Winesburg, Ohio.................................................................................................................................................1

Sherwood Anderson .................................................................................................................................1

THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of

the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A

Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into

the writer's room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer

For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on

the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in

Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter

got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered

up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was

ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his

own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.

In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions

concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he

would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him.

The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed,

than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but

something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him

was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a

knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened

to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was

The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long fife, a great many notions in his

head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of

course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from

the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him.

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious,

figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all

grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all

drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog

whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a

painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called "The Book of the

Grotesque." It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The

book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I

people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a

truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was

the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of

carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the

matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his

truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words,

would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he

himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn't, I suppose, for the same reason that he never

Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he,

like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and

UPON THE HALF decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the

town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had

been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the

public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry

pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the

wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of

the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long

field came a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling into your eyes,"

commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in

any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of

Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the

New Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the

Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's

house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was

hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the

berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence

peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and

looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town

mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came

forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street

or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been

low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish

returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into words the

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving

to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings

of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands

alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet

inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on

When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on

the walls of his house. The action made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two

were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding

The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many

strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted

attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and

forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also

they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands

of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White's new stone house and Wesley

Moyer's bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the twofifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.

As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands. At times an almost overwhelming

curiosity had taken hold of him. He felt that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their

inclination to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept him from blurting out

Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were walking in the fields on a summer afternoon and had

stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he

had stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had shouted at George Willard,

condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people about him, "You are destroying yourself,"

he cried. "You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be

On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point home. His voice became soft and

reminiscent, and with a sigh of contentment he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a

Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In the picture men lived again in a

kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green open country came cleanlimbed young men, some afoot, some

mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man who sat beneath

Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands. Slowly they stole forth and lay

upon George Willard's shoulders. Something new and bold came into the voice that talked. "You must try to

forget all you have learned," said the old man. "You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut

Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at George Willard. His eyes glowed.

Again he raised the hands to caress the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.

With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his feet and thrust his hands deep into

his trousers pockets. Tears came to his eyes. "I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you," he

Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and across a meadow, leaving George

Willard perplexed and frightened upon the grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along

the road toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he thought, touched by the memory of the terror he

had seen in the man's eyes. "There's something wrong, but I don't want to know what it is. His hands have

And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the hands. Perhaps our talking of them

will arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but

In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher in a town in Pennsylvania. He was not then known

as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the less euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much

Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, littleunderstood men

it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the

And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had

walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here

and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he talked

his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the

stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry a dream

into the young minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in

whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief

And then the tragedy. A halfwitted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at

night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange,

hideous accusations fell from his loosehung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden,

shadowy doubts that had been in men's minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.

The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and questioned. "He put his arms about

One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon, came to the schoolhouse door. Calling

Adolph Myers into the school yard he began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down into

the frightened face of the schoolmaster, his wrath became more and more terrible. Screaming with dismay,

the children ran here and there like disturbed insects. "I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you beast,"

roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating the master, had begun to kick him about the yard.

Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With lanterns in their hands a dozen men

came to the door of the house where he lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was

raining and one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but

something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran

away into the darkness they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and

great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster and faster into the darkness.

For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but forty but looked sixtyfive. The

name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of goods seen at a freight station as he hurried through an eastern

Ohio town. He had an aunt in Winesburg, a blacktoothed old woman who raised chickens, and with her he

lived until she died. He had been ill for a year after the experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery

worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he did

not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of the

boys had talked of the hands. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared, dancing, with fury

Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued to walk up and down until the sun

had disappeared and the road beyond the field was lost in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut

slices of bread and spread honey upon them. When the rumble of the evening train that took away the express

cars loaded with the day's harvest of berries had passed and restored the silence of the summer night, he went

again to walk upon the veranda. In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became quiet. Although

he still hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the medium through which he expressed his love of

man, the hunger became again a part of his loneliness and his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum

washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to

the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor

by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth

one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure

looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and

out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade

HE WAS AN old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we

will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of

Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father

died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in

Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.

The knuckles of the doctor's hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like

clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe

and after his wife's death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs.

He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he

Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something very fine.

Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods Company's store, he worked

ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after

erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and

little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets

into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard

round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but

one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood,

old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man. "That

is to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist," he cried, shaking with laughter.

The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to

him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of

Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have

been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they

will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only

a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One

nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of

its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and

filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was fortyfive then and already

he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were

thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded white horse and went slowly

along country roads. On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.

One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that

arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little

The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the family way and had become frightened.

The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had come down to her had set a train of

suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike.

They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and in their eyes when

they looked at her. The two who were different were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender young

man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with

her he was never off the subject. The other, a blackhaired boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always

For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler's son. For hours she sat in silence listening

as he talked to her and then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to

think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding

her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night

she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times,

then she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion

After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her that she never wanted to leave him again.

She went into his office one morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened

In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who kept the bookstore in Winesburg.

Like all oldfashioned country practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a

handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the tooth was taken out they both

screamed and blood ran down on the woman's white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When

the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. "I will take you driving into the country with me," he

For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together almost every day. The condition that had

brought her to him passed in an illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted

apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments.

In the fall after the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in the

following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had

scribbled on the bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to

ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with

smallpox scars. Although she was but fortyfive, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure.

Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wallpaper and the ragged carpets and,

when she was able to be about, doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of fat

traveling men. Her husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick military

step, and a black mustache trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out of his mind. The

presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. When

he thought of her he grew angry and swore. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on the edge of failure and

he wished himself out of it. He thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things

defeated and done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a

hotel should be. As he went spruce and businesslike through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes

stopped and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and of the woman would follow

Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been the leading Democrat in a strongly

Republican community. Some day, he told himself, the fide of things political will turn in my favor and the

years of ineffectual service count big in the bestowal of rewards. He dreamed of going to Congress and even

of becoming governor. Once when a younger member of the party arose at a political conference and began

to boast of his faithful service, Tom Willard grew white with fury. "Shut up, you," he roared, glaring about.

"What do you know of service? What are you but a boy? Look at what I've done here! I was a Democrat here

in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the old days they fairly hunted us with guns."

Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a

girlhood dream that had long ago died. In the son's presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while

he hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into his room and closing the door knelt

by a little desk, made of a kitchen table, that sat near a window. In the room by the desk she went through a

ceremony that was half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the skies. In the boyish figure she yearned to

see something half forgotten that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned that. "Even

though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination that her

whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I am dead and see him becoming a

meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that

privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if

but this my boy be allowed to express something for us both." Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about

the boy's room. "And do not let him become smart and successful either," she added vaguely.

The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a formal thing without meaning.

When she was ill and sat by the window in her room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit.

They sat by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into Main Street. By turning their

heads they could see through another window, along an alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and

into the back door of Abner Groff's bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus a picture of village life presented

itself to them. At the back door of his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or an empty milk bottle in his

hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker and a grey cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the

druggist. The boy and his mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently emerge followed

by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The baker's eyes were small and red and his black hair

and beard were filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the cat had disappeared, he

hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even some of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at

the back of Sinning's Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched behind barrels filled with torn paper

and broken bottles above which flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she was alone, and after watching a

prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker, Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long

white hands and wept. After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to forget the contest

between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the silence made them both feel awkward.

Darkness came on and the evening train came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and down

upon a board sidewalk. In the station yard, after the evening train had gone, there was a heavy silence.

Perhaps Skinner Leason, the express agent, moved a truck the length of the station platform. Over on Main

Street sounded a man's voice, laughing. The door of the express office banged. George Willard arose and

crossing the room fumbled for the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked against a chair, making it scrape along

the floor. By the window sat the sick woman, perfectly still, listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless,

could be seen drooping over the ends of the arms of the chair. "I think you had better be out among the boys.

You are too much indoors," she said, striving to relieve the embarrassment of the departure. "I thought I

One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard House their temporary home had

become scarce, and the hallways, lighted only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom,

Elizabeth Willard had an adventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and her son had not come to visit

her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of life that remained in her body was blown into a flame by her

anxiety and she crept out of bed, dressed and hurried along the hallway toward her son's room, shaking with

exaggerated fears. As she went along she steadied herself with her hand, slipped along the papered walls of

the hall and breathed with difficulty. The air whistled through her teeth. As she hurried forward she thought

how foolish she was. "He is concerned with boyish affairs," she told herself. "Perhaps he has now begun to

Elizabeth Willard had a dread of being seen by guests in the hotel that had once belonged to her father and

the ownership of which still stood recorded in her name in the county courthouse. The hotel was continually

losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby. Her own room was in an

obscure corner and when she felt able to work she voluntarily worked among the beds, preferring the labor

that could be done when the guests were abroad seeking trade among the merchants of Winesburg.

By the door of her son's room the mother knelt upon the floor and listened for some sound from within. When

she heard the boy moving about and talking in low tones a smile came to her lips. George Willard had a habit

of talking aloud to himself and to hear him doing so had always given his mother a peculiar pleasure. The

habit in him, she felt, strengthened the secret bond that existed between them. A thousand times she had

whispered to herself of the matter. "He is groping about, trying to find himself," she thought. "He is not a dull

clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I

In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and started again toward her own room. She

was afraid that the door would open and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance and

was about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and bracing herself with her hands waited,

thinking to shake off a trembling fit of weakness that had come upon her. The presence of the boy in the

room had made her happy. In her bed, during the long hours alone, the little fears that had visited her had

become giants. Now they were all gone. "When I get back to my room I shall sleep," she murmured

But Elizabeth Willard was not to return to her bed and to sleep. As she stood trembling in the darkness the

door of her son's room opened and the boy's father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed out at

the door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he said infuriated the woman.

Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself as a successful man, although

nothing he had ever done had turned out successfully. However, when he was out of sight of the New Willard

House and had no fear of coming upon his wife, he swaggered and began to dramatize himself as one of the

chief men of the town. He wanted his son to succeed. He it was who had secured for the boy the position on

the Winesburg Eagle. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he was advising concerning some course

of conduct. "I tell you what, George, you've got to wake up," he said sharply. "Will Henderson has spoken to

me three times concerning the matter. He says you go along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to

and acting like a gawky girl. What ails you?" Tom Willard laughed goodnaturedly. "Well, I guess you'll get

over it," he said. "I told Will that. You're not a fool and you're not a woman. You're Tom Willard's son and

you'll wake up. I'm not afraid. What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper man had put the notion of

becoming a writer into your mind that's all right. Only I guess you'll have to wake up to do that too, eh?"

Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a flight of stairs to the office. The woman in the

darkness could hear him laughing and talking with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by

dozing in a chair by the office door. She returned to the door of her son's room. The weakness had passed

from her body as by a miracle and she stepped boldly along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When

she heard the scraping of a chair and the sound of a pen scratching upon paper, she again turned and went

A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of the Winesburg hotel keeper. The

determination was the result of long years of quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. "Now," she told herself, "I

will act. There is something threatening my boy and I will ward it off." The fact that the conversation

between Tom Willard and his son had been rather quiet and natural, as though an understanding existed

between them, maddened her. Although for years she had hated her husband, her hatred had always before

been a quite impersonal thing. He had been merely a part of something else that she hated. Now, and by the

few words at the door, he had become the thing personified. In the darkness of her own room she clenched

her fists and glared about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she took out a long pair of

sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a dagger. "I will stab him," she said aloud. "He has chosen to

be the voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him something will snap within myself and I will

In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had borne a somewhat shaky reputation

in Winesburg. For years she had been what is called "stagestruck" and had paraded through the streets with

traveling men guests at her father's hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell her of life in the cities

out of which they had come. Once she startled the town by putting on men's clothes and riding a bicycle

In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much confused. A great restlessness was in her and

it expressed itself in two ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big definite movement

to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company

and wandering over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of herself to all people.

Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter to

the members of the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg and stopped at her father's hotel, she got

nowhere. They did not seem to know what she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed,

they only laughed. "It's not like that," they said. "It's as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of

With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with Tom Willard, it was quite different.

Always they seemed to understand and sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the darkness

under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth

And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that came she felt for a time released and

happy. She did not blame the men who walked with her and later she did not blame Tom Willard. It was

always the same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild emotions, with peace and then sobbing

repentance. When she sobbed she put her hand upon the face of the man and had always the same thought.

Even though he were large and bearded she thought he had become suddenly a little boy. She wondered why

In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House, Elizabeth Willard lighted a lamp and put it on

a dressing table that stood by the door. A thought had come into her mind and she went to a closet and

brought out a small square box and set it on the table. The box contained material for makeup and had been

left with other things by a theatrical company that had once been stranded in Winesburg. Elizabeth Willard

had decided that she would be beautiful. Her hair was still black and there was a great mass of it braided and

coiled about her head. The scene that was to take place in the office below began to grow in her mind. No

ghostly wornout figure should confront Tom Willard, but something quite unexpected and startling. Tall and

with dusky cheeks and hair that fell in a mass from her shoulders, a figure should come striding down the

stairway before the startled loungers in the hotel office. The figure would be silentit would be swift and

terrible. As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear, coming out of the shadows, stealing

With a little broken sob in her throat, Elizabeth Willard blew out the light that stood upon the table and stood

weak and trembling in the darkness. The strength that had been as a miracle in her body left and she half

reeled across the floor, clutching at the back of the chair in which she had spent so many long days staring

out over the tin roofs into the main street of Winesburg. In the hallway there was the sound of footsteps and

George Willard came in at the door. Sitting in a chair beside his mother he began to talk. "I'm going to get out

of here," he said. "I don't know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going away."

The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. "I suppose you had better wake up,"

she said. "You think that? You will go to the city and make money, eh? It will be better for you, you think, to

The son shook his head. "I suppose I can't make you understand, but oh, I wish I could," he said earnestly. "I

can't even talk to father about it. I don't try. There isn't any use. I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go

Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together. Again, as on the other evenings, they were

embarrassed. After a time the boy tried again to talk. "I suppose it won't be for a year or two but I've been

thinking about it," he said, rising and going toward the door. "Something father said makes it sure that I shall

have to go away." He fumbled with the doorknob. In the room the silence became unbearable to the woman.

She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had come from the lips of her son, but the

expression of joy had become impossible to her. "I think you had better go out among the boys. You are too

much indoors," she said. "I thought I would go for a little walk," replied the son stepping awkwardly out of

DOCTOR PARCIVAL was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache. He always

wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars

known as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes. The lid

of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard. It began when George had been working for a year

on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor's own making.

In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor of the Eagle, went over to Tom Willy's saloon. Along

an alleyway he went and slipping in at the back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made of a

combination of sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a sensualist and had reached the age of

fortyfive. He imagined the gin renewed the youth in him. Like most sensualists he enjoyed talking of

women, and for an hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy. The saloon keeper was a short,

broadshouldered man with peculiarly marked hands. That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints

with red the faces of men and women had touched with red Tom Willy's fingers and the backs of his hands.

As he stood by the bar talking to Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together. As he grew more and more

excited the red of his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood that had dried

As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red hands and talking of women, his assistant, George

Willard, sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle and listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.

Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will Henderson had disappeared. One might have supposed that

the doctor had been watching from his office window and had seen the editor going along the alleyway.

Coming in at the front door and finding himself a chair, he lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs

began to talk. He seemed intent upon convincing the boy of the advisability of adopting a line of conduct that

"If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients," he

began. "There is a reason for that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much of

medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The reason, you see, does not appear on the surface. It lies in

fact in my character, which has, if you think about it, many strange turns. Why I want to talk to you of the

matter I don't know. I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes. I have a desire to make you admire

Sometimes the doctor launched into long tales concerning himself. To the boy the tales were very real and

full of meaning. He began to admire the fat uncleanlooking man and, in the afternoon when Will Henderson

Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years. He came from Chicago and when he arrived was

drunk and got into a fight with Albert Longworth, the baggageman. The fight concerned a trunk and ended by

the doctor's being escorted to the village lockup. When he was released he rented a room above a

shoerepairing shop at the lower end of Main Street and put out the sign that announced himself as a doctor.

Although he had but few patients and these of the poorer sort who were unable to pay, he seemed to have

plenty of money for his needs. He slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at Biff Carter's

lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroad station. In the summer the lunch room was filled

with flies and Biff Carter's white apron was more dirty than his floor. Doctor Parcival did not mind. Into the

lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents upon the counter. "Feed me what you wish for that," he

said laughing. "Use up food that you wouldn't otherwise sell. It makes no difference to me. I am a man of

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy

thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the

"I was a reporter like you here," Doctor Parcival began. "It was in a town in Iowaor was it in Illinois ? I

don't remember and anyway it makes no difference. Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity and don't

want to be very definite. Have you ever thought it strange that I have money for my needs although I do

nothing? I may have stolen a great sum of money or been involved in a murder before I came here. There is

food for thought in that, eh? If you were a really smart newspaper reporter you would look me up. In Chicago

there was a Doctor Cronin who was murdered. Have you heard of that? Some men murdered him and put him

in a trunk. In the early morning they hauled the trunk across the city. It sat on the back of an express wagon

and they were on the seat as unconcerned as anything. Along they went through quiet streets where everyone

was asleep. The sun was just coming up over the lake. Funny, ehjust to think of them smoking pipes and

chattering as they drove along as unconcerned as I am now. Perhaps I was one of those men. That would be a

strange turn of things, now wouldn't it, eh?" Again Doctor Parcival began his tale: "Well, anyway there I was,

a reporter on a paper just as you are here, running about and getting little items to print. My mother was poor.

She took in washing. Her dream was to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying with that end in

"My father had been insane for a number of years. He was in an asylum over at Dayton, Ohio. There you see

I have let it slip out! All of this took place in Ohio, right here in Ohio. There is a clew if you ever get the

"I was going to tell you of my brother. That's the object of all this. That's what I'm getting at. My brother was

a railroad painter and had a job on the Big Four. You know that road runs through Ohio here. With other men

he lived in a box car and away they went from town to town painting the railroad propertyswitches, crossing

"The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color. How I hated that color! My brother was always

covered with it. On pay days he used to get drunk and come home wearing his paintcovered clothes and

bringing his money with him. He did not give it to mother but laid it in a pile on our kitchen table.

