small
desk near the window sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead pencil
that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a married woman. She
became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as a lay figure to
give point to her tale. "And then I was married and it did not turn out at
all," she said bitterly. "As soon as I had gone into it I began to be
afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then perhaps I found out too much
during my first night with him. I don't remember.
"What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what the
girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also. It wasn't
Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I leaned out of the
window and thought of the life I had led. I didn't want to be a bad woman.
The town was full of stories about me. I even began to be afraid Tom would
change his mind."
The woman's voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came an
odd illusion. He thought that as she talked the woman's body was changing,
that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he could not shake
off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist. "It is good for both
her body and her mind, this talking," he muttered.
The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon
a few months after her marriage. Her voice became steadier. "In the late
afternoon I went for a drive alone," she said. "I had a buggy and a little
grey pony I kept in Moyer's Livery. Tom was painting and repapering rooms in
the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to make up my mind to tell him
about the eight hundred dollars father had given to me. I couldn't decide to
do it. I didn't like him well enough. There was always paint on his hands
and face during those days and he smelled of paint. He was trying to fix up
the old hotel, and make it new and smart."
The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told of the drive alone on the spring
afternoon. "It was cloudy and a storm threatened," she said. "Black clouds
made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so that the colors hurt
my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a mile or more and then turned into a side
road. The little horse went quickly along up hill and down. I was impatient.
Thoughts came and I wanted to get away from my thoughts. I began to beat the
horse. The black clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at
a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get out of town,
out of my clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any more
I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I fell and hurt
my side. I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards
something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"
Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the
office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone walk
before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him.
When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair he took her into his
arms and began to kiss her passionately. "I cried all the way home," she
said, as she tried to continue the story of her wild ride, but he did not
listen. "You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!" he muttered and
thought he held in his arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a
lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to project
herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman.
Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the summer afternoon in the office when he was on the
point of becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident brought his
love-making quickly to an end. As the man and woman held each other tightly
heavy feet came tramping up the office stairs. The two sprang to their feet
and stood listening and trembling. The noise on the stairs was made by a
clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Company. With a loud bang he threw an empty
box on the pile of rubbish in the hallway and then went heavily down the
stairs. Elizabeth followed him almost immediately. The thing that had come
to life in her as she talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was
hysterical, as was also Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk.
Along the street she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when
she turned out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of the New Willard
House, she began to tremble and her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.
The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She personified
the figure of death and made him now a strong blackhaired youth running over
hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living. In
the darkness of her room she put out her hand, thrusting it from under the
covers of her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing put out
his hand to her. "Be patient, lover," she whispered. "Keep yourself young
and beautiful and be patient."
On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon her and defeated
her plans for telling her son George of the eight hundred dollars hidden
away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading with death
for another hour of life. "Wait, dear! The boy! The boy! The boy!" she
pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to fight off the arms of the
lover she had wanted so earnestly.
Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her son George became
eighteen, and the young man had but little sense of the meaning of her
death. Only time could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the doctor
stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.
The young man went into his own room and closed the door. He had a
queer empty feeling in the region of his stomach. For a moment he sat
staring at, the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the station
platform he went, and around through residence streets past the highschool
building, thinking almost entirely of his own affairs. The notion of death
could not get hold of him and he was in fact a little annoyed that his
mother had died on that day. He had just received a note from Helen White,
the daughter of the town banker, in answer to one from him. "Tonight I could
have gone to see her and now it will have to be put off," he thought half
angrily.
Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o'clock. It had been cold
and rainy in the morning but in the afternoon the sun came out. Before she
died she lay paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and with only
her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six days she struggled,
thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard to his future,
and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it kept the
memory of the dying woman in their minds for years. Even Tom Willard, who
had always half resented his wife, forgot his resentment and the tears ran
out of his eyes and lodged in his mustache. The mustache had begun to turn
grey and Tom colored it with dye. There was oil in the preparation he used
for the purpose and the tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed
away by his hand, formed a fine mistlike vapor. In his grief Tom Willard's
face looked like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in
bitter weather.
George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother's
death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes, went
along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was a candle
on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a chair by the
bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out his hand as though
to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it back again. The air of
the room was heavy with the presence of the two selfconscious human beings,
and the man hurried away.