"About the house he went in the clothes covered with the nasty orange colored paint. I can see the picture.

My mother, who was small and had red, sadlooking eyes, would come into the house from a little shed at

the back. That's where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing people's dirty clothes. In she would

come and stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her apron that was covered with soapsuds.

"'Don't touch it! Don't you dare touch that money,' my brother roared, and then he himself took five or ten

dollars and went tramping off to the saloons. When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more.

He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he had spent it all, a little at a time. Then he

went back to his job with the painting crew on the railroad. After he had gone things began to arrive at our

house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there would be a dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.

"Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother much more than she did me, although he never said a kind word

to either of us and always raved up and down threatening us if we dared so much as touch the money that

"We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister and prayed. I was a regular ass about saying prayers.

You should have heard me. When my father died I prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother

was in town drinking and going about buying the things for us. In the evening after supper I knelt by the table

where the money lay and prayed for hours. When no one was looking I stole a dollar or two and put it in my

pocket. That makes me laugh now but then it was terrible. It was on my mind all the time. I got six dollars a

week from my job on the paper and always took it straight home to mother. The few dollars I stole from my

brother's pile I spent on myself, you know, for trifles, candy and cigarettes and such things.

"When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I went over there. I borrowed some money from the man

for whom I worked and went on the train at night. It was raining. In the asylum they treated me as though I

"The men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was a newspaper reporter. That made them afraid.

There had been some negligence, some carelessness, you see, when father was ill. They thought perhaps I

would write it up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do anything of the kind.

"Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed the dead body. I wonder what put that

notion into my head. Wouldn't my brother, the painter, have laughed, though. There I stood over the dead

body and spread out my hands. The superintendent of the asylum and some of his helpers came in and stood

about looking sheepish. It was very amusing. I spread out my hands and said, 'Let peace brood over this

Jumping to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor Parcival began to walk up and down in the office of the

Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat listening. He was awkward and, as the office was

small, continually knocked against things. "What a fool I am to be talking," he said. "That is not my object in

coming here and forcing my acquaintanceship upon you. I have something else in mind. You are a reporter

just as I was once and you have attracted my attention. You may end by becoming just such another fool. I

Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard's attitude toward men. It seemed to the boy that the man had

but one object in view, to make everyone seem despicable. "I want to fill you with hatred and contempt so

that you will be a superior being," he declared. "Look at my brother. There was a fellow, eh? He despised

everyone, you see. You have no idea with what contempt he looked upon mother and me. And was he not our

superior? You know he was. You have not seen him and yet I have made you feel that. I have given you a

sense of it. He is dead. Once when he was drunk he lay down on the tracks and the car in which he lived with

One day in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg. For a month George Willard had been

going each morning to spend an hour in the doctor's office. The visits came about through a desire on the part

of the doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book he was in the process of writing. To write the book

On the morning in August before the coming of the boy, an incident had happened in the doctor's office.

There had been an accident on Main Street. A team of horses had been frightened by a train and had run

away. A little girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown from a buggy and killed.

On Main Street everyone had become excited and a cry for doctors had gone up. All three of the active

practitioners of the town had come quickly but had found the child dead. From the crowd someone had run to

the office of Doctor Parcival who had bluntly refused to go down out of his office to the dead child. The

useless cruelty of his refusal had passed unnoticed. Indeed, the man who had come up the stairway to

All of this, Doctor Parcival did not know and when George Willard came to his office he found the man

shaking with terror. "What I have done will arouse the people of this town," he declared excitedly. "Do I not

know human nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word of my refusal will be whispered about.

Presently men will get together in groups and talk of it. They will come here. We will quarrel and there will

Doctor Parcival shook with fright. "I have a presentiment," he declared emphatically. "It may be

that what I am talking about will not occur this morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged.

Going to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival looked timidly down the stairway leading to the street.

When he returned the fright that had been in his eyes was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming on

tiptoe across the room he tapped George Willard on the shoulder. "If not now, sometime," he whispered,

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard. "You must pay attention to me," he urged. "If

something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very

simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is thisthat everyone in the world is Christ

and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare

LOOKING CAUTIOUSLY ABOUT, George Willard arose from his desk in the office of the Winesburg

Eagle and went hurriedly out at the back door. The night was warm and cloudy and although it was not yet

eight o'clock, the alleyway back of the Eagle office was pitch dark. A team of horses tied to a post

somewhere in the darkness stamped on the hardbaked ground. A cat sprang from under George Willard' s feet

and ran away into the night. The young man was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed

In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going carefully and cautiously. The back doors of

the Winesburg stores were open and he could see men sitting about under the store lamps. In Myerbaum's

Notion Store Mrs. Willy the saloon keeper's wife stood by the counter with a basket on her arm. Sid Green

George Willard crouched and then jumped through the path of light that came out at the door. He began to

run forward in the darkness. Behind Ed Griffith's saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the

George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been trying to make up his mind to go

through with the adventure and now he was acting. In the office of the Winesburg Eagle he had been sitting

There had been no decision. He had just jumped to his feet, hurried past Will Henderson who was reading

Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people who passed. He crossed and recrossed

the road. When he passed a street lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In his

mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid the adventure on which he had set out

George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father's house. She was washing dishes by the

light of a kerosene lamp. There she stood behind the screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the back of

the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried to control the shaking of his body. Only a

narrow potato patch separated him from the adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt sure enough of

himself to call to her. "Louise! Oh, Louise!" he called. The cry stuck in his throat. His voice became a hoarse

Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth in her hand. "How do you know I

George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness with the fence between them. "You

go on along," she said. "Pa's in there. I'll come along. You wait by Williams' barn."

The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise Trunnion. It had come that morning to the

office of the Winesburg Eagle. The letter was brief. "I'm yours if you want me," it said. He thought it

annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was nothing between them. "She has a

nerve! Well, gracious sakes, she has a nerve," he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of

vacant lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had been planted right down to the sidewalk.

When Louise Trunnion came out of the front door of her house she still wore the gingham dress in which she

had been washing dishes. There was no hat on her head. The boy could see her standing with the doorknob in

her hand talking to someone within, no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her father. Old Jake was half deaf and she

shouted. The door closed and everything was dark and silent in the little side street. George Willard trembled

In the shadows by Williams' barn George and Louise stood, not daring to talk. She was not particularly

comely and there was a black smudge on the side of her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose

The young man began to laugh nervously. "It's warm," he said. He wanted to touch her with his hand. "I'm

not very bold," he thought. Just to touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided, be an

exquisite pleasure. She began to quibble. "You think you're better than I am. Don't tell me, I guess I know,"

A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that had lurked in the girl's eyes when

they had met on the streets and thought of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered tales

concerning her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male, bold and

aggressive. In his heart there was no sympathy for her. "Ah, come on, it'll be all right. There won't be anyone

They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the cracks of which tall weeds grew. Some of the

bricks were missing and the sidewalk was rough and irregular. He took hold of her hand that was also rough

and thought it delightfully small. "I can't go far," she said and her voice was quiet, unperturbed.

They crossed a bridge that ran over a tiny stream and passed another vacant lot in which corn grew. The street

ended. In the path at the side of the road they were compelled to walk one behind the other. Will Overton's

berry field lay beside the road and there was a pile of boards. "Will is going to build a shed to store berry

When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o'clock and had begun to rain. Three times he

walked up and down the length of Main Street. Sylvester West's Drug Store was still open and he went in and

bought a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was pleased. For five

minutes the two stood in the shelter of the store awning and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had

wanted more than anything else to talk to some man. Around a corner toward the New Willard House he

On the sidewalk at the side of Winney's Dry Goods Store where there was a high board fence covered with

circus pictures, he stopped whistling and stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as though for

a voice calling his name. Then again he laughed nervously. "She hasn't got anything on me. Nobody knows,"

THERE WERE ALWAYS three or four old people sitting on the front porch of the house or puttering about

the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the old people were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a

colorless, soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with thin white hair who was Jesse's uncle.

The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outercovering over a framework of logs. It was in reality not one

house but a cluster of houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner. Inside, the place was full of

surprises. One went up steps from the living room into the dining room and there were always steps to be

ascended or descended in passing from one room to another. At meal times the place was like a beehive. At

one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open, feet clattered on stairs, a murmur of soft voices arose

Besides the old people, already mentioned, many others lived in the Bentley house. There were four hired

men, a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe, who was in charge of the housekeeping, a dullwitted girl named

Eliza Stoughton, who made beds and helped with the milking, a boy who worked in the stables, and Jesse

By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that part of Northern Ohio where the

Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from pioneer life. Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain.

He had built modern barns and most of his land was drained with carefully laid tile drain, but in order to

The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for several generations before Jesse's time. They came from

New York State and took up land when the country was new and land could be had at a low price. For a long

time they, in common with all the other Middle Western people, were very poor. The land they had settled

upon was heavily wooded and covered with fallen logs and underbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing

these away and cutting the timber, there were still the stumps to be reckoned with. Plows run through the

fields caught on hidden roots, stones lay all about, on the low places water gathered, and the young corn

When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers had come into their ownership of the place, much of the harder part

of the work of clearing had been done, but they clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They

lived as practically all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through most of the winter

the highways leading into the town of Winesburg were a sea of mud. The four young men of the family

worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on

beds of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse and brutal and outwardly they were themselves

coarse and brutal. On Saturday afternoons they hitched a team of horses to a threeseated wagon and went

off to town. In town they stood about the stoves in the stores talking to other farmers or to the store keepers.

They were dressed in overalls and in the winter wore heavy coats that were flecked with mud. Their hands as

they stretched them out to the heat of the stoves were cracked and red. It was difficult for them to talk and so

they for the most part kept silent. When they had bought meat, flour, sugar, and salt, they went into one of the

Winesburg saloons and drank beer. Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures,

kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of crude and

animallike poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and

shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs.

Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of the boys, struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a

teamster's whip, and the old man seemed likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in the loft of the

stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passion turned out to be murder. He was kept alive with

food brought by his mother, who also kept him informed of the injured man's condition. When all turned out

well he emerged from his hiding place and went back to the work of clearing land as though nothing had

The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes of the Bentleys and was responsible for the rise of the

youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward, Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they

were all killed. For a time after they went away to the South, old Tom tried to run the place, but he was not

successful. When the last of the four had been killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come home.

Then the mother, who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and the father became altogether

discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and moving into town. All day he went about shaking his head and

muttering. The work in the fields was neglected and weeds grew high in the corn. Old Tim hired men but he

did not use them intelligently. When they had gone away to the fields in the morning he wandered into the

woods and sat down on a log. Sometimes he forgot to come home at night and one of the daughters had to go

When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and began to take charge of things he was a slight,

sensitivelooking man of twentytwo. At eighteen he had left home to go to school to become a scholar and

eventually to become a minister of the Presbyterian Church. All through his boyhood he had been what in our

country was called an "odd sheep" and had not got on with his brothers. Of all the family only his mother had

understood him and she was now dead. When he came home to take charge of the farm, that had at that time

grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and in the nearby town of Winesburg

smiled at the idea of his trying to handle the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.

There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man at all. He

was small and very slender and womanish of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a long

black coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused when they saw him, after the years

away, and they were even more amused when they saw the woman he had married in the city.

As a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon go under. That was perhaps Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in

the hard years after the Civil War was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate.

Jesse was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days. She tried to do such work as all

the neighbor women about her did and he let her go on without interference. She helped to do the milking and

did part of the housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a year she worked

every day from sunrise until late at night and then after giving birth to a child she died.

As for Jesse Bentleyalthough he was a delicately built man there was something within him that could not

easily be killed. He had brown curly hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering

and uncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature. His mouth was like the mouth of a

sensitive and very determined child. Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place

and for this he suffered and made others suffer. Never did he succeed in getting what he wanted out of fife

and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very short time after he came home to the Bentley farm he

made everyone there a little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his mother had

been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over to him the entire

ownership of the place and retired into the background. Everyone retired into the background. In spite of his

youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of his people. He was so in earnest in

everything he did and said that no one understood him. He made everyone on the farm work as they had

never worked before and yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well they went well for Jesse and

never for the people who were his dependents. Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the

world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could master others but he could not

master himself. The running of the farm as it had never been run before was easy for him. When he came

home from Cleveland where he had been in school, he shut himself off from all of his people and began to

make plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful. Other men on the farms

about him worked too hard and were too fired to think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly

making plans for its success was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something in his passionate nature.

Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to the old house and in a large room facing the west

he had windows that looked into the barnyard and other windows that looked off across the fields. By the

window he sat down to think. Hour after hour and day after day he sat and looked over the land and thought

out his new place in life. The passionate burning thing in his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard. He

wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced before and then he wanted

something else. It was the indefinable hunger within that made his eyes waver and that kept him always more

and more silent before people. He would have given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace

All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his small frame was gathered the force of a long line of strong

men. He had always been extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later when he was a

young man in school. In the school he had studied and thought of God and the Bible with his whole mind and

heart. As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary

man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he

looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to

become also such a clod. Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact

that his young wife was doing a strong woman's work even after she had become large with child and that she

was killing herself in his service, he did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who was old and

twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the farm and seemed content to creep away to a corner

and wait for death, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.

In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to him sat Jesse thinking of his own

affairs. In the stables he could hear the tramping of his horses and the restless movement of his cattle. Away

in the fields he could see other cattle wandering over green hills. The voices of men, his men who worked for

him, came in to him through the window. From the milkhouse there was the steady thump, thump of a churn

being manipulated by the halfwitted girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind went back to the men of Old

Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out of the

skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and to talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish

eagerness to in some way achieve in his own life the flavor of significance that had hung over these men took

possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the matter aloud to God and the sound of his own

"I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields," he declared. "Look upon me, O God, and look

Thou also upon my neighbors and all the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me another

Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the father of sons who shall be rulers !" Jesse grew

excited as he talked aloud and jumping to his feet walked up and down in the room. In fancy he saw himself

living in old times and among old peoples. The land that lay stretched out before him became of vast

significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of men sprung from himself. It seemed to him that

in his day as in those other and older days, kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of

men by the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He longed to be such a servant. "It is God's

work I have come to the land to do," he declared in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he

It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later day to understand Jesse Bentley. In

the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken

place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of

new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the

building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these

later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of

thought of our people of MidAmerica. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry

of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are

everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to

overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of

the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer

by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as

In Jesse Bentley's time and in the country districts of the whole Middle West in the years after the Civil War

it was not so. Men labored too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon

paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, halfformed thoughts took possession of them. They believed in

God and in God's power to control their lives. In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to

hear of God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and intellectual life of the times. The

And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a great intellectual eagerness, Jesse

Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of

God in that. When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the running of the farm, he took that

also as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came to him, he walked about at night through the streets

thinking of the matter and when he had come home and had got the work on the farm well under way, he

went again at night to walk through the forests and over the low hills and to think of God.

As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew in his mind. He grew avaricious and

was impatient that the farm contained only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the edge of some

meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the stars shining down at him.

One evening, some months after his father's death, and when his wife Katherine was expecting at any

moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was

situated in a tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the stream to the end of

his own land and on through the fields of his neighbors. As he walked the valley broadened and then

narrowed again. Great open stretches of field and wood lay before him. The moon came out from behind

Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of country through which he had walked should

have come into his possession. He thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked

harder and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over stones, and he began to

A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of Jesse Bentley. He remembered how in the

old Bible story the Lord had appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to where Saul

and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Into Jesse's mind came the

conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and

enemies of God. "Suppose," he whispered to himself, "there should come from among them one who, like

Goliath the Philistine of Gath, could defeat me and take from me my possessions." In fancy he felt the

sickening dread that he thought must have lain heavy on the heart of Saul before the coming of David.

Jumping to his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His voice carried far over

the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let

Thy grace alight upon me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all of these

lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on

DAVID HARDY OF Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the owner of Bentley farms.

When he was twelve years old he went to the old Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl

who came into the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that he be given a son,

had grown to womanhood on the farm and had married young John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a

banker. Louise and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. She

was a small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been inclined to fits of

temper and when not angry she was often morose and silent. In Winesburg it was said that she drank. Her

husband, the banker, who was a careful, shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy. When he began to make

money he bought for her a large brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg and he was the first man in that

But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of temper during which she was

sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and quarrelsome. She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife

from the kitchen and threatened her husband's life. Once she deliberately set fire to the house, and often she

hid herself away for days in her own room and would see no one. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave rise to

all sorts of stories concerning her. It was said that she took drugs and that she hid herself away from people

because she was often so under the influence of drink that her condition could not be concealed. Sometimes

on summer afternoons she came out of the house and got into her carriage. Dismissing the driver she took the

reins in her own hands and drove off at top speed through the streets. If a pedestrian got in her way she drove

straight ahead and the frightened citizen had to escape as best he could. To the people of the town it seemed

as though she wanted to run them down. When she had driven through several streets, tearing around corners

and beating the horses with the whip, she drove off into the country. On the country roads after she had

gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow down to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed.

She became thoughtful and muttered words. Sometimes tears came into her eyes. And then when she came

back into town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets. But for the influence of her husband and

the respect he inspired in people's minds she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.

Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well be imagined there was not much

joy in his childhood. He was too young then to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was

difficult for him not to have very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother. David was always

a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard.

His eyes were brown and as a child he had a habit of looking at things and people a long time without

appearing to see what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or when he overheard

her berating his father, he was frightened and ran away to hide. Sometimes he could not find a hiding place

and that confused him. Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the wall, he closed his eyes

and tried not to think of anything. He had a habit of talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet

On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the Bentley farm, he was altogether contented

and happy. Often he wished that he would never have to go back to town and once when he had come home

from the farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his mind.

David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in a hurry to go about his own

affairs and left the boy at the head of the street in which the Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall

evening and the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could not bear to go into

the house where his mother and father lived, and on an impulse he decided to run away from home. He

intended to go back to the farm and to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered weeping

and frightened on country roads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in the sky. The boy's imagination was

excited and he fancied that he could see and hear strange things in the darkness. Into his mind came the

conviction that he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever been before. The

darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team of

horses approached along the road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a fence. Through a field

he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt of the soft ground with his fingers. But

for the figure of his grandfather, whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the

world must be altogether empty. When his cries were heard by a farmer who was walking home from town

and he was brought back to his father's house, he was so tired and excited that he did not know what was

By chance David's father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he had met the farm hand

from the Bentley place and knew of his son's return to town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was

set up and John Hardy with several men of the town went to search the country. The report that David had

been kidnapped ran about through the streets of Winesburg. When he came home there were no lights in the

house, but his mother appeared and clutched him eagerly in her arms. David thought she had suddenly

become another woman. He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With her own hands

Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food. She would not let him go to bed but, when

he had put on his nightgown, blew out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour

the woman sat in the darkness and held her boy. All the time she kept talking in a low voice. David could not

understand what had so changed her. Her habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most

peaceful and lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held him more and more tightly. On

and on went her voice. It was not harsh or shrill as when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling

on trees. Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found, but she made him hide

and be silent until she had sent them away. He thought it must be a game his mother and the men of the town

were playing with him and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the thought that his having been lost and

frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter. He thought that he would have been willing

to go through the frightful experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long black road

During the last years of young David's boyhood he saw his mother but seldom and she became for him just a

woman with whom he had once lived. Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older it

became more definite. When he was twelve years old he went to the Bentley farm to live. Old Jesse came into

town and fairly demanded that he be given charge of the boy. The old man was excited and determined on

having his own way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and then the two

men went to the house on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They both expected her to make trouble but were

mistaken. She was very quiet and when Jesse had explained his mission and had gone on at some length

about the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet atmosphere of the old

farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval. "It is an atmosphere not corrupted by my presence," she said

sharply. Her shoulders shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. "It is a place for a man child,

although it was never a place for me," she went on. "You never wanted me there and of course the air of your

house did me no good. It was like poison in my blood but it will be different with him."

Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two men to sit in embarrassed silence. As very often

happened she later stayed in her room for days. Even when the boy's clothes were packed and he was taken

away she did not appear. The loss of her son made a sharp break in her life and she seemed less inclined to

quarrel with her husband. John Hardy thought it had all turned out very well indeed.

And so young David went to live in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse. Two of the old farmer's sisters were

alive and still lived in the house. They were afraid of Jesse and rarely spoke when he was about. One of the

women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she was younger was a born mother and became

the boy's caretaker. Every night when he had gone to bed she went into his room and sat on the floor until he

fell asleep. When he became drowsy she became bold and whispered things that he later thought he must

Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his mother had come to him and that she

had changed so that she was always as she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and

reaching out his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so that she was ecstatically happy. Everyone

in the old house became happy after the boy went there. The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley that had

kept the people in the house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by the presence of the girl

Louise was apparently swept away by the coming of the boy. It was as though God had relented and sent a

The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all the valley of Wine Creek, and who

had wanted God to send him a sign of approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think

that at last his prayers had been answered. Although he was at that time only fiftyfive years old he looked

seventy and was worn out with much thinking and scheming. The effort he had made to extend his land

holdings had been successful and there were few farms in the valley that did not belong to him, but until

There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his mind had been a battleground for these

influences. First there was the old thing in him. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men of

God. His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had brought him close to nature and there were

forces in the passionately religious man that ran out to the forces in nature. The disappointment that had come

to him when a daughter and not a son had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him like a blow struck by

some unseen hand and the blow had somewhat softened his egotism. He still believed that God might at any

moment make himself manifest out of the winds or the clouds, but he no longer demanded such recognition.

Instead he prayed for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful and thought God had deserted the world. He

regretted the fate that had not let him live in a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some

strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into the wilderness to create new

races. While he worked night and day to make his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land,

he regretted that he could not use his own restless energy in the building of temples, the slaying of

That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something else. He had grown into maturity in

America in the years after the Civil War and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the deep

influences that were at work in the country during those years when modem industrialism was being born. He

began to buy machines that would permit him to do the work of the farms while employing fewer men and he

sometimes thought that if he were a younger man he would give up farming altogether and start a factory in

Winesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit of reading newspapers and magazines. He

invented a machine for the making of fence out of wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times

and places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign to the thing that was

growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world,

when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay

attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be

wellnigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling

its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about him. The greedy thing in him wanted to make

money faster than it could be made by tilling the land. More than once he went into Winesburg to talk with

his soninlaw John Hardy about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I never had," he said and

his eyes shone. "I am thinking about it all the time. Big things are going to be done in the country and there

will be more money to be made than I ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your

chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more and more excited as he talked.

At one time in his life he had been threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened.

As he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when night came on and the stars

came out it was harder to get back the old feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead

and who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint for him some

heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes

to be made almost without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the coming of the boy David

did much to bring back with renewed force the old faith and it seemed to him that God had at last looked with

As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a thousand new and delightful ways. The

kindly attitude of all about him expanded his quiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner he had

always had with his people. At night when he went to bed after a long day of adventures in the stables, in the

fields, or driving about from farm to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the house.

If Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each night to sit on the floor by his bedside, did not appear at once,

he went to the head of the stairs and shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow halls where for so

long there had been a tradition of silence. In the morning when he awoke and lay still in bed, the sounds that

came in to him through the windows filled him with delight. He thought with a shudder of the life in the

house in Winesburg and of his mother's angry voice that had always made him tremble. There in the country

all sounds were pleasant sounds. When he awoke at dawn the barnyard back of the house also awoke. In the

house people stirred about. Eliza Stoughton the halfwitted girl was poked in the ribs by a farm hand and

giggled noisily, in some distant field a cow bawled and was answered by the cattle in the stables, and one of

the farm hands spoke sharply to the horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped out of bed and

ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excited his mind, and he wondered what his mother was

From the windows of his own room he could not see directly into the barnyard where the farm hands had now

all assembled to do the morning shores, but he could hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the

horses. When one of the men laughed, he laughed also. Leaning out at the open window, he looked into an

orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a litter of tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning he counted the

pigs. "Four, five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up and down marks on

the window ledge. David ran to put on his trousers and shirt. A feverish desire to get out of doors took

possession of him. Every morning he made such a noise coming down stairs that Aunt Callie, the

housekeeper, declared he was trying to tear the house down. When he had run through the long old house,

shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he came into the barnyard and looked about with an amazed air of

expectancy. It seemed to him that in such a place tremendous things might have happened during the night.

The farm hands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader, an old man who had been on the farm since Jesse

came into possession and who before David's time had never been known to make a joke, made the same joke

every morning. It amused David so that he laughed and clapped his hands. "See, come here and look," cried

the old man. "Grandfather Jesse's white mare has tom the black stocking she wears on her foot."

Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to farm up and down the valley of

Wine Creek, and his grandson went with him. They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white

horse. The old man scratched his thin white beard and talked to himself of his plans for increasing the

productiveness of the fields they visited and of God's part in the plans all men made. Sometimes he looked at

David and smiled happily and then for a long time he appeared to forget the boy's existence. More and more

every day now his mind turned back again to the dreams that had filled his mind when he had first come out

of the city to live on the land. One afternoon he startled David by letting his dreams take entire possession of

him. With the boy as a witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about an accident that nearly

Jesse and his grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley some miles from home. A forest came

down to the road and through the forest Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river. All

the afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk. His mind went back to the night

when he had been frightened by thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his

possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he became

excited to the edge of insanity. Stopping the horse he got out of the buggy and asked David to get out also.

The two climbed over a fence and walked along the bank of the stream. The boy paid no attention to the

muttering of his grandfather, but ran along beside him and wondered what was going to happen. When a

rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he clapped his hands and danced with delight. He looked

at the tall trees and was sorry that he was not a little animal to climb high in the air without being frightened.

Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the head of his grandfather into a clump of bushes.

"Wake up, little animal. Go and climb to the top of the trees," he shouted in a shrill voice.

Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with his mind in a ferment. His earnestness

affected the boy, who presently became silent and a little alarmed. Into the old man's mind had come the

notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the sky, that the presence of the boy and

man on their knees in some lonely spot in the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost

inevitable. "It was in just such a place as this that other David tended the sheep when his father came and told

Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen log and when he had come to an open

place among the trees he dropped upon his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.

A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David. Crouching beneath a tree he watched

the man on the ground before him and his own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the

presence not only of his grandfather but of someone else, someone who might hurt him, someone who was

not kindly but dangerous and brutal. He began to cry and reaching down picked up a small stick, which he

held tightly gripped in his fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in his own idea, suddenly arose and

advanced toward him, his terror grew until his whole body shook. In the woods an intense silence seemed to

lie over everything and suddenly out of the silence came the old man's harsh and insistent voice. Gripping the

boy's shoulders, Jesse turned his face to the sky and shouted. The whole left side of his face twitched and his

hand on the boy's shoulder twitched also. "Make a sign to me, God," he cried. "Here I stand with the boy

With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the hands that held him, ran away through

the forest. He did not believe that the man who turned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the sky was

his grandfather at all. The man did not look like his grandfather. The conviction that something strange and

terrible had happened, that by some miracle a new and dangerous person had come into the body of the

kindly old man, took possession of him. On and on he ran down the hillside, sobbing as he ran. When he fell

over the roots of a tree and in falling struck his head, he arose and tried to run on again. His head hurt so that

presently he fell down and lay still, but it was only after Jesse had carried him to the buggy and he awoke to

find the old man's hand stroking his head tenderly that the terror left him. "Take me away. There is a terrible

man back there in the woods," he declared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of the trees and

again his lips cried out to God. "What have I done that Thou dost not approve of me," he whispered softly,

saying the words over and over as he drove rapidly along the road with the boy's cut and bleeding head held

THE STORY OF Louise Bentley, who became Mrs. John Hardy and lived with her husband in a brick house

Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made livable, much will have to be done.

Thoughtful books will have to be written and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.

Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard, imaginative father, who did not look with

favor upon her coming into the world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of

oversensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in such great numbers into the world.

During her early years she lived on the Bentley farm, a silent, moody child, wanting love more than anything

else in the world and not getting it. When she was fifteen she went to live in Winesburg with the family of

Albert Hardy, who had a store for the sale of buggies and wagons, and who was a member of the town board

Louise went into town to be a student in the Winesburg High School and she went to live at the Hardys'

Hardy, the vehicle merchant of Winesburg, like thousands of other men of his times, was an enthusiast on the

subject of education. He had made his own way in the world without learning got from books, but he was

convinced that had he but known books things would have gone better with him. To everyone who came into

his shop he talked of the matter, and in his own household he drove his family distracted by his constant

He had two daughters and one son, John Hardy, and more than once the daughters threatened to leave school

altogether. As a matter of principle they did just enough work in their classes to avoid punishment. "I hate

books and I hate anyone who likes books," Harriet, the younger of the two girls, declared passionately.

In Winesburg as on the farm Louise was not happy. For years she had dreamed of the time when she could go

forth into the world, and she looked upon the move into the Hardy household as a great step in the direction

of freedom. Always when she had thought of the matter, it had seemed to her that in town all must be gaiety

and life, that there men and women must live happily and freely, giving and taking friendship and affection as

one takes the feel of a wind on the cheek. After the silence and the cheerlessness of life in the Bentley house,

she dreamed of stepping forth into an atmosphere that was warm and pulsating with life and reality. And in

the Hardy household Louise might have got something of the thing for which she so hungered but for a

Louise won the disfavor of the two Hardy girls, Mary and Harriet, by her application to her studies in school.

She did not come to the house until the day when school was to begin and knew nothing of the feeling they

had in the matter. She was timid and during the first month made no acquaintances. Every Friday afternoon

one of the hired men from the farm drove into Winesburg and took her home for the weekend, so that she

did not spend the Saturday holiday with the town people. Because she was embarrassed and lonely she

worked constantly at her studies. To Mary and Harriet, it seemed as though she tried to make trouble for them

by her proficiency. In her eagerness to appear well Louise wanted to answer every question put to the class

by the teacher. She jumped up and down and her eyes flashed. Then when she had answered some question

the others in the class had been unable to answer, she smiled happily. "See, I have done it for you," her eyes

seemed to say. "You need not bother about the matter. I will answer all questions. For the whole class it will

In the evening after supper in the Hardy house, Albert Hardy began to praise Louise. One of the teachers had

spoken highly of her and he was delighted. "Well, again I have heard of it," he began, looking hard at his

daughters and then turning to smile at Louise. "Another of the teachers has told me of the good work Louise

is doing. Everyone in Winesburg is telling me how smart she is. I am ashamed that they do not speak so of

my own girls." Arising, the merchant marched about the room and lighted his evening cigar.

The two girls looked at each other and shook their heads wearily. Seeing their indifference the father became

angry. "I tell you it is something for you two to be thinking about," he cried, glaring at them. "There is a big

change coming here in America and in learning is the only hope of the coming generations. Louise is the

daughter of a rich man but she is not ashamed to study. It should make you ashamed to see what she does."

The merchant took his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to depart for the evening. At the door he

stopped and glared back. So fierce was his manner that Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to her own

room. The daughters began to speak of their own affairs. "Pay attention to me," roared the merchant. "Your

minds are lazy. Your indifference to education is affecting your characters. You will amount to nothing. Now

mark what I sayLouise will be so far ahead of you that you will never catch up."

The distracted man went out of the house and into the street shaking with wrath. He went along muttering

words and swearing, but when he got into Main Street his anger passed. He stopped to talk of the weather or

the crops with some other merchant or with a farmer who had come into town and forgot his daughters

altogether or, if he thought of them, only shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, well, girls will be girls," he muttered

In the house when Louise came down into the room where the two girls sat, they would have nothing to do

with her. One evening after she had been there for more than six weeks and was heartbroken because of the

continued air of coldness with which she was always greeted, she burst into tears. "Shut up your crying and

The room occupied by Louise was on the second floor of the Hardy house, and her window looked out upon

an orchard. There was a stove in the room and every evening young John Hardy carried up an armful of wood

and put it in a box that stood by the wall. During the second month after she came to the house, Louise gave

up all hope of getting on a friendly footing with the Hardy girls and went to her own room as soon as the

Her mind began to play with thoughts of making friends with John Hardy. When he came into the room with

the wood in his arms, she pretended to be busy with her studies but watched him eagerly. When he had put

the wood in the box and turned to go out, she put down her head and blushed. She tried to make talk but

could say nothing, and after he had gone she was angry at herself for her stupidity.

The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing close to the young man. She thought that

in him might be found the quality she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her that between

herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge

of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed

with the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of her association with people

something quite different, and that it was possible by such an act to pass into a new life as one opens a door

and goes into a room. Day and night she thought of the matter, but although the thing she wanted so earnestly

was something very warm and close it had as yet no conscious connection with sex. It had not become that

definite, and her mind had only alighted upon the person of John Hardy because he was at hand and unlike

The Hardy sisters, Mary and Harriet, were both older than Louise. In a certain kind of knowledge of the

world they were years older. They lived as all of the young women of Middle Western towns lived. In those

days young women did not go out of our towns to Eastern colleges and ideas in regard to social classes had

hardly begun to exist. A daughter of a laborer was in much the same social position as a daughter of a farmer

or a merchant, and there were no leisure classes. A girl was "nice" or she was "not nice." If a nice girl, she

had a young man who came to her house to see her on Sunday and on Wednesday evenings. Sometimes she

went with her young man to a dance or a church social. At other times she received him at the house and was

given the use of the parlor for that purpose. No one intruded upon her. For hours the two sat behind closed

doors. Sometimes the lights were turned low and the young man and woman embraced. Cheeks became hot

and hair disarranged. After a year or two, if the impulse within them became strong and insistent enough,

One evening during her first winter in Winesburg, Louise had an adventure that gave a new impulse to her

desire to break down the wall that she thought stood between her and John Hardy. It was Wednesday and

immediately after the evening meal Albert Hardy put on his hat and went away. Young John brought the

wood and put it in the box in Louise's room. "You do work hard, don't you?" he said awkwardly, and then

Louise heard him go out of the house and had a mad desire to run after him. Opening her window she leaned

out and called softly, "John, dear John, come back, don't go away." The night was cloudy and she could not

see far into the darkness, but as she waited she fancied she could hear a soft little noise as of someone going

on tiptoes through the trees in the orchard. She was frightened and closed the window quickly. For an hour

she moved about the room trembling with excitement and when she could not longer bear the waiting, she

crept into the hall and down the stairs into a closetlike room that opened off the parlor.

Louise had decided that she would perform the courageous act that had for weeks been in her mind. She was

convinced that John Hardy had concealed himself in the orchard beneath her window and she was determined

to find him and tell him that she wanted him to come close to her, to hold her in his arms, to tell her of his

thoughts and dreams and to listen while she told him her thoughts and dreams. "In the darkness it will be

easier to say things," she whispered to herself, as she stood in the little room groping for the door.

And then suddenly Louise realized that she was not alone in the house. In the parlor on the other side of the

door a man's voice spoke softly and the door opened. Louise just had time to conceal herself in a little

opening beneath the stairway when Mary Hardy, accompanied by her young man, came into the little dark

For an hour Louise sat on the floor in the darkness and listened. Without words Mary Hardy, with the aid of

the man who had come to spend the evening with her, brought to the country girl a knowledge of men and

women. Putting her head down until she was curled into a little ball she lay perfectly still. It seemed to her

that by some strange impulse of the gods, a great gift had been brought to Mary Hardy and she could not

The young man took Mary Hardy into his arms and kissed her. When she struggled and laughed, he but held

her the more tightly. For an hour the contest between them went on and then they went back into the parlor

and Louise escaped up the stairs. "I hope you were quiet out there. You must not disturb the little mouse at

her studies," she heard Harriet saying to her sister as she stood by her own door in the hallway above.