The dead woman's son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a
change in his fife, that he would leave Winesburg. "I will go to some city.
Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper," he thought, and then his mind
turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening and again he
was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented his going to her.
In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to
have thoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother's mind
had played with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and imagined that
the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips. His body trembled
and his hands shook. And then something happened. The boy sprang to his feet
and stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of the dead woman under the
sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over him so that he began to weep. A
new notion came into his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about as
though afraid he would be observed.
George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought that had come into his
mind gripped him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother but
someone else lay in the bed before him. The conviction was so real that it
was almost unbearable. The body under the sheets was long and in death
looked young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange fancy, it was
unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the body before him was alive, that in
another moment a lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront him,
became so overpowering that he could not bear the suspense. Again and again
he put out his hand. Once he touched and half lifted the white sheet that
covered her, but his courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and
went out of the room. In the hallway outside the door he stopped and
trembled so that he had to put a hand against the wall to support himself.
"That's not my mother. That's not my mother in there," he whispered to
himself and again his body shook with fright and uncertainty. When Aunt
Elizabeth Swift, who had come to watch over the body, came out of an
adjoining room he put his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head
from side to side, half blind with grief. "My mother is dead," he said, and
then forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he
had just come. "The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear," the boy, urged by
some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.
As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin
box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had put it
there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick.
Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about
the hotel to mend the wall. "I jammed the corner of the bed against it," she
had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of
release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in
the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.
SOPHISTICATION
IT WAS EARLY evening of a day in, the late fall and the Winesburg
County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been
clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where
the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered
with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds.
Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon
beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The
dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with
colors.
In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the
sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran
madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked
terribly at the task of amusing itself.
Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard
concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy's office and
looked at the people. With feverish eyes he watched the faces drifting past
under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head and he did not
want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply
about. "Well, is she going to stay with him all day? Have I done all this
waiting for nothing?" he muttered.
George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and
new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam of
people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave
Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city
newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken possession of him
was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and a little
tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him
apart, made of him a halftragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the
feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time
takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses
the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He
is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world.
Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops
under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things
creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a
message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself
and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a
door is tom open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing,
as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of
men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived
their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of
sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as
merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows
that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in
uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt
in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years he has
lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity.
Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to
some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of
another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he
believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants,
most of all, understanding.
When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind
turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker's daughter. Always he had been
conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into manhood. Once
on a summer night when he was eighteen, he had walked with her on a country
road and in her presence had given way to an impulse to boast, to make
himself appear big and significant in her eyes. Now he wanted to see her for
another purpose. He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that had come to
him. He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of
manhood and now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the
change he believed had taken place in his nature.
As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change. What
George felt, she in her young woman's way felt also. She was no longer a
girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood. She had
come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to spend a day at
the Fair. She also had begun to have memories. During the day she sat in the
grand-stand with a young man, one of the instructors from the college, who
was a guest of her mother's. The young man was of a pedantic turn of mind
and she felt at once he would not do for her purpose. At the Fair she was
glad to be seen in his company as he was well dressed and a stranger. She
knew that the fact of his presence would create an impression. During the
day she was happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless. She
wanted to drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence. While they
sat together in the grand-stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates
were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew
interested. "A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money," he
mused.
Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily
through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening when
they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again. She thought that
the months she had spent in the city, the going to theaters and the seeing
of great crowds wandering in lighted thoroughfares, had changed her
profoundly. She wanted him to feel and be conscious of the change in her
nature.
The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of
both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather
stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country road. Then they
had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and George had taken off
his coat and let it hang on his arm. "Well, I've stayed here in
Winesburg--yes--I've not yet gone away but I'm growing up," he had said.
"I've been reading books and I've been thinking. I'm going to try to amount
to something in life.
"Well," he explained, "that isn't the point. Perhaps I'd better quit
talking."
The confused boy put his hand on the girl's arm. His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town. In his desperation
George boasted, "I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here
in Winesburg," he declared. "I want you to do something, I don't know what.
Perhaps it is none of my business. I want you to try to be different from
other women. You see the point. It's none of my business I tell you. I want
you to be a beautiful woman. You see what I want."