Louise wrote a note to John Hardy and late that night, when all in the house were asleep, she crept downstairs

and slipped it under his door. She was afraid that if she did not do the thing at once her courage would fail. In

the note she tried to be quite definite about what she wanted. "I want someone to love me and I want to love

someone," she wrote. "If you are the one for me I want you to come into the orchard at night and make a

noise under my window. It will be easy for me to crawl down over the shed and come to you. I am thinking

For a long time Louise did not know what would be the outcome of her bold attempt to secure for herself a

lover. In a way she still did not know whether or not she wanted him to come. Sometimes it seemed to her

that to be held tightly and kissed was the whole secret of life, and then a new impulse came and she was

terribly afraid. The ageold woman' s desire to be possessed had taken possession of her, but so vague was

her notion of life that it seemed to her just the touch of John Hardy's hand upon her own hand would satisfy.

She wondered if he would understand that. At the table next day while Albert Hardy talked and the two girls

whispered and laughed, she did not look at John but at the table and as soon as possible escaped. In the

evening she went out of the house until she was sure he had taken the wood to her room and gone away.

When after several evenings of intense listening she heard no call from the darkness in the orchard, she was

half beside herself with grief and decided that for her there was no way to break through the wall that had

And then on a Monday evening two or three weeks after the writing of the note, John Hardy came for her.

Louise had so entirely given up the thought of his coming that for a long time she did not hear the call that

came up from the orchard. On the Friday evening before, as she was being driven back to the farm for the

weekend by one of the hired men, she had on an impulse done a thing that had startled her, and as John

Hardy stood in the darkness below and called her name softly and insistently, she walked about in her room

The farm hand, a young fellow with black curly hair, had come for her somewhat late on that Friday evening

and they drove home in the darkness. Louise, whose mind was filled with thoughts of John Hardy, tried to

make talk but the country boy was embarrassed and would say nothing. Her mind began to review the

loneliness of her childhood and she remembered with a pang the sharp new loneliness that had just come to

her. "I hate everyone," she cried suddenly, and then broke forth into a tirade that frightened her escort. "I hate

father and the old man Hardy, too," she declared vehemently. "I get my lessons there in the school in town

Louise frightened the farm hand still more by turning and putting her cheek down upon his shoulder. Vaguely

she hoped that he like that young man who had stood in the darkness with Mary would put his arms about her

and kiss her, but the country boy was only alarmed. He struck the horse with the whip and began to whistle.

"The road is rough, eh?" he said loudly. Louise was so angry that reaching up she snatched his hat from his

head and threw it into the road. When he jumped out of the buggy and went to get it, she drove off and left

Louise Bentley took John Hardy to be her lover. That was not what she wanted but it was so the young man

had interpreted her approach to him, and so anxious was she to achieve something else that she made no

resistance. When after a few months they were both afraid that she was about to become a mother, they went

one evening to the county seat and were married. For a few months they lived in the Hardy house and then

took a house of their own. All during the first year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague

and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Again and again

she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always without success. Filled with his own notions of love

between men and women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the lips. That confused her so that in

When the alarm that had tricked them into marriage proved to be groundless, she was angry and said bitter,

hurtful things. Later when her son David was born, she could not nurse him and did not know whether she

wanted him or not. Sometimes she stayed in the room with him all day, walking about and occasionally

creeping close to touch him tenderly with her hands, and then other days came when she did not want to see

or be near the tiny bit of humanity that had come into the house. When John Hardy reproached her for her

cruelty, she laughed. "It is a man child and will get what it wants anyway," she said sharply. "Had it been a

WHEN DAVID HARDY was a tall boy of fifteen, he, like his mother, had an adventure that changed the

whole current of his life and sent him out of his quiet corner into the world. The shell of the circumstances of

his life was broken and he was compelled to start forth. He left Winesburg and no one there ever saw him

again. After his disappearance, his mother and grandfather both died and his father became very rich. He

spent much money in trying to locate his son, but that is no part of this story.

It was in the late fall of an unusual year on the Bentley farms. Everywhere the crops had been heavy. That

spring, Jesse had bought part of a long strip of black swamp land that lay in the valley of Wine Creek. He got

the land at a low price but had spent a large sum of money to improve it. Great ditches had to be dug and

thousands of tile laid. Neighboring farmers shook their heads over the expense. Some of them laughed and

hoped that Jesse would lose heavily by the venture, but the old man went silently on with the work and said

When the land was drained he planted it to cabbages and onions, and again the neighbors laughed. The crop

was, however, enormous and brought high prices. In the one year Jesse made enough money to pay for all the

cost of preparing the land and had a surplus that enabled him to buy two more farms. He was exultant and

could not conceal his delight. For the first time in all the history of his ownership of the farms, he went

Jesse bought a great many new machines for cutting down the cost of labor and all of the remaining acres in

the strip of black fertile swamp land. One day he went into Winesburg and bought a bicycle and a new suit of

clothes for David and he gave his two sisters money with which to go to a religious convention at Cleveland,

In the fall of that year when the frost came and the trees in the forests along Wine Creek were golden brown,

David spent every moment when he did not have to attend school, out in the open. Alone or with other boys

he went every afternoon into the woods to gather nuts. The other boys of the countryside, most of them sons

of laborers on the Bentley farms, had guns with which they went hunting rabbits and squirrels, but David did

not go with them. He made himself a sling with rubber bands and a forked stick and went off by himself to

gather nuts. As he went about thoughts came to him. He realized that he was almost a man and wondered

what he would do in life, but before they came to anything, the thoughts passed and he was a boy again. One

day he killed a squirrel that sat on one of the lower branches of a tree and chattered at him. Home he ran with

the squirrel in his hand. One of the Bentley sisters cooked the little animal and he ate it with great gusto. The

skin he tacked on a board and suspended the board by a string from his bedroom window.

That gave his mind a new turn. After that he never went into the woods without carrying the sling in his

pocket and he spent hours shooting at imaginary animals concealed among the brown leaves in the trees.

Thoughts of his coming manhood passed and he was content to be a boy with a boy's impulses.

One Saturday morning when he was about to set off for the woods with the sling in his pocket and a bag for

nuts on his shoulder, his grandfather stopped him. In the eyes of the old man was the strained serious look

that always a little frightened David. At such times Jesse Bentley's eyes did not look straight ahead but

wavered and seemed to be looking at nothing. Something like an invisible curtain appeared to have come

between the man and all the rest of the world. "I want you to come with me," he said briefly, and his eyes

looked over the boy's head into the sky. "We have something important to do today. You may bring the bag

for nuts if you wish. It does not matter and anyway we will be going into the woods."

Jesse and David set out from the Bentley farmhouse in the old phaeton that was drawn by the white horse.

When they had gone along in silence for a long way they stopped at the edge of a field where a flock of sheep

were grazing. Among the sheep was a lamb that had been born out of season, and this David and his

grandfather caught and tied so tightly that it looked like a little white ball. When they drove on again Jesse let

David hold the lamb in his arms. "I saw it yesterday and it put me in mind of what I have long wanted to do,"

he said, and again he looked away over the head of the boy with the wavering, uncertain stare in his eyes.

After the feeling of exaltation that had come to the farmer as a result of his successful year, another mood had

taken possession of him. For a long time he had been going about feeling very humble and prayerful. Again

he walked alone at night thinking of God and as he walked he again connected his own figure with the figures

of old days. Under the stars he knelt on the wet grass and raised up his voice in prayer. Now he had decided

that like the men whose stories filled the pages of the Bible, he would make a sacrifice to God. "I have been

given these abundant crops and God has also sent me a boy who is called David," he whispered to himself.

"Perhaps I should have done this thing long ago." He was sorry the idea had not come into his mind in the

days before his daughter Louise had been born and thought that surely now when he had erected a pile of

burning sticks in some lonely place in the woods and had offered the body of a lamb as a burnt offering, God

More and more as he thought of the matter, he thought also of David and his passionate selflove was

partially forgotten. "It is time for the boy to begin thinking of going out into the world and the message will

be one concerning him," he decided. "God will make a pathway for him. He will tell me what place David is

to take in life and when he shall set out on his journey. It is right that the boy should be there. If I am

fortunate and an angel of God should appear, David will see the beauty and glory of God made manifest to

In silence Jesse and David drove along the road until they came to that place where Jesse had once before

appealed to God and had frightened his grandson. The morning had been bright and cheerful, but a cold wind

now began to blow and clouds hid the sun. When David saw the place to which they had come he began to

tremble with fright, and when they stopped by the bridge where the creek came down from among the trees,

A dozen plans for escape ran through David's head, but when Jesse stopped the horse and climbed over the

fence into the wood, he followed. "It is foolish to be afraid. Nothing will happen," he told himself as he went

along with the lamb in his arms. There was something in the helplessness of the little animal held so tightly in

his arms that gave him courage. He could feel the rapid beating of the beast's heart and that made his own

heart beat less rapidly. As he walked swiftly along behind his grandfather, he untied the string with which the

four legs of the lamb were fastened together. "If anything happens we will run away together," he thought.

In the woods, after they had gone a long way from the road, Jesse stopped in an opening among the trees

where a clearing, overgrown with small bushes, ran up from the creek. He was still silent but began at once to

erect a heap of dry sticks which he presently set afire. The boy sat on the ground with the lamb in his arms.

His imagination began to invest every movement of the old man with significance and he became every

moment more afraid. "I must put the blood of the lamb on the head of the boy," Jesse muttered when the

sticks had begun to blaze greedily, and taking a long knife from his pocket he turned and walked rapidly

Terror seized upon the soul of the boy. He was sick with it. For a moment he sat perfectly still and then his

body stiffened and he sprang to his feet. His face became as white as the fleece of the lamb that, now finding

itself suddenly released, ran down the hill. David ran also. Fear made his feet fly. Over the low bushes and

logs he leaped frantically. As he ran he put his hand into his pocket and took out the branched stick from

which the sling for shooting squirrels was suspended. When he came to the creek that was shallow and

splashed down over the stones, he dashed into the water and turned to look back, and when he saw his

grandfather still running toward him with the long knife held tightly in his hand he did not hesitate, but

reaching down, selected a stone and put it in the sling. With all his strength he drew back the heavy rubber

bands and the stone whistled through the air. It hit Jesse, who had entirely forgotten the boy and was pursuing

the lamb, squarely in the head. With a groan he pitched forward and fell almost at the boy's feet. When David

saw that he lay still and that he was apparently dead, his fright increased immeasurably. It became an insane

With a cry he turned and ran off through the woods weeping convulsively. "I don't careI killed him, but I

don't care," he sobbed. As he ran on and on he decided suddenly that he would never go back again to the

Bentley farms or to the town of Winesburg. "I have killed the man of God and now I will myself be a man

and go into the world," he said stoutly as he stopped running and walked rapidly down a road that followed

On the ground by the creek Jesse Bentley moved uneasily about. He groaned and opened his eyes. For a long

time he lay perfectly still and looked at the sky. When at last he got to his feet, his mind was confused and he

was not surprised by the boy's disappearance. By the roadside he sat down on a log and began to talk about

God. That is all they ever got out of him. Whenever David's name was mentioned he looked vaguely at the

sky and said that a messenger from God had taken the boy. "It happened because I was too greedy for glory,"

HE LIVED WITH his mother, a grey, silent woman with a peculiar ashy complexion. The house in which

they lived stood in a little grove of trees beyond where the main street of Winesburg crossed Wine Creek. His

name was Joe Welling, and his father had been a man of some dignity in the community, a lawyer, and a

member of the state legislature at Columbus. Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike

anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire.

No, he wasn't like that he was like a man who is subject to fits, one who walks among his fellow men

inspiring fear because a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny physical

state in which his eyes roll and his legs and arms jerk. He was like that, only that the visitation that descended

upon Joe Welling was a mental and not a physical thing. He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his

ideas was uncontrollable. Words rolled and tumbled from his mouth. A peculiar smile came upon his lips.

The edges of his teeth that were tipped with gold glistened in the light. Pouncing upon a bystander he began

to talk. For the bystander there was no escape. The excited man breathed into his face, peered into his eyes,

pounded upon his chest with a shaking forefinger, demanded, compelled attention.

In those days the Standard Oil Company did not deliver oil to the consumer in big wagons and motor trucks

as it does now, but delivered instead to retail grocers, hardware stores, and the like. Joe was the Standard Oil

agent in Winesburg and in several towns up and down the railroad that went through Winesburg. He collected

bills, booked orders, and did other things. His father, the legislator, had secured the job for him.

In and out of the stores of Winesburg went Joe Wellingsilent, excessively polite, intent upon his business.

Men watched him with eyes in which lurked amusement tempered by alarm. They were waiting for him to

break forth, preparing to flee. Although the seizures that came upon him were harmless enough, they could

not be laughed away. They were overwhelming. Astride an idea, Joe was overmastering. His personality

became gigantic. It overrode the man to whom he talked, swept him away, swept all away, all who stood

In Sylvester West's Drug Store stood four men who were talking of horse racing. Wesley Moyer's stallion,

Tony Tip, was to race at the June meeting at Tiffin, Ohio, and there was a rumor that he would meet the

stiffest competition of his career. It was said that Pop Geers, the great racing driver, would himself be there.

Into the drug store came Joe Welling, brushing the screen door violently aside. With a strange absorbed light

Thomas, he who knew Pop Geers and whose opinion of Tony Tip's chances was worth considering.

"The water is up in Wine Creek," cried Joe Welling with the air of Pheidippides bringing news of the victory

of the Greeks in the struggle at Marathon. His finger beat a tattoo upon Ed Thomas's broad chest. "By

Trunion bridge it is within eleven and a half inches of the flooring," he went on, the words coming quickly

and with a little whistling noise from between his teeth. An expression of helpless annoyance crept over the

"I have my facts correct. Depend upon that. I went to Sinnings' Hardware Store and got a rule. Then I went

back and measured. I could hardly believe my own eyes. It hasn't rained you see for ten days. At first I didn't

know what to think. Thoughts rushed through my head. I thought of subterranean passages and springs.

Down under the ground went my mind, delving about. I sat on the floor of the bridge and rubbed my head.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky, not one. Come out into the street and you'll see. There wasn't a cloud. There

isn't a cloud now. Yes, there was a cloud. I don't want to keep back any facts. There was a cloud in the west

"Not that I think that has anything to do with it. There it is, you see. You understand how puzzled I was.

"Then an idea came to me. I laughed. You'll laugh, too. Of course it rained over in Medina County. That's

interesting, eh? If we had no trains, no mails, no telegraph, we would know that it rained over in Medina

County. That's where Wine Creek comes from. Everyone knows that. Little old Wine Creek brought us the

news. That's interesting. I laughed. I thought I'd tell youit's interesting, eh?"

Joe Welling turned and went out at the door. Taking a book from his pocket, he stopped and ran a finger

down one of the pages. Again he was absorbed in his duties as agent of the Standard Oil Company. "Hern's

Grocery will be getting low on coal oil. I'll see them," he muttered, hurrying along the street, and bowing

When George Willard went to work for the Winesburg Eagle he was besieged by Joe Welling. Joe envied the

boy. It seemed to him that he was meant by Nature to be a reporter on a newspaper. "It is what I should be

doing, there is no doubt of that," he declared, stopping George Willard on the sidewalk before Daugherty's

Feed Store. His eyes began to glisten and his forefinger to tremble. "Of course I make more money with the

Standard Oil Company and I'm only telling you," he added. "I've got nothing against you but I should have

your place. I could do the work at odd moments. Here and there I would run finding out things you'll never

Becoming more excited Joe Welling crowded the young reporter against the front of the feed store. He

appeared to be lost in thought, rolling his eyes about and running a thin nervous hand through his hair. A

smile spread over his face and his gold teeth glittered. "You get out your note book," he commanded. "You

carry a little pad of paper in your pocket, don't you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought of it

the other day. Let's take decay. Now what is decay? It's fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never

thought of that? Of course not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street therethey're

all on fire. They're burning up. Decay you see is always going on. It doesn't stop. Water and paint can't stop

it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That's fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the

paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up. They'll say you're a

smart one. I don't care. I don't envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper

Turning quickly, Joe Welling walked rapidly away. When he had taken several steps he stopped and looked

back. "I'm going to stick to you," he said. "I'm going to make you a regular hummer. I should start a

newspaper myself, that's what I should do. I'd be a marvel. Everybody knows that."

When George Willard had been for a year on the Winesburg Eagle, four things happened to Joe Welling. His

mother died, he came to live at the New Willard House, he became involved in a love affair, and he organized

Joe organized the baseball club because he wanted to be a coach and in that position he began to win the

respect of his townsmen. "He is a wonder," they declared after Joe's team had whipped the team from Medina

Upon the baseball field Joe Welling stood by first base, his whole body quivering with excitement. In spite of

themselves all the players watched him closely. The opposing pitcher became confused.

"Now! Now! Now! Now!" shouted the excited man. "Watch me! Watch me! Watch my fingers! Watch my

hands! Watch my feet! Watch my eyes! Let's work together here! Watch me! In me you see all the

movements of the game! Work with me! Work with me! Watch me! Watch me! Watch me!"

With runners of the Winesburg team on bases, Joe Welling became as one inspired. Before they knew what

had come over them, the base runners were watching the man, edging off the bases, advancing, retreating,

held as by an invisible cord. The players of the opposing team also watched Joe. They were fascinated. For a

moment they watched and then, as though to break a spell that hung over them, they began hurling the ball

wildly about, and amid a series of fierce animallike cries from the coach, the runners of the Winesburg team

Joe Welling's love affair set the town of Winesburg on edge. When it began everyone whispered and shook

his head. When people tried to laugh, the laughter was forced and unnatural. Joe fell in love with Sarah King,

a lean, sadlooking woman who lived with her father and brother in a brick house that stood opposite the gate

The two Kings, Edward the father, and Tom the son, were not popular in Winesburg. They were called proud

and dangerous. They had come to Winesburg from some place in the South and ran a cider mill on the

Winesburg. He was twentyseven years old and rode about town on a grey pony. Also he had a long yellow

mustache that dropped down over his teeth, and always carried a heavy, wickedlooking walking stick in his

hand. Once he killed a dog with the stick. The dog belonged to Win Pawsey, the shoe merchant, and stood on

the sidewalk wagging its tail. Tom King killed it with one blow. He was arrested and paid a fine of ten

Old Edward King was small of stature and when he passed people in the street laughed a queer unmirthful

laugh. When he laughed he scratched his left elbow with his right hand. The sleeve of his coat was almost

worn through from the habit. As he walked along the street, looking nervously about and laughing, he seemed

When Sarah King began walking out in the evening with Joe Welling, people shook their heads in alarm. She

was tall and pale and had dark rings under her eyes. The couple looked ridiculous together. Under the trees

they walked and Joe talked. His passionate eager protestations of love, heard coming out of the darkness by

the cemetery wall, or from the deep shadows of the trees on the hill that ran up to the Fair Grounds from

Waterworks Pond, were repeated in the stores. Men stood by the bar in the New Willard House laughing and

talking of Joe's courtship. After the laughter came the silence. The Winesburg baseball team, under his

management, was winning game after game, and the town had begun to respect him. Sensing a tragedy, they

Late on a Saturday afternoon the meeting between Joe Welling and the two Kings, the anticipation of which

had set the town on edge, took place in Joe Welling's room in the New Willard House. George Willard was a

When the young reporter went to his room after the evening meal he saw Tom King and his father sitting in

the half darkness in Joe's room. The son had the heavy walking stick in his hand and sat near the door. Old

Edward King walked nervously about, scratching his left elbow with his right hand. The hallways were

George Willard went to his own room and sat down at his desk. He tried to write but his hand trembled so

that he could not hold the pen. He also walked nervously up and down. Like the rest of the town of

It was seventhirty and fast growing dark when Joe Welling came along the station platform toward the New

Willard House. In his arms he held a bundle of weeds and grasses. In spite of the terror that made his body

shake, George Willard was amused at the sight of the small spry figure holding the grasses and half running

Shaking with fright and anxiety, the young reporter lurked in the hallway outside the door of the room in

which Joe Welling talked to the two Kings. There had been an oath, the nervous giggle of old Edward King,

and then silence. Now the voice of Joe Welling, sharp and clear, broke forth. George Willard began to laugh.

He understood. As he had swept all men before him, so now Joe Welling was carrying the two men in the

room off their feet with a tidal wave of words. The listener in the hall walked up and down, lost in

Inside the room Joe Welling had paid no attention to the grumbled threat of Tom King. Absorbed in an idea

he closed the door and, lighting a lamp, spread the handful of weeds and grasses upon the floor. "I've got

something here," he announced solemnly. "I was going to tell George Willard about it, let him make a piece

out of it for the paper. I'm glad you're here. I wish Sarah were here also. I've been going to come to your

house and tell you of some of my ideas. They're interesting. Sarah wouldn't let me. She said we'd quarrel.

Running up and down before the two perplexed men, Joe Welling began to explain. "Don't you make a

mistake now," he cried. "This is something big." His voice was shrill with excitement. "You just follow me,

you'll be interested. I know you will. Suppose thissuppose all of the wheat, the corn, the oats, the peas, the

potatoes, were all by some miracle swept away. Now here we are, you see, in this county. There is a high

fence built all around us. We'll suppose that. No one can get over the fence and all the fruits of the earth are

destroyed, nothing left but these wild things, these grasses. Would we be done for? I ask you that. Would we

be done for?" Again Tom King growled and for a moment there was silence in the room. Then again Joe

plunged into the exposition of his idea. "Things would go hard for a time. I admit that. I've got to admit that.

No getting around it. We'd be hard put to it. More than one fat stomach would cave in. But they couldn't

Tom King laughed good naturedly and the shivery, nervous laugh of Edward King rang through the house.

Joe Welling hurried on. "We'd begin, you see, to breed up new vegetables and fruits. Soon we'd regain all we

had lost. Mind, I don't say the new things would be the same as the old. They wouldn't. Maybe they'd be

better, maybe not so good. That's interesting, eh? You can think about that. It starts your mind working, now

In the room there was silence and then again old Edward King laughed nervously. "Say, I wish Sarah was

here," cried Joe Welling. "Let's go up to your house. I want to tell her of this."

There was a scraping of chairs in the room. It was then that George Willard retreated to his own room.

Leaning out at the window he saw Joe Welling going along the street with the two Kings. Tom King was

forced to take extraordinary long strides to keep pace with the little man. As he strode along, he leaned over,

listeningabsorbed, fascinated. Joe Welling again talked excitedly. "Take milkweed now," he cried. "A lot

might be done with milkweed, eh? It's almost unbelievable. I want you to think about it. I want you two to

think about it. There would be a new vegetable kingdom you see. It's interesting, eh? It's an idea. Wait till you

see Sarah, she'll get the idea. She'll be interested. Sarah is always interested in ideas. You can't be too smart

ALICE HINDMAN, a woman of twentyseven when George Willard was a mere boy, had lived in

Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney's Dry Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married

Alice's stepfather was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His story is an odd one. It will be worth telling

At twentyseven Alice was tall and somewhat slight. Her head was large and overshadowed her body. Her

shoulders were a little stooped and her hair and eyes brown. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior

When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the store, Alice had an affair with a young

man. The young man, named Ned Currie, was older than Alice. He, like George Willard, was employed on

the Winesburg Eagle and for a long time he went to see Alice almost every evening. Together the two walked

under the trees through the streets of the town and talked of what they would do with their lives. Alice was

then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and said

things he did not intend to say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her

rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence

and reserve, was tom away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late in the fall of her

sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland where he hoped to get a place on a city newspaper and

rise in the world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling voice she told him what was in her mind. "I

will work and you can work," she said. "I do not want to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent

your making progress. Don't marry me now. We will get along without that and we can be together. Even

though we live in the same house no one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will

Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his sweetheart and was also deeply touched. He

had wanted the girl to become his mistress but changed his mind. He wanted to protect and care for her. "You

don't know what you're talking about," he said sharply; "you may be sure I'll let you do no such thing. As

soon as I get a good job I'll come back. For the present you'll have to stay here. It's the only thing we can do."

On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his new life in the city, Ned Currie went to call on Alice.

They walked about through the streets for an hour and then got a rig from Wesley Moyer's livery and went

for a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the

young man forgot the resolutions he had made regarding his conduct with the girl.

They got out of the buggy at a place where a long meadow ran down to the bank of Wine Creek and there in

the dim light became lovers. When at midnight they returned to town they were both glad. It did not seem to

them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had

happened. "Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that," Ned Currie

The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago.

For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice almost every day. Then he was caught up by the life of the city;

he began to make friends and found new interests in life. In Chicago he boarded at a house where there were

several women. One of them attracted his attention and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the end of a year he

had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of the

city parks and saw the moon shining on the grass as it had shone that night on the meadow by Wine Creek,

In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a woman. When she was twentytwo years old her

father, who owned a harness repair shop, died suddenly. The harness maker was an old soldier, and after a

few months his wife received a widow's pension. She used the first money she got to buy a loom and became

a weaver of carpets, and Alice got a place in Winney's store. For a number of years nothing could have

She was glad to be employed because the daily round of toil in the store made the time of waiting seem less

long and uninteresting. She began to save money, thinking that when she had saved two or three hundred

dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try if her presence would not win back his affections.

Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight in the field, but felt that she could

never marry another man. To her the thought of giving to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned

seemed monstrous. When other young men tried to attract her attention she would have nothing to do with

them. "I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not," she whispered to herself, and

for all of her willingness to support herself could not have understood the growing modern idea of a woman's

Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the morning until six at night and on three evenings a week

went back to the store to stay from seven until nine. As time passed and she became more and more lonely

she began to practice the devices common to lonely people. When at night she went upstairs into her own

room she knelt on the floor to pray and in her prayers whispered things she wanted to say to her lover. She

became attached to inanimate objects, and because it was her own, could not bare to have anyone touch the

furniture of her room. The trick of saving money, begun for a purpose, was carried on after the scheme of

going to the city to find Ned Currie had been given up. It became a fixed habit, and when she needed new

clothes she did not get them. Sometimes on rainy afternoons in the store she got out her bank book and,

letting it lie open before her, spent hours dreaming impossible dreams of saving money enough so that the

"Ned always liked to travel about," she thought. "I'll give him the chance. Some day when we are married and

I can save both his money and my own, we will be rich. Then we can travel together all over the world."

In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months into years as Alice waited and dreamed of her

lover's return. Her employer, a grey old man with false teeth and a thin grey mustache that drooped down

over his mouth, was not given to conversation, and sometimes, on rainy days and in the winter when a storm

raged in Main Street, long hours passed when no customers came in. Alice arranged and rearranged the stock.

She stood near the front window where she could look down the deserted street and thought of the evenings

when she had walked with Ned Currie and of what he had said. "We will have to stick to each other now."

The words echoed and reechoed through the mind of the maturing woman. Tears came into her eyes.

Sometimes when her employer had gone out and she was alone in the store she put her head on the counter

and wept. "Oh, Ned, I am waiting," she whispered over and over, and all the time the creeping fear that he

In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days of summer have come, the country

about Winesburg is delightful. The town lies in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields are pleasant

patches of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to

sit on Sunday afternoons. Through the trees they look out across the fields and see farmers at work about the

barns or people driving up and down on the roads. In the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes,

For several years after Ned Currie went away Alice did not go into the wood with the other young people on

Sunday, but one day after he had been gone for two or three years and when her loneliness seemed

unbearable, she put on her best dress and set out. Finding a little sheltered place from which she could see the

town and a long stretch of the fields, she sat down. Fear of age and ineffectuality took possession of her. She

could not sit still, and arose. As she stood looking out over the land something, perhaps the thought of never

ceasing life as it expresses itself in the flow of the seasons, fixed her mind on the passing years. With a shiver

of dread, she realized that for her the beauty and freshness of youth had passed. For the first time she felt that

she had been cheated. She did not blame Ned Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness swept over

her. Dropping to her knees, she tried to pray, but instead of prayers words of protest came to her lips. "It is

not going to come to me. I will never find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?" she cried, and an odd sense

of relief came with this, her first bold attempt to face the fear that had become a part of her everyday life.

In the year when Alice Hindman became twentyfive two things happened to disturb the dull uneventfulness

Milton, the carriage painter of Winesburg, and she herself became a member of the Winesburg Methodist

Church. Alice joined the church because she had become frightened by the loneliness of her position in life.

Her mother's second marriage had emphasized her isolation. "I am becoming old and queer. If Ned comes he

will not want me. In the city where he is living men are perpetually young. There is so much going on that

they do not have time to grow old," she told herself with a grim little smile, and went resolutely about the

business of becoming acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when the store had closed she went to

a prayer meeting in the basement of the church and on Sunday evening attended a meeting of an organization

When Will Hurley, a middleaged man who clerked in a drug store and who also belonged to the church,

offered to walk home with her she did not protest. "Of course I will not let him make a practice of being with

me, but if he comes to see me once in a long time there can be no harm in that," she told herself, still

Without realizing what was happening, Alice was trying feebly at first, but with growing determination, to

get a new hold upon life. Beside the drug clerk she walked in silence, but sometimes in the darkness as they

went stolidly along she put out her hand and touched softly the folds of his coat. When he left her at the gate

before her mother's house she did not go indoors, but stood for a moment by the door. She wanted to call to

the drug clerk, to ask him to sit with her in the darkness on the porch before the house, but was afraid he

would not understand. "It is not him that I want," she told herself; "I want to avoid being so much alone. If I

During the early fall of her twentyseventh year a passionate restlessness took possession of Alice. She could

not bear to be in the company of the drug clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk with her she sent

him away. Her mind became intensely active and when, weary from the long hours of standing behind the

counter in the store, she went home and crawled into bed, she could not sleep. With staring eyes she looked

into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep

within her there was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite

Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a

blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling beside the bed, she

caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a refrain. "Why doesn't something happen? Why am I left

Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or any

other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder

And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure. It frightened and confused her. She had come

home from the store at nine and found the house empty. Bush Milton had gone off to town and her mother to

the house of a neighbor. Alice went upstairs to her room and undressed in the darkness. For a moment she

stood by the window hearing the rain beat against the glass and then a strange desire took possession of her.

Without stopping to think of what she intended to do, she ran downstairs through the dark house and out into

the rain. As she stood on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her body a mad desire

She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body. Not for years had she

felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and

embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled homeward. Alice started to run. A

wild, desperate mood took possession of her. "What do I care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him," she

thought; and then without stopping to consider the possible result of her madness, called softly. "Wait!" she

The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man and somewhat deaf.

Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was so frightened at the thought of what she had done

that when the man had gone on his way she did not dare get to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees

through the grass to the house. When she got to her own room she bolted the door and drew her dressing table

across the doorway. Her body shook as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had difficulty getting

into her nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face in the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. "What

is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful," she thought, and turning her face to

the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even

IF YOU HAVE lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen,

blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging,

hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the

completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are

fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to

remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

Had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village of Winesburg, Ohio, there would have

been for you no mystery in regard to the beast in his cage. "It is like Wash Williams," you would have said.

"As he sits in the corner there, the beast is exactly like old Wash sitting on the grass in the station yard on a

Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was immense,

his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes

I go too fast. Not everything about Wash was unclean. He took care of his hands. His fingers were fat, but

there was something sensitive and shapely in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument in the telegraph

office. In his youth Wash Williams had been called the best telegraph operator in the state, and in spite of his

degradement to the obscure office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.

Wash Williams did not associate with the men of the town in which he lived. "I'll have nothing to do with

them," he said, looking with bleary eyes at the men who walked along the station platform past the telegraph

office. Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed Griffith's saloon, and after drinking unbelievable

quantities of beer staggered off to his room in the New Willard House and to his bed for the night.

Wash Williams was a man of courage. A thing had happened to him that made him hate life, and he hated it

wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet. First of all, he hated women. "Bitches," he called them. His

feeling toward men was somewhat different. He pitied them. "Does not every man let his life be managed for

In Winesburg no attention was paid to Wash Williams and his hatred of his fellows. Once Mrs. White, the

banker's wife, complained to the telegraph company, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and

smelled abominably, but nothing came of her complaint. Here and there a man respected the operator.

Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent. When

Wash walked through the streets such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow

before him. The superintendent who had supervision over the telegraph operators on the railroad that went

through Winesburg felt that way. He had put Wash into the obscure office at Winesburg to avoid discharging

him, and he meant to keep him there. When he received the letter of complaint from the banker's wife, he tore

it up and laughed unpleasantly. For some reason he thought of his own wife as he tore up the letter.

Wash Williams once had a wife. When he was still a young man he married a woman at Dayton, Ohio. The

woman was tall and slender and had blue eyes and yellow hair. Wash was himself a comely youth. He loved

In all of Winesburg there was but one person who knew the story of the thing that had made ugly the person

and the character of Wash Williams. He once told the story to George Willard and the telling of the tale came

George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer of women's hats who worked in a

millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh. The young man was not in love with the woman, who, in fact,

had a suitor who worked as bartender in Ed Griffith's saloon, but as they walked about under the trees they

occasionally embraced. The night and their own thoughts had aroused something in them. As they were

returning to Main Street they passed the little lawn beside the railroad station and saw Wash Williams

apparently asleep on the grass beneath a tree. On the next evening the operator and George Willard walked

out together. Down the railroad they went and sat on a pile of decaying railroad ties beside the tracks. It was

Perhaps a dozen times George Willard and the strange, shapeless man who lived at his father's hotel had been

on the point of talking. The young man looked at the hideous, leering face staring about the hotel dining room

and was consumed with curiosity. Something he saw lurking in the staring eyes told him that the man who

had nothing to say to others had nevertheless something to say to him. On the pile of railroad ties on the

summer evening, he waited expectantly. When the operator remained silent and seemed to have changed his

mind about talking, he tried to make conversation. "Were you ever married, Mr. Williams?" he began. "I

Wash Williams spat forth a succession of vile oaths. "Yes, she is dead," he agreed. "She is dead as all women

are dead. She is a livingdead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth foul by her presence."

Staring into the boy's eyes, the man became purple with rage. "Don't have fool notions in your head," he

commanded. "My wife, she is dead; yes, surely. I tell you, all women are dead, my mother, your mother, that

tall dark woman who works in the millinery store and with whom I saw you walking about yesterdayall of

them, they are all dead. I tell you there is something rotten about them. I was married, sure. My wife was

dead before she married me, she was a foul thing come out a woman more foul. She was a thing sent to make

life unbearable to me. I was a fool, do you see, as you are now, and so I married this woman. I would like to

see men a little begin to understand women. They are sent to prevent men making the world worth while. It is

a trick in Nature. Ugh! They are creeping, crawling, squirming things, they with their soft hands and their

blue eyes. The sight of a woman sickens me. Why I don't kill every woman I see I don't know."

Half frightened and yet fascinated by the light burning in the eyes of the hideous old man, George Willard

listened, afire with curiosity. Darkness came on and he leaned forward trying to see the face of the man who

talked. When, in the gathering darkness, he could no longer see the purple, bloated face and the burning eyes,

a curious fancy came to him. Wash Williams talked in low even tones that made his words seem the more

terrible. In the darkness the young reporter found himself imagining that he sat on the railroad ties beside a

comely young man with black hair and black shining eyes. There was something almost beautiful in the voice

The telegraph operator of Winesburg, sitting in the darkness on the railroad ties, had become a poet. Hatred

had raised him to that elevation. "It is because I saw you kissing the lips of that Belle Carpenter that I tell you

my story," he said. "What happened to me may next happen to you. I want to put you on your guard. Already

Wash Williams began telling the story of his married life with the tall blonde girl with the blue eyes whom he

had met when he was a young operator at Dayton, Ohio. Here and there his story was touched with moments

of beauty intermingled with strings of vile curses. The operator had married the daughter of a dentist who was

the youngest of three sisters. On his marriage day, because of his ability, he was promoted to a position as

dispatcher at an increased salary and sent to an office at Columbus, Ohio. There he settled down with his

The young telegraph operator was madly in love. With a kind of religious fervor he had managed to go

through the pitfalls of his youth and to remain virginal until after his marriage. He made for George Willard a

picture of his life in the house at Columbus, Ohio, with the young wife. "in the garden back of our house we

planted vegetables," he said, "you know, peas and corn and such things. We went to Columbus in early

March and as soon as the days became warm I went to work in the garden. With a spade I turned up the black

ground while she ran about laughing and pretending to be afraid of the worms I uncovered. Late in April

came the planting. In the little paths among the seed beds she stood holding a paper bag in her hand. The bag

was filled with seeds. A few at a time she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the warm, soft

For a moment there was a catch in the voice of the man talking in the darkness. "I loved her," he said. "I don't

claim not to be a fool. I love her yet. There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along the black ground

to her feet and groveled before her. I kissed her shoes and the ankles above her shoes. When the hem of her

garment touched my face I trembled. When after two years of that life I found she had managed to acquire

three other lovers who came regularly to our house when I was away at work, I didn't want to touch them or

her. I just sent her home to her mother and said nothing. There was nothing to say. I had four hundred dollars

in the bank and I gave her that. I didn't ask her reasons. I didn't say anything. When she had gone I cried like

a silly boy. Pretty soon I had a chance to sell the house and I sent that money to her."