The boy's voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and
went along the street to Helen White's house. At the gate he tried to say
something impressive. Speeches he had thought out came into his head, but
they seemed utterly pointless. "I thought--I used to think--I had it in my
mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now I know you won't," was all he could
find to say as she went through the gate and toward the door of her house.
On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway and looked at the
crowd drifting through Main Street, George thought of the talk beside the
field of young corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of himself. In
the street the people surged up and down like cattle confined in a pen.
Buggies and wagons almost filled the narrow thoroughfare. A band played and
small boys raced along the sidewalk, diving between the legs of men. Young
men with shining red faces walked awkwardly about with girls on their arms.
In a room above one of the stores, where a dance was to be held, the
fiddlers tuned their instruments. The broken sounds floated down through an
open window and out across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the
horns of the band. The medley of sounds got on young Willard's nerves.
Everywhere, on all sides, the sense of crowding, moving life closed in about
him. He wanted to run away by himself and think. "If she wants to stay with
that fellow she may. Why should I care? What difference does it make to me?"
he growled and went along Main Street and through Hern's Grocery into a side
street.
George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he wanted to weep but
pride made him walk rapidly along, swinging his arms. He came to Wesley
Moyer's livery barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a group of men
who talked of a race Wesley's stallion, Tony Tip, had won at the Fair during
the afternoon. A crowd had gathered in front of the barn and before the
crowd walked Wesley, prancing up and down boasting. He held a whip in his
hand and kept tapping the ground. Little puffs of dust arose in the
lamplight. "Hell, quit your talking," Wesley exclaimed. "I wasn't afraid, I
knew I had 'em beat all the time. I wasn't afraid."
Ordinarily George Willard would have been intensely interested in the
boasting of Moyer, the horseman. Now it made him angry. He turned and
hurried away along the street. "Old windbag," he sputtered. "Why does he
want to be bragging? Why don't he shut up?"
George went into a vacant lot and, as he hurried along, fell over a
pile of rubbish. A nail protruding from an empty barrel tore his trousers.
He sat down on the ground and swore. With a pin he mended the torn place and
then arose and went on. "I'll go to Helen White's house, that's what I'll
do. I'll walk right in. I'll say that I want to see her. I'll walk right in
and sit down, that's what I'll do," he declared, climbing over a fence and
beginning to run.
On the veranda of Banker White's house Helen was restless and
distraught. The instructor sat between the mother and daughter. His talk
wearied the girl. Although he had also been raised in an Ohio town, the
instructor began to put on the airs of the city. He wanted to appear
cosmopolitan. "I like the chance you have given me to study the background
out of which most of our girls come," he declared. "It was good of you, Mrs.
White, to have me down for the day." He turned to Helen and laughed. "Your
life is still bound up with the life of this town?" he asked. "There are
people here in whom you are interested?" To the girl his voice sounded
pompous and heavy.
Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at
the back she stopped and stood listening. Her mother began to talk. "There
is no one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen's breeding," she said.
Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the
garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her
that the world was full of meaningless people saying words. Afire with
eagerness she ran through a garden gate and, turning a corner by the
banker's barn, went into a little side street. "George! Where are you,
George?" she cried, filled with nervous excitement. She stopped running, and
leaned against a tree to laugh hysterically. Along the dark little street
came George Willard, still saying words. "I'm going to walk right into her
house. I'll go right in and sit down, " he declared as he came up to her. He
stopped and stared stupidly. "Come on," he said and took hold of her hand.
With hanging heads they walked away along the street under the trees. Dry
leaves rustled under foot. Now that he had found her George wondered what he
had better do and say.
At the upper end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half
decayed old grand-stand. It has never been painted and the boards are all
warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill rising out
of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can see at night,
over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected against the sky.
George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the
path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that had
come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and
intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her.
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm
unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and
remembers, and the older, the more sophisticated thing had possession of
George Willard. Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled with
respect. When they got to the grand-stand they climbed up under the roof and
sat down on one of the long bench-like seats.
There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into
a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night
after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be
forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people.
Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the
town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all
the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within
these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked
of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with
life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life
has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself
standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a
reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the
thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the
people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears
come into the eyes.