Wash Williams and George Willard arose from the pile of railroad ties and walked along the tracks toward

"Her mother sent for me," he said. "She wrote me a letter and asked me to come to their house at Dayton.

Wash Williams' voice rose to a half scream. "I sat in the parlor of that house two hours. Her mother took me

in there and left me. Their house was stylish. They were what is called respectable people. There were plush

chairs and a couch in the room. I was trembling all over. I hated the men I thought had wronged her. I was

sick of living alone and wanted her back. The longer I waited the more raw and tender I became. I thought

that if she came in and just touched me with her hand I would perhaps faint away. I ached to forgive and

Wash Williams stopped and stood staring at George Willard. The boy's body shook as from a chill. Again the

man's voice became soft and low. "She came into the room naked," he went on. "Her mother did that. While I

sat there she was taking the girl's clothes off, perhaps coaxing her to do it. First I heard voices at the door that

led into a little hallway and then it opened softly. The girl was ashamed and stood perfectly still staring at the

floor. The mother didn't come into the room. When she had pushed the girl in through the door she stood in

George Willard and the telegraph operator came into the main street of Winesburg. The lights from the store

windows lay bright and shining on the sidewalks. People moved about laughing and talking. The young

reporter felt ill and weak. In imagination, he also became old and shapeless. "I didn't get the mother killed,"

said Wash Williams, staring up and down the street. "I struck her once with a chair and then the neighbors

came in and took it away. She screamed so loud you see. I won't ever have a chance to kill her now. She died

THE HOUSE in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg lived with his mother had been at one time the show

place of the town, but when young Seth lived there its glory had become somewhat dimmed. The huge brick

house which Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had overshadowed it. The Richmond place was in a

little valley far out at the end of Main Street. Farmers coming into town by a dusty road from the south

passed by a grove of walnut trees, skirted the Fair Ground with its high board fence covered with

advertisements, and trotted their horses down through the valley past the Richmond place into town. As much

of the country north and south of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and berry raising, Seth saw wagonloads of

berry pickersboys, girls, and womengoing to the fields in the morning and returning covered with dust

in the evening. The chattering crowd, with their rude jokes cried out from wagon to wagon, sometimes

irritated him sharply. He regretted that he also could not laugh boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and

make of himself a figure in the endless stream of moving, giggling activity that went up and down the road.

The Richmond house was built of limestone, and, although it was said in the village to have become run

down, had in reality grown more beautiful with every passing year. Already time had begun a little to color

the stone, lending a golden richness to its surface and in the evening or on dark days touching the shaded

The house had been built by Seth's grandfather, a stone quarryman, and it, together with the stone quarries on

Lake Erie eighteen miles to the north, had been left to his son, Clarence Richmond, Seth's father. Clarence

Richmond, a quiet passionate man extraordinarily admired by his neighbors, had been killed in a street fight

with the editor of a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. The fight concerned the publication of Clarence Richmond's

name coupled with that of a woman school teacher, and as the dead man had begun the row by firing upon

the editor, the effort to punish the slayer was unsuccessful. After the quarryman's death it was found that

much of the money left to him had been squandered in speculation and in insecure investments made through

Left with but a small income, Virginia Richmond had settled down to a retired life in the village and to the

raising of her son. Although she had been deeply moved by the death of the husband and father, she did not at

all believe the stories concerning him that ran about after his death. To her mind, the sensitive, boyish man

whom all had instinctively loved, was but an unfortunate, a being too fine for everyday life. "You'll be

hearing all sorts of stories, but you are not to believe what you hear," she said to her son. "He was a good

man, full of tenderness for everyone, and should not have tried to be a man of affairs. No matter how much I

were to plan and dream of your future, I could not imagine anything better for you than that you turn out as

Several years after the death of her husband, Virginia Richmond had become alarmed at the growing

demands upon her income and had set herself to the task of increasing it. She had learned stenography and

through the influence of her husband's friends got the position of court stenographer at the county seat. There

she went by train each morning during the sessions of the court, and when no court sat, spent her days

working among the rosebushes in her garden. She was a tall, straight figure of a woman with a plain face and

In the relationship between Seth Richmond and his mother, there was a quality that even at eighteen had

begun to color all of his traffic with men. An almost unhealthy respect for the youth kept the mother for the

most part silent in his presence. When she did speak sharply to him he had only to look steadily into her eyes

to see dawning there the puzzled look he had already noticed in the eyes of others when he looked at them.

The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the mother did not. She expected from all

people certain conventional reactions to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and

looked at the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all was forgiven. After the weeping and when

Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did not do these things. After the severest reprimand,

he did not tremble and look at the floor but instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to invade

her mind. As for creeping into his room after Seth had passed his fifteenth year, she would have been half

Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys ran away from home. The three

boys climbed into the open door of an empty freight car and rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was

being held. One of the boys had a bottle filled with a combination of whiskey and blackberry wine, and the

three sat with legs dangling out of the car door drinking from the bottle. Seth's two companions sang and

waved their hands to idlers about the stations of the towns through which the train passed. They planned raids

upon the baskets of farmers who had come with their families to the fair. "We will five like kings and won't

have to spend a penny to see the fair and horse races," they declared boastfully.

After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down the floor of her home filled with

vague alarms. Although on the next day she discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on

what adventure the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All through the night she lay awake hearing

the clock tick and telling herself that Seth, like his father, would come to a sudden and violent end. So

determined was she that the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she would not

allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and paper and wrote down a series of

sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going

And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a little weary and with coal soot in his ears and about his

eyes, she again found herself unable to reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail by the

kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her. "I wanted to turn back within an hour after we had started," he

explained. "I didn't know what to do. I knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if I didn't go on I

would be ashamed of myself. I went through with the thing for my own good. It was uncomfortable, sleeping

on wet straw, and two drunken Negroes came and slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket out of a farmer's

wagon I couldn't help thinking of his children going all day without food. I was sick of the whole affair, but I

"I'm glad you did stick it out," replied the mother, half resentfully, and kissing him upon the forehead

On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New Willard House to visit his friend, George Willard. It

had rained during the afternoon, but as he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and a

golden glow lit up the west. Going around a corner, he turned in at the door of the hotel and began to climb

the stairway leading up to his friend's room. In the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men were

On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices of the men below. They were excited and talked

rapidly. Tom Willard was berating the traveling men. "I am a Democrat but your talk makes me sick," he

said. "You don't understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are friends. It is impossible perhaps for

your mind to grasp that. If anyone tells you that a friendship can be deeper and bigger and more worth while

than dollars and cents, or even more worth while than state politics, you snicker and laugh."

The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a tall, greymustached man who worked for a wholesale

grocery house. "Do you think that I've lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark Hanna?" he

demanded. "Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money and nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has

The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the rest of the discussion, but went on up the stairway and

into the little dark hall. Something in the voices of the men talking in the hotel office started a chain of

thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to think that loneliness was a part of his character,

something that would always stay with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by a window that looked into

an alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner Groff, the town baker. His tiny bloodshot eyes looked up

and down the alleyway. In his shop someone called the baker, who pretended not to hear. The baker had an

In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the "deep one." "He's like his father," men said as he went through

The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys instinctively greeted him, as all men greet

silent people, had affected Seth Richmond's outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was deeper

than boys are given credit for being, but he was not what the men of the town, and even his mother, thought

him to be. No great underlying purpose lay back of his habitual silence, and he had no definite plan for his

life. When the boys with whom he associated were noisy and quarrelsome, he stood quietly at one side. With

calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in

what was going on, and sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as

he stood in the halfdarkness by the window watching the baker, he wished that he himself might become

thoroughly stirred by something, even by the fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted. "It would

be better for me if I could become excited and wrangle about politics like windy old Tom Willard," he

thought, as he left the window and went again along the hallway to the room occupied by his friend, George

George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the rather odd friendship between the two, it was he

who was forever courting and the younger boy who was being courted. The paper on which George worked

had one policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as possible of the inhabitants of the

village. Like an excited dog, George Willard ran here and there, noting on his pad of paper who had gone on

business to the county seat or had returned from a visit to a neighboring village. All day he wrote little facts

upon the pad. "A. P. Wringlet had received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were

in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road."

The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given him a place of distinction in

Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked continually of the matter, "It's the easiest of all lives to live," he

declared, becoming excited and boastful. "Here and there you go and there is no one to boss you. Though you

are in India or in the South Seas in a boat, you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my name up

In George Willard's room, which had a window looking down into an alleyway and one that looked across

railroad tracks to Biff Carter's Lunch Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and

looked at the floor. George Willard, who had been sitting for an hour idly playing with a lead pencil, greeted

him effusively. "I've been trying to write a love story," he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he

began walking up and down the room. "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to fall in love. I've been

As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went to a window and turning his back to his friend leaned

out. "I know who I'm going to fall in love with," he said sharply. "It's Helen White. She is the only girl in

Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked toward his visitor. "Look here," he said. "You

know Helen White better than I do. I want you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking to her and say

that I'm in love with her. See what she says to that. See how she takes it, and then you come and tell me."

Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door. The words of his comrade irritated him unbearably. "Well,

George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to look into Seth's face. "What's the

A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the men of the town who were, he thought, perpetually

talking of nothing, and most of all, against his own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. "Aw, speak to

her yourself," he burst forth and then, going quickly through the door, slammed it sharply in his friend's face.

"I'm going to find Helen White and talk to her, but not about him," he muttered.

Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door of the hotel muttering with wrath. Crossing a little

dusty street and climbing a low iron railing, he went to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George Willard

he thought a profound fool, and he wished that he had said so more vigorously. Although his

acquaintanceship with Helen White, the banker's daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the

subject of his thoughts and he felt that she was something private and personal to himself. "The busy fool

with his love stories," he muttered, staring back over his shoulder at George Willard's room, "why does he

It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the station platform men and boys loaded the boxes of red,

fragrant berries into two express cars that stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although in the

west a storm threatened, and no street lamps were lighted. In the dim light the figures of the men standing

upon the express truck and pitching the boxes in at the doors of the cars were but dimly discernible. Upon the

iron railing that protected the station lawn sat other men. Pipes were lighted. Village jokes went back and

forth. Away in the distance a train whistled and the men loading the boxes into the cars worked with renewed

Seth arose from his place on the grass and went silently past the men perched upon the railing and into Main

Street. He had come to a resolution. "I'll get out of here," he told himself. "What good am I here? I'm going to

Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past Wacker's Cigar Store and the Town Hall, and into

Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the thought that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the

depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. In the heavy shadows of a big tree

before Doctor Welling's house, he stopped and stood watching halfwitted Turk Smollet, who was pushing a

wheelbarrow in the road. The old man with his absurdly boyish mind had a dozen long boards on the

wheelbarrow, and, as he hurried along the road, balanced the load with extreme nicety. "Easy there, Turk!

Steady now, old boy!" the old man shouted to himself, and laughed so that the load of boards rocked

Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood chopper whose peculiarities added so much of color to

the life of the village. He knew that when Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of a

whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old man was going far out of his way in order to pass

through Main Street and exhibit his skill in wheeling the boards. "If George Willard were here, he'd have

something to say," thought Seth. "George belongs to this town. He'd shout at Turk and Turk would shout at

him. They'd both be secretly pleased by what they had said. It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not make

Seth stumbled forward through the halfdarkness, feeling himself an outcast in his own town. He began to

pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was

simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for selfpity. "I'm made to go to work. I may be able to

make a place for myself by steady working, and I might as well be at it," he decided.

Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the darkness by the front door. On the door hung a

heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced into the village by Helen White's mother, who had also

organized a women's club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. Its heavy clatter

sounded like a report from distant guns. "How awkward and foolish I am," he thought. "If Mrs. White comes

It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth standing at the edge of the porch. Blushing with

pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the door softly. "I'm going to get out of town. I don't know what I'll do,

but I'm going to get out of here and go to work. I think I'll go to Columbus," he said. "Perhaps I'll get into the

State University down there. Anyway, I'm going. I'll tell mother tonight." He hesitated and looked doubtfully

Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the

moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying

forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the wooden lamppost, lighted

the village lights so that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening

shadows cast by the lowbranched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play, disturbing the

sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two

Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had been a half expressed intimacy between him and the

maiden who now for the first time walked beside him. For a time she had been beset with a madness for

writing notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found them concealed in his books at school and one had

been given him by a child met in the street, while several had been delivered through the village post office.

The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth

had not answered them, although he had been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in

pencil upon the stationery of the banker's wife. Putting them into the pocket of his coat, he went through the

street or stood by the fence in the school yard with something burning at his side. He thought it fine that he

should be thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in town.

Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced the street. The building had once

been a factory for the making of barrel staves but was now vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a

house a man and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming dearly across to the halfembarrassed

youth and maiden. There was the sound of scraping chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel

path to a wooden gate. Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed the woman. "For old times'

"That's Belle Turner," whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into Seth's hand. "I didn't know she had a

fellow. I thought she was too old for that." Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a

strange, dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came a desire to tell her something he had been

determined not to tell. "George Willard's in love with you," he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice was

low and quiet. "He's writing a story, and he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it feels. He wanted

Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden surrounding the old Richmond place and

On the street as he walked beside the girl new and daring thoughts had come into Seth Richmond's mind. He

began to regret his decision to get out of town. "It would be something new and altogether delightful to

remain and walk often through the streets with Helen White," he thought. In imagination he saw himself

putting his arm about her waist and feeling her arms clasped tightly about his neck. One of those odd

combinations of events and places made him connect the idea of lovemaking with this girl and a spot he had

visited some days before. He had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer who lived on a hillside beyond

the Fair Ground and had returned by a path through a field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer's house

Seth had stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming noise had greeted his ears.

And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him in the long grass. He stood in a

mass of weeds that grew waisthigh in the field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with

tiny purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds the bees were gathered in

Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the weeds beneath the tree. Beside

him, in the scene built in his fancy, lay Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept

him from kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished. Instead, he lay perfectly still,

looking at her and listening to the army of bees that sang the sustained masterful song of labor above his

On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily. Releasing the hand of the girl, he thrust his hands into his

trouser pockets. A desire to impress the mind of his companion with the importance of the resolution he had

made came over him and he nodded his head toward the house. "Mother'll make a fuss, I suppose," he

whispered. "She hasn't thought at all about what I'm going to do in life. She thinks I'm going to stay on here

Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness. "You see, I've got to strike out. I've got to get to work.

Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of admiration swept over her. "This is as it

should be," she thought. "This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires

that had been invading her body were swept away and she sat up very straight on the bench. The thunder

continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning lit up the eastern sky. The garden that had been so

mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange and

wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite definite and limited

Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more

sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A feeling

of impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to tell her of it. "Everyone talks

and talks," he began. "I'm sick of it. I'll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don't count.

Maybe I'll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I just want to work and keep

Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did not want to bring the meeting to an end but could not

think of anything more to say. "It's the last time we'll see each other," he whispered.

A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand upon Seth's shoulder, she started to draw his face

down toward her own upturned face. The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague

adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never be realized. "I think I'd better be

going along," she said, letting her hand fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her. "Don't you go with

me; I want to be alone," she said. "You go and talk with your mother. You'd better do that now."

Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away through the hedge. A desire to run after

her came to him, but he only stood staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and

puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come. Walking slowly toward the house, he

stopped in the shadow of a large tree and looked at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily sewing. The

feeling of loneliness that had visited him earlier in the evening returned and colored his thoughts of the

adventure through which he had just passed. "Huh!" he exclaimed, turning and staring in the direction taken

by Helen White. "That's how things'll turn out. She'll be like the rest. I suppose she'll begin now to look at me

in a funny way." He looked at the ground and pondered this thought. "She'll be embarrassed and feel strange

whispered to himself. "That's how it'll be. That's how everything'll turn out. When it comes to loving

someone, it won't never be me. It'll be someone elsesome foolsomeone who talks a lotsomeone like

UNTIL SHE WAS seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off

Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time

talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the

ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the

little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.

A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see. He was a tall, redhaired young

Sometimes he sat in a chair before the New Willard House with Tom Hard, the father. As Tom talked,

declaring there could be no God, the stranger smiled and winked at the bystanders. He and Tom became

The stranger was the son of a rich merchant of Cleveland and had come to Winesburg on a mission. He

wanted to cure himself of the habit of drink, and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living

in a rural community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the appetite that was destroying him.

His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than

ever. But he did succeed in doing something. He gave a name rich with meaning to Tom Hard's daughter.

One evening when he was recovering from a long debauch the stranger came reeling along the main street of

the town. Tom Hard sat in a chair before the New Willard House with his daughter, then a child of five, on

his knees. Beside him on the board sidewalk sat young George Willard. The stranger dropped into a chair

It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the railroad that ran along the foot of a little

incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from the

whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked. The stranger

began to babble and made a prophecy concerning the child that lay in the arms of the agnostic.

"I came here to quit drinking," he said, and tears began to run down his cheeks. He did not look at Tom Hard,

but leaned forward and stared into the darkness as though seeing a vision. "I ran away to the country to be

cured, but I am not cured. There is a reason." He turned to look at the child who sat up very straight on her

The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. "Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted," he said.