In the darkness under the roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat
beside Helen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the scheme
of existence. Now that he had come out of town where the presence of the
people stirring about, busy with a multitude of affairs, had been so
irritating, the irritation was all gone. The presence of Helen renewed and
refreshed him. It was as though her woman's hand was assisting him to make
some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life. He began to think of
the people in the town where he had always lived with something like
reverence. He had reverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by
her, but he did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood. In
the darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand on
her shoulder. A wind began to blow and he shivered. With all his strength he
tried to hold and to understand the mood that had come upon him. In that
high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each
other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have
come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the
thing felt.
In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of
the late fall. Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads pulling
their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of goods in off
the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores. In the Opera House a crowd had
gathered to see a show and further down Main Street the fiddlers, their
instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the feet of youth flying over
a dance floor.
In the darkness in the grand-stand Helen White and George Willard
remained silent. Now and then the spell that held them was broken and they
turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other's eyes. They kissed
but that impulse did not last. At the upper end of the Fair Ground a half
dozen men worked over horses that had raced during the afternoon. The men
had built a fire and were heating kettles of water. Only their legs could be
seen as they passed back and forth in the light. When the wind blew the
little flames of the fire danced crazily about.
George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went
along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind
whispered among the dry corn blades. For a moment during the walk back into
town the spell that held them was broken. When they had come to the crest of
Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again put his hands on the
girl's shoulders. She embraced him eagerly and then again they drew quickly
back from that impulse. They stopped kissing and stood a little apart.
Mutual respect grew big in them. They were both embarrassed and to relieve
their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth. They laughed and
began to pull and haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by
the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl,
but excited little animals.
It was so they went down the hill. In the darkness they played like two
splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward, Helen
tripped George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with laughter,
he roiled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a moment she stopped
in the darkness. There was no way of knowing what woman's thoughts went
through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came
up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence.
For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their
silent evening together the thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they
had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men
and women in the modern world possible.
DEPARTURE
YOUNG GEORGE WILLARD got out of bed at four in the morning. It was
April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The
trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are
winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and
making a carpet underfoot.
George came downstairs into the hotel office carrying a brown leather
bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o'clock he had been awake
thinking of the journey he was about to take and wondering what he would
find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel office lay on
a cot by the door. His mouth was open and he snored lustily. George crept
past the cot and went out into the silent deserted main street. The east was
pink with the dawn and long streaks of light climbed into the sky where a
few stars still shone.
Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg there is a great
stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and
drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking wagons. In
the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the late afternoon in
the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky
haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like
looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect
is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which
tiny human insects toil up and down.
All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in
the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great
open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon
looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and
on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the
April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He
did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from
town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main
Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. "Hey, you
George. How does it feel to be going away?" they asked.
The westbound train leaves Winesburg at seven forty-five in the
morning. Tom Little is conductor. His train runs from Cleveland to where it
connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New
York. Tom has what in railroad circles is called an "easy run." Every
evening he returns to his family. In the fall and spring he spends his
Sundays fishing in Lake Erie. He has a round red face and small blue eyes.
He knows the people in the towns along his railroad better than a city man
knows the people who live in his apartment building.
George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven
o'clock. Tom Willard carried his bag. The son had become taller than the
father.
On the station platform everyone shook the young man's hand. More than
a dozen people waited about. Then they talked of their own affairs. Even
Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of bed.
George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall thin woman of fifty who
worked in the Winesburg post office, came along the station platform. She
had never before paid any attention to George. Now she stopped and put out
her hand. In two words she voiced what everyone felt. "Good luck," she said
sharply and then turning went on her way.
When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scampered
hurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street hoping to have
a parting word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see her. When
the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he
knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no
comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to
the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him. In the smoking car
there was a man who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky
Bay. He wanted to accept the invitation and talk over details.
George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking, then
took out his pocketbook and counted his money. His mind was occupied with a
desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had said to him
concerned the matter of his behavior when he got to the city. "Be a sharp
one," Tom Willard had said. "Keep your eyes on your money. Be awake. That's
the ticket. Don't let anyone think you're a greenhorn."
After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was
surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg.
The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life,
began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things
like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of
his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did
not come into his mind.
He thought of little things--Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the
main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned,
who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp
lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and
holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the
Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.
The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for
dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp.
With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes
and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when
he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of
Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on
which to paint the dreams of his manhood.