"There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know

enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand

The stranger became silent and seemed overcome with sadness, but another blast from the whistle of the

passenger engine aroused him. "I have not lost faith. I proclaim that. I have only been brought to the place

where I know my faith will not be realized," he declared hoarsely. He looked hard at the child and began to

address her, paying no more attention to the father. "There is a woman coming," he said, and his voice was

now sharp and earnest. "I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may be the woman. It

would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as this, when I have destroyed

The shoulders of the stranger shook violently, and when he tried to roll a cigarette the paper fell from his

trembling fingers. He grew angry and scolded. "They think it's easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know

better," he declared. Again he turned to the child. "I understand," he cried. "Perhaps of all men I alone

His glance again wandered away to the darkened street. "I know about her, although she has never crossed

my path," he said softly. "I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to

me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it

Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of

being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get. "

The stranger arose and stood before Tom Hard. His body rocked back and forth and he seemed about to fall,

but instead he dropped to his knees on the sidewalk and raised the hands of the little girl to his drunken lips.

He kissed them ecstatically. "Be Tandy, little one," he pleaded. "Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the

road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be

The stranger arose and staggered off down the street. A day or two later he got aboard a train and returned to

his home in Cleveland. On the summer evening, after the talk before the hotel, Tom Hard took the girl child

to the house of a relative where she had been invited to spend the night. As he went along in the darkness

under the trees he forgot the babbling voice of the stranger and his mind returned to the making of arguments

by which he might destroy men's faith in God. He spoke his daughter's name and she began to weep.

"I don't want to be called that," she declared. "I want to be called TandyTandy Hard." The child wept so

bitterly that Tom Hard was touched and tried to comfort her. He stopped beneath a tree and, taking her into

his arms, began to caress her. "Be good, now," he said sharply; but she would not be quieted. With childish

abandon she gave herself over to grief, her voice breaking the evening stillness of the street. "I want to be

Tandy. I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy Hard," she cried, shaking her head and sobbing as though her

young strength were not enough to bear the vision the words of the drunkard had brought to her.

THE REVEREND Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg, and had been in that

position ten years. He was forty years old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in

the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from Wednesday morning until Saturday

evening he thought of nothing but the two sermons that must be preached on Sunday. Early on Sunday

morning he went into a little room called a study in the bell tower of the church and prayed. In his prayers

there was one note that always predominated. "Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!" he

pleaded, kneeling on the bare floor and bowing his head in the presence of the task that lay before him.

The Reverend Hartman was a tall man with a brown beard. His wife, a stout, nervous woman, was the

daughter of a manufacturer of underwear at Cleveland, Ohio. The minister himself was rather a favorite in the

town. The elders of the church liked him because he was quiet and unpretentious and Mrs. White, the

The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other churches of Winesburg. It was larger and

more imposing and its minister was better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on summer evenings

sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street and up and down Buckeye Street he went,

bowing gravely to the people, while his wife, afire with secret pride, looked at him out of the corners of her

For a good many years after he came to Winesburg things went well with Curtis Hartman. He was not one to

arouse keen enthusiasm among the worshippers in his church but on the other hand he

made no enemies. In reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of remorse

because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and byways of the town. He wondered if the

flame of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new current of power

would come like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would tremble before the spirit of

God made manifest in him. "I am a poor stick and that will never really happen to me," he mused dejectedly,

and then a patient smile lit up his features. "Oh well, I suppose I'm doing well enough," he added

The room in the bell tower of the church, where on Sunday mornings the minister prayed for an increase in

him of the power of God, had but one window. It was long and narrow and swung outward on a hinge like a

door. On the window, made of little leaded panes, was a design showing the Christ laying his hand upon the

head of a child. One Sunday morning in the summer as he sat by his desk in the room with a large Bible

opened before him, and the sheets of his sermon scattered about, the minister was shocked to see, in the upper

room of the house next door, a woman lying in her bed and smoking a cigarette while she read a book. Curtis

Hartman went on tiptoe to the window and closed it softly. He was horror stricken at the thought of a woman

smoking and trembled also to think that his eyes, just raised from the pages of the book of God, had looked

upon the bare shoulders and white throat of a woman. With his brain in a whirl he went down into the pulpit

and preached a long sermon without once thinking of his gestures or his voice. The sermon attracted unusual

attention because of its power and clearness. "I wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying a message

into her soul," he thought and began to hope that on future Sunday mornings he might be able to say words

The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through the windows of which the minister had seen the

sight that had so upset him, was occupied by two women. Aunt Elizabeth Swift, a grey competentlooking

Bank, lived there with her daughter Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school teacher was thirty years old and

had a neat trimlooking figure. She had few friends and bore a reputation of having a sharp tongue. When he

began to think about her, Curtis Hartman remembered that she had been to Europe and had lived for two

years in New York City. "Perhaps after all her smoking means nothing," he thought. He began to remember

that when he was a student in college and occasionally read novels, good although somewhat worldly

women, had smoked through the pages of a book that had once fallen into his hands. With a rush of new

determination he worked on his sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to reach the ears and the

soul of this new listener, both his embarrassment in the pulpit and the necessity of prayer in the study on

Reverend Hartman's experience with women had been somewhat limited. He was the son of a wagon maker

from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his way through college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer

had boarded in a house where he lived during his school days and he had married her after a formal and

prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by the girl herself. On his marriage day the underwear

manufacturer had given his daughter five thousand dollars and he promised to leave her at least twice that

amount in his will. The minister had thought himself fortunate in marriage and had never permitted himself to

think of other women. He did not want to think of other women. What he wanted was to do the work of God

In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke. From wanting to reach the ears of Kate Swift, and through his

sermons to delve into her soul, he began to want also to look again at the figure lying white and quiet in the

bed. On a Sunday morning when he could not sleep because of his thoughts he arose and went to walk in the

streets. When he had gone along Main Street almost to the old Richmond place he stopped and picking up a

stone rushed off to the room in the bell tower. With the stone he broke out a corner of the window and then

locked the door and sat down at the desk before the open Bible to wait. When the shade of the window to

Kate Swift's room was raised he could see, through the hole, directly into her bed, but she was not there. She

also had arisen and had gone for a walk and the hand that raised the shade was the hand of Aunt Elizabeth

The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal desire to "peep" and went back to his

own house praising God. In an ill moment he forgot, however, to stop the hole in the window. The piece of

glass broken out at the corner of the window just nipped off the bare heel of the boy standing motionless and

Curtis Hartman forgot his sermon on that Sunday morning. He talked to his congregation and in his talk said

that it was a mistake for people to think of their minister as a man set aside and intended by nature to lead a

blameless life. "Out of my own experience I know that we, who are the ministers of God's word, are beset by

the same temptations that assail you," he declared. "I have been tempted and have surrendered to temptation.

It is only the hand of God, placed beneath my head, that has raised me up. As he has raised me so also will he

raise you. Do not despair. In your hour of sin raise your eyes to the skies and you will be again and again

Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of his mind and began to be something

like a lover in the presence of his wife. One evening when they drove out together he turned the horse out of

Buckeye Street and in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks Pond, put his arm about Sarah

Hartman's waist. When he had eaten breakfast in the morning and was ready to retire to his study at the back

of his house he went around the table and kissed his wife on the cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came

into his head, he smiled and raised his eyes to the skies. "Intercede for me, Master," he muttered, "keep me in

And now began the real struggle in the soul of the brownbearded minister. By chance he discovered that

Kate Swift was in the habit of lying in her bed in the evenings and reading a book. A lamp stood on a table by

the side of the bed and the light streamed down upon her white shoulders and bare throat. On the evening

when he made the discovery the minister sat at the desk in the dusty room from nine until after eleven and

when her light was put out stumbled out of the church to spend two more hours walking and praying in the

streets. He did not want to kiss the shoulders and the throat of Kate Swift and had not allowed his mind to

dwell on such thoughts. He did not know what he wanted. "I am God's child and he must save me from

myself," he cried, in the darkness under the trees as he wandered in the streets. By a tree he stood and looked

at the sky that was covered with hurrying clouds. He began to talk to God intimately and closely. "Please,

Father, do not forget me. Give me power to go tomorrow and repair the hole in the window. Lift my eyes

Up and down through the silent streets walked the minister and for days and weeks his soul was troubled. He

could not understand the temptation that had come to him nor could he fathom the reason for its coming. In a

way he began to blame God, saying to himself that he had tried to keep his feet in the true path and had not

run about seeking sin. "Through my days as a young man and all through my life here I have gone quietly

about my work," he declared. "Why now should I be tempted? What have I done that this burden should be

Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis Hartman crept out of his house to the room in

the bell tower to sit in the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and later went to walk

and pray in the streets. He could not understand himself. For weeks he would go along scarcely thinking of

the school teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to look at her body. And then

something would happen. As he sat in the study of his own house, hard at work on a sermon, he would

become nervous and begin to walk up and down the room. "I will go out into the streets," he told himself and

even as he let himself in at the church door he persistently denied to himself the cause of his being there. "I

will not repair the hole in the window and I will train myself to come here at night and sit in the presence of

this woman without raising my eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The Lord has devised this temptation

as a test of my soul and I will grope my way out of darkness into the light of righteousness."

One night in January when it was bitter cold and snow lay deep on the streets of Winesburg Curtis Hartman

paid his last visit to the room in the bell tower of the church. It was past nine o'clock when he left his own

house and he set out so hurriedly that he forgot to put on his overshoes. In Main Street no one was abroad but

Hop Higgins the night watchman and in the whole town no one was awake but the watchman and young

George Willard, who sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle trying to write a story. Along the street to the

church went the minister, plowing through the drifts and thinking that this time he would utterly give way to

sin. "I want to look at the woman and to think of kissing her shoulders and I am going to let myself think

what I choose," he declared bitterly and tears came into his eyes. He began to think that he would get out of

the ministry and try some other way of life. "I shall go to some city and get into business," he declared. "If

my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give myself over to sin. At least I shall not be a hypocrite,

preaching the word of God with my mind thinking of the shoulders and neck of a woman who does not

It was cold in the room of the bell tower of the church on that January night and almost as soon as he came

into the room Curtis Hartman knew that if he stayed he would be ill. His feet were wet from tramping in the

snow and there was no fire. In the room in the house next door Kate Swift had not yet appeared. With grim

determination the man sat down to wait. Sitting in the chair and gripping the edge of the desk on which lay

the Bible he stared into the darkness thinking the blackest thoughts of his life. He thought of his wife and for

the moment almost hated her. "She has always been ashamed of passion and has cheated me," he thought.

"Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a woman. He has no right to forget that he is an

animal and in me there is something that is Greek. I will throw off the woman of my bosom and seek other

women. I will besiege this school teacher. I will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts

The distracted man trembled from head to foot, partly from cold, partly from the struggle in which he was

engaged. Hours passed and a fever assailed his body. His throat began to hurt and his teeth chattered. His feet

on the study floor felt like two cakes of ice. Still he would not give up. "I will see this woman and will think

the thoughts I have never dared to think," he told himself, gripping the edge of the desk and waiting.

Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that night of waiting in the church, and also he found in

the thing that happened what he took to be the way of life for him. On other evenings when he had waited he

had not been able to see, through the little hole in the glass, any part of the school teacher's room except that

occupied by her bed. In the darkness he had waited until the woman suddenly appeared sitting in the bed in

her white nightrobe. When the light was turned up she propped herself up among the' pillows and read a

book. Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes. Only her bare shoulders and throat were visible.

On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after his mind had two or three times

actually slipped away into an odd land of fantasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself

back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next door a lamp was lighted and the waiting man

stared into an empty bed. Then upon the bed before his eyes a naked woman threw herself. Lying face

downward she wept and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final outburst of weeping she half arose,

and in the presence of the man who had waited to look and not to think thoughts the woman of sin began to

pray. In the lamplight her figure, slim and strong, looked like the figure of the boy in the presence of the

Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a cry he arose, dragging the heavy

desk along the floor. The Bible fell, making a great clatter in the silence. When the light in the house next

door went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along the street he went and ran in at the

door of the Winesburg Eagle. To George Willard, who was tramping up and down in the office undergoing a

struggle of his own, he began to talk half incoherently. "The ways of God are beyond human understanding,"

he cried, running in quickly and closing the door. He began to advance upon the young man, his eyes glowing

and his voice ringing with fervor. "I have found the light," he cried. "After ten years in this town, God has

manifested himself to me in the body of a woman." His voice dropped and he began to whisper. "I did not

understand," he said. "What I took to be a trial of my soul was only a preparation for a new and more

beautiful fervor of the spirit. God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling

naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not be aware of it, she is an instrument of God,

Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door he stopped, and after looking up and

down the deserted street, turned again to George Willard. "I am delivered. Have no fear." He held up a

bleeding fist for the young man to see. "I smashed the glass of the window," he cried. "Now it will have to be

SNOW LAY DEEP in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about ten o'clock in the morning and a

wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were

fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. "There will be good sleighing," said Will Henderson,

standing by the bar in Ed Griffith's saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist

stumbling along in the kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. "Snow will bring the people into town on

Saturday," said the druggist. The two men stopped and discussed their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on a

light overcoat and no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot with the toe of the right. "Snow will be good

Young George Willard, who had nothing to do, was glad because he did not feel like working that day. The

weekly paper had been printed and taken to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow began to fall on

Thursday. At eight o'clock, after the morning train had passed, he put a pair of skates in his pocket and went

up to Waterworks Pond but did not go skating. Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine Creek he

went until he came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a fire against the side of a log and sat down at the

end of the log to think. When the snow began to fall and the wind to blow he hurried about getting fuel for

The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his school teacher. On the evening before

he had gone to her house to get a book she wanted him to read and had been alone with her for an hour. For

the fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with great earnestness and he could not make out what

she meant by her talk. He began to believe she must be in love with him and the thought was both pleasing

Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on the fire. Looking about to be sure he was alone he

talked aloud pretending he was in the presence of the woman, "Oh,, you're just letting on, you know you are,"

The young man got up and went back along the path toward town leaving the fire blazing in the wood. As he

went through the streets the skates clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he built

a fire in the stove and lay down on top of the bed. He began to have lustful thoughts and pulling down the

shade of the window closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. He took a pillow into his arms and

embraced it thinking first of the school teacher, who by her words had stirred something within him, and later

of Helen White, the slim daughter of the town banker, with whom he had been for a long time half in love.

By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the weather had become bitter cold. It was

difficult to walk about. The stores were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses. The evening

train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in its arrival. By ten o'clock all but four of the

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake. He was lame and carried a heavy stick. On dark

nights he carried a lantern. Between nine and ten o'clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he

stumbled through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then he went into alleyways and tried the back

doors. Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the New Willard House and beat on the door. Through

the rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove. "You go to bed. I'll keep the stove going," he said to the

Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his shoes. When the boy had gone to sleep he began to think

of his own affairs. He intended to paint his house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost of

paint and labor. That led him into other calculations. The night watchman was sixty years old and wanted to

retire. He had been a soldier in the Civil War and drew a small pension. He hoped to find some new method

of making a living and aspired to become a professional breeder of ferrets. Already he had four of the

strangely shaped savage little creatures, that are used by sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits, in the cellar of

his house. "Now I have one male and three females," he mused. "If I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve

or fifteen. In another year I shall be able to begin advertising ferrets for sale in the sporting papers."

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank. He did not sleep. By years of practice

he had trained himself to sit for hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the morning he

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only three people were awake in

Winesburg. George Willard was in the office of the Eagle pretending to be at work on the writing of a story

but in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood. In the bell tower of the

Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a

revelation from God, and Kate Swift, the school teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in the storm.

It was past ten o'clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was unpremeditated. It was as though the man

and the boy, by thinking of her, had driven her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth Swift had gone to

the county seat concerning some business in connection with mortgages in which she had money invested

and would not be back until the next day. By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room of the

house sat the daughter reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and, snatching a cloak from a rack by

At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman. Her complexion was not

good and her face was covered with blotches that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the winter streets

she was lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square, and her features were as the features of a tiny

During the afternoon the school teacher had been to see Doctor Welling concerning her health. The doctor

had scolded her and had declared she was in danger of losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to be

The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and would not have turned back had she

remembered. She was very cold but after walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she went

to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales set in the ground before a feed barn and into

Trunion Pike. Along Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winters' barn and turning east followed a street of low

frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead's

chicken farm to Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had driven her out of

There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom

she was silent, cold, and stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long while

something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of the children in the schoolroom felt the

effect of her happiness. For a time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.

With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and down in the schoolroom and talked

very rapidly. It did not seem to matter what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children of

Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning the life of the dead writer. The stories

were told with the air of one who had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of his

private life. The children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles Lamb must be someone who had once

On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto Cellini. That time they laughed. What a

bragging, blustering, brave, lovable fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she invented

anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a room above Cellini's lodgings in the city of

Milan that made the boys guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that he became

dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him. Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.

On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snowcovered streets, a crisis had come into the

life of the school teacher. Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been very

adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in the schoolroom or walked in the streets,

grief, hope, and desire fought within her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in

her mind. The people of the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and

went her own way thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make and mar their own

lives. In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them, and more than once, in the five years

since she had come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been

compelled to go out of the house and walk half through the night fighting out some battle raging within. Once

on a night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when she came home had a quarrel with Aunt

Elizabeth Swift. "I am glad you're not a man," said the mother sharply. "More than once I've waited for your

father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I've had my share of uncertainty and you

cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of him reproduced in you."

Kate Swift's mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In something he had written as a school boy

she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the summer

she had gone to the Eagle office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair

Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of

the boy some conception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer. "You will have to know life,"

she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard's shoulders and

turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passerby might have thought them about to

embrace. "If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be

better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to

frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must

not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what

On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of

the church waiting to look at her body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a book. It

was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy. He had the book under his arm and was

preparing to depart. Again Kate Swift talked with great earnestness. Night was coming on and the light in the

room grew dim. As he turned to go she spoke his name softly and with an impulsive movement took hold of

his hand. Because the reporter was rapidly becoming a man something of his man's appeal, combined with

the winsomeness of the boy, stirred the heart of the lonely woman. A passionate desire to have him

understand the import of life, to learn to interpret it truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward, her

lips brushed his cheek. At the same moment he for the first time became aware of the marked beauty of her

harsh and domineering. "What's the use? It will be ten years before you begin to understand what I mean

On the night of the storm and while the minister sat in the church waiting for her, Kate Swift went to the

office of the Winesburg Eagle, intending to have another talk with the boy. After the long walk in the snow

she was cold, lonely, and tired. As she came through Main Street she saw the fight from the printshop

window shining on the snow and on an impulse opened the door and went in. For an hour she sat by the stove

in the office talking of life. She talked with passionate earnestness. The impulse that had driven her out into

the snow poured itself out into talk. She became inspired as she sometimes did in the presence of the children

in school. A great eagerness to open the door of life to the boy, who had been her pupil and who she thought

might possess a talent for the understanding of life, had possession of her. So strong was her passion that it

became something physical. Again her hands took hold of his shoulders and she turned him about. In the dim

light her eyes blazed. She arose and laughed, not sharply as was customary with her, but in a queer, hesitating

way. "I must be going," she said. "In a moment, if I stay, I'll be wanting to kiss you."

In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked to the door. She was a teacher but

she was also a woman. As she looked at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had

a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took possession of her. In the lamplight George

The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the warm little office the air became

suddenly heavy and the strength went out of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited.

When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body fall heavily against him. For

George Willard the confusion was immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of the woman

tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists began to beat on his face. When the school

teacher had run away and left him alone, he walked up and down the office swearing furiously.

It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded himself. When he came in George

Willard thought the town had gone mad. Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the

George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the printshop went home. Through the hotel

office, past Hop Higgins lost in his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room. The fire

in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of

George Willard rolled about in the bed on which had lain in the afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking

thoughts of Kate Swift. The words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his

ears. His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to the baffled male, passed and he tried to

understand what had happened. He could not make it out. Over and over he turned the matter in his mind.

Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another day to come. At four o'clock he pulled the

covers up about his neck and tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a hand

and with it groped about in the darkness. "I have missed something. I have missed something Kate Swift was

trying to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that winter

HE WAS THE son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion Pike, east

of Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all

of the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of chickens,

accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his mother in those days

and when he was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High School. Old citizens remembered him as

a quiet, smiling youth inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and

sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make him realize where he was so that he

When he was twentyone years old Enoch went to New York City and was a city man for fifteen years. He

studied French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind he

planned to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the masters there, but that never turned out.

Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could draw well enough and he had many odd delicate

thoughts hidden away in his brain that might have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he

was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development. He never grew up and of course he

couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him. The child in him kept bumping

against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions. Once he was hit by a street car and

thrown against an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of the many things that kept things from turning

In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became confused and disconcerted by the

facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men. He got into a group of other young artists, both

men and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in his room. Once he got drunk and

was taken to a police station where a police magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an

affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging house. The woman and Enoch

walked together three blocks and then the young man grew afraid and ran away. The woman had been

drinking and the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of a building and laughed so heartily that

another man stopped and laughed with her. The two went away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington Square and was long and narrow

like a hallway. It is important to get that fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch's friends. There was nothing particularly striking

about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists.

Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and

are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm

near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a corner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue

childlike eyes stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished. His friends

talked of these. Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side.

Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always being said.

Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how. He was too excited to talk coherently. When he tried he

sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He

knew what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could never by any possibility say it. When a picture he

had painted was under discussion, he wanted to burst out with something like this: "You don't get the point,"

he wanted to explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist of the things you see and say words about. There is

something else, something you don't see at all, something you aren't intended to see. Look at this one over

here, by the door here, where the light from the window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that you might

not notice at all is, you see, the beginning of everything. There is a clump of elders there such as used to grow

beside the road before our house back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there is something

hidden. It is a woman, that's what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and the horse has run away out of

sight. Do you not see how the old man who drives a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who

has a farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be ground into meal at Comstock's mill. He knows

there is something in the elders, something hidden away, and yet he doesn't quite know.

"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a woman and, oh, she is lovely! She is hurt and is suffering but

she makes no sound. Don't you see how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty comes out

from her and spreads over everything. It is in the sky back there and all around everywhere. I didn't try to

paint the woman, of course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull to talk of composition and such

things! Why do you not look at the sky and then run away as I used to do when I was a boy back there in

That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the guests who came into his room when

he was a young fellow in New York City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his

own mind. He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed in the pictures he painted. In a half

indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door.

He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick

imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the

things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men

and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch Robinson had

ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own

fancy, something that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind the elders in the

The mild, blueeyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not want

friends for the quite simple reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own

mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you

see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always selfconfident and bold. They might talk, to be sure,

and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the

figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blueeyed king he was, in a sixdollar room facing Washington Square in

Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to touch actual fleshandbone people

with his hands. Days passed when his room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind.

At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a girl who sat in a chair next to his own

in the art school and went to live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the woman

he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations are made for advertisements.

That began another phase of Enoch's life. He began to play at a new game. For a while he was very proud of

himself in the role of producing citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things and played with

realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he had a newspaper thrown on his porch each morning. When

in the evening he came home from work he got off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind some

business man, striving to look very substantial and important. As a payer of taxes he thought he should post

himself on how things are run. "I'm getting to be of some moment, a real part of things, of the state and the

city and all that," he told himself with an amusing miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home from

Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train. Enoch talked about the advisability of the

government' s owning and operating the railroads and the man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that

such a move on the part of the government would be a good thing, and he grew quite excited as he talked.

Later he remembered his own words with pleasure. "I gave him something to think about, that fellow," he

To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He himself brought it to an end. He began to feel choked and

walled in by the life in the apartment, and to feel toward his wife and even toward his children as he had felt

concerning the friends who once came to visit him. He began to tell little lies about business engagements

that would give him freedom to walk alone in the street at night and, the chance offering, he secretly

rerented the room facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al Robinson died on the farm near Winesburg, and

he got eight thousand dollars from the bank that acted as trustee of her estate. That took Enoch out of the

world of men altogether. He gave the money to his wife and told her he could not live in the apartment any

more. She cried and was angry and threatened, but he only stared at her and went his own way. In reality the

wife did not care much. She thought Enoch slightly insane and was a little afraid of him. When it was quite

sure that he would never come back, she took the two children and went to a village in Connecticut where she

had lived as a girl. In the end she married a man who bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.

And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of his fancy, playing with them,

talking to them, happy as a child is happy. They were an odd lot, Enoch's people. They were made, I suppose,

out of real people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason made an appeal to him. There was a

woman with a sword in her hand, an old man with a long white beard who went about followed by a dog, a

young girl whose stockings were always coming down and hanging over her shoe tops. There must have been

two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the childmind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with

And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked the door. With an absurd air of importance he

talked aloud, giving instructions, making comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go on making his

living in the advertising place until something happened. Of course something did happen. That is why he

went back to live in Winesburg and why we know about him. The thing that happened was a woman. It

would be that way. He was too happy. Something had to come into his world. Something had to drive him

out of the New York room to live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure, bobbing up and down on the

streets of an Ohio town at evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of Wesley Moyer's livery

About the thing that happened. Enoch told George Willard about it one night. He wanted to talk to someone,

and he chose the young newspaper reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when

Youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the year's end, opened

the lips of the old man. The sadness was in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but it

It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a drizzly wet October rain. The fruition of the year had

come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the

air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In

the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees. Beneath the trees wet

leaves were pasted against tree roots that protruded from the ground. In gardens back of houses in Winesburg

dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on the ground. Men who had finished the evening meal and who had

planned to go uptown to talk the evening away with other men at the back of some store changed their minds.

George Willard tramped about in the rain and was glad that it rained. He felt that way. He was like Enoch

Robinson on the evenings when the old man came down out of his room and wandered alone in the streets.

He was like that only that George Willard had become a tall young man and did not think it manly to weep

and carry on. For a month his mother had been very ill and that had something to do with his sadness, but not

Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that extended out over the sidewalk

before Voight's wagon shop on Maumee Street just off the main street of Winesburg. They went together

from there through the rainwashed streets to the older man's room on the third floor of the Heffner Block.

The young reporter went willingly enough. Enoch Robinson asked him to go after the two had talked for ten

minutes. The boy was a little afraid but had never been more curious in his life. A hundred times he had heard

the old man spoken of as a little off his head and he thought himself rather brave and manly to go at all. From

the very beginning, in the street in the rain, the old man talked in a queer way, trying to tell the story of the

room in Washington Square and of his life in the room. "You'll understand if you try hard enough," he said

conclusively. "I have looked at you when you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It

isn't hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and believe, that's all there is to it."

It was past eleven o'clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to George Willard in the room in the Heffner

Block, came to the vital thing, the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to live out his life

alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by the window with his head in his hand and George

Willard was in a chair by a table. A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room, although almost bare of

furniture, was scrupulously clean. As the man talked George Willard began to feel that he would like to get

out of the chair and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put his arms about the little old man. In the half darkness

"She got to coming in there after there hadn't been anyone in the room for years," said Enoch Robinson. "She

saw me in the hallway of the house and we got acquainted. I don't know just what she did in her own room. I

never went there. I think she was a musician and played a violin. Every now and then she came and knocked

at the door and I opened it. In she came and sat down beside me, just sat and looked about and said nothing.

The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat he wore was wet from the rain and

drops of water kept falling with a soft thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard got

"I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she was too big for the room. I felt that she

was driving everything else away. We just talked of little things, but I couldn't sit still. I wanted to touch her

with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so strong and her face was so good and she looked at me all

The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as from a chill. "I was afraid," he

whispered. "I was terribly afraid. I didn't want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I couldn't

sit still. 'No, no,' I said to myself, but I got up and opened the door just the same. She was so grown up, you

see. She was a woman. I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that room."

Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered.

"I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her," he explained. "Then I began to tell her about my people,

about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn't. I

felt just as I did about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never come back any

The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with excitement. "One night something happened. I

and to know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see how important I was. I told her over and

over. When she tried to go away, I ran and locked the door. I followed her about. I talked and talked and then

all of a sudden things went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she did understand. Maybe she

had understood all the time. I was furious. I couldn't stand it. I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I

couldn't let her understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned

The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the boy listened, filled with awe. "Go away, boy," said the

man. "Don't stay here with me any more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you but it isn't. I don't want

George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his voice. "Don't stop now. Tell me the rest

Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window that looked down into the deserted main street of

Winesburg. George Willard followed. By the window the two stood, the tall awkward boyman and the little

wrinkled manboy. The childish, eager voice carried forward the tale. "I swore at her," he explained. "I said

vile words. I ordered her to go away and not to come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first she pretended

not to understand but I kept at it. I screamed and stamped on the floor. I made the house ring with my curses.

I didn't want ever to see her again and I knew, after some of the things I said, that I never would see her

The old man's voice broke and he shook his head. "Things went to smash," he said quietly and sadly. "Out

she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my

people away. They all went out through the door after her. That's the way it was."

George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson's room. In the darkness by the window, as he went

through the door, he could hear the thin old voice whimpering and complaining. "I'm alone, all alone here,"

BELLE CARPENTER had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was tall and strong. When black

thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She

worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the day sat trimming hats by a window

at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of

Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye Street. The house was

surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eavestrough had slipped from

its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat against the roof of a small shed, making

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from

girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little

pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat

that had become shabby with age. At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca

coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for

the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped

together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright

behind the dining room door. If they were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter. She, he realized, knew the story of his

brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of

soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George Willard. Secretly she loved another man,

but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby,

bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.

She did not think that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of the bartender and

walked about under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very

insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broadshouldered man of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above

Griffith's saloon. His fists were large and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to

At twentyfive the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in Indiana. When sold, the farm

brought in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began

an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with awe. Here and there he went

throwing the money about, driving carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and

women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars.

One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With his fist he

broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later went about smashing windows and breaking chairs

in dance halls for the joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in the eyes of clerks who

had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in

spending but one evening in her company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's

livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he

must get her settled upon him and he told her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin

trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to

explain his intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking

the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became

helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll

not let you go. You can't play with me," he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the

buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. "I'll keep you for good the next time," he said. "You

might as well make up your mind to that. It's you and me for it and I'm going to have you before I get

One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was in Ed Handby's mind the only

obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter, went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom

Surbeck's pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher. Seth Richmond stood

with his back against the wall and remained silent, but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with

Winesburg boys and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He said that women should

look out for themselves, that the fellow who went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As

he talked he looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five minutes and then Art Wilson began

to talk. Art was learning the barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already began to consider himself an

authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing, drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of

a night when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the county seat. The

butcher's son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor. "The women in the place

couldn't embarrass me although they tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house tried to get

fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she began to talk I went and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days the weather had been bitter cold

with a high wind blowing down on the town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the

wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely. Without thinking where he was going

or what he wanted to do, George went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his companions of the pool room. Because it was

dark and he was alone he began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a drunken

man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword

that jingled as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long line of men

who stood at attention. He began to examine the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and

began to scold. "Your pack is not in order," he said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of this

matter? Everything must be in order here. We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be done

Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board sidewalk saying more words. "There

is a law for armies and for men too," he muttered, lost in reflection. "The law begins with little things and

spreads out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work,

in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into touch

with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to learn

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body began to tremble. He had never

before thought such thoughts as had just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For

the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he walked. He was

amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To

come out of Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that," he whispered. "It is better to be alone. If

I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn't understand what I've been thinking

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a section in which lived day laborers. As

the time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the

railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the long day of toil. The houses in

which they lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more

comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked into such a street on the clear January

night. The street was dimly lighted and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there

was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year he had been devoting all of his odd

moments to the reading of books and now some tale he had read concerning fife in old world towns of the

middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one

revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence. On an impulse he turned out of the street and

went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting

his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in

the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the

smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in

cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and

going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children cryingall of these

things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the

alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one

of the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the

sky. He felt unutterably big and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing and in a

kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into the darkness above his head and muttering

words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his

tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning. "Death," he muttered, night, the sea,

George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all

of the people in the little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to call

them out of their houses and to shake their hands. "If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her

hand and we would run until we were both tired out," he thought. "That would make me feel better." With the

thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter

lived. He thought she would understand his mood and that he could achieve in her presence a position he had

long been wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come

away filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and had not

When George got to Belle Carpenter's house there had already been a visitor there before him. Ed Handby

had come to the door and calling Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the

woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came and stood by the door he lost his

selfassurance and became sullen. "You stay away from that kid," he growled, thinking of George Willard,

and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. "If I catch you together I will break your bones

and his too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly upstairs. From a window at the upper part

of the house she saw Ed Handby cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a

neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in his hands. She was made happy by the

sight, and when George Willard came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She

thought that, as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under the trees in the sweet night air.

George Willard was full of big words. The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the

darkness in the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering along and swinging his arms

about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had

changed. "You'll find me different," he declared, thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking boldly into

her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've got to take me for a man or let me alone. That's how it is."

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the boy. When George had finished

talking they turned down a side street and went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The

hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew

dense bushes and small trees and among the bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard's heart began to beat rapidly and his shoulders

straightened. Suddenly he decided that Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new force

that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon her and had led to her conquest. The thought

made him half drunk with the sense of masculine power. Although he had been annoyed that as they walked

about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she had accompanied him to this place

took all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has become different," he thought and taking hold of her

shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she leaned heavily against him and looked

over his shoulder into the darkness. In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as in the

alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into words and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the words

George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on the hillside. Later, when he got to his

own room, he wanted to weep and then grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and

was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the hillside he had led the woman to one of the

little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the

laborers' houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for the new power in himself and was waiting for the

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to take his woman away. He knew that

beating was unnecessary, that he had power within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists.

Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held him with one hand while he looked at

Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man

sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're no good,"

he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you. I'd let you alone if I didn't want you so much."

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think.

He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the bartender, catching him by the

shoulder, hurled him back into the bushes. The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going

indefinitely but George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As he crept down the hillside his

heart was sick within him. He hated himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.

When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and stopping in the darkness

listened, hoping to hear again the voice outside himself that had so short a time before put new courage into

his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight

and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid and

FROM HIS SEAT on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr on the rear of Cowley & Son's store

in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the

printshop of the Winesburg Eagle. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They did not go in readily

and he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one of

his stockings. Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard, the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg,

standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and staring absentmindedly about. "Well, well, what next!"

exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping to his feet and creeping away from the

A flush crept into Elmer Cowley's face and his hands began to tremble. In Cowley & Son's store a Jewish

traveling salesman stood by the counter talking to his father. He imagined the reporter could hear what was

being said and the thought made him furious. With one of the shoes still held in his hand he stood in a corner

Cowley & Son's store did not face the main street of Winesburg. The front was on Maumee Street and

beyond it was Voight's wagon shop and a shed for the sheltering of farmers' horses. Beside the store an

alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and

taking out goods, passed up and down. The store itself was indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that

it sold everything and nothing. In the window facing Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an

apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and beside the black mass of the coal stood three

The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale as were also the coat hangers, patent

suspender buttons, cans of roof paint, bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that

Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager patter of words that fell from the lips

of the traveling man, was tall and lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen partially

covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat. The coat had been purchased to serve as a

wedding garment. Before he became a merchant Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore the

Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons when he came into town to trade. When

he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the coat constantly. It had become brown with age and was

covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.

As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not been happily placed as a farmer. Still

he existed. His family, consisting of a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the

store and it did not cost them much to live. His troubles were not financial. His unhappiness as a merchant lay

in the fact that when a traveling man with wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid. Behind the

counter he stood shaking his head. He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to buy and thus lose

the opportunity to sell again; second that he would not be stubborn enough and would in a moment of

In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard standing and apparently listening at the

back door of the Eagle printshop, a situation had arisen that always stirred the son's wrath. The traveling man

talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty. "You see how quickly it is done," said

the traveling man, who had for sale a small flat metal substitute for collar buttons. With one hand he quickly

unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed a flattering wheedling tone. "I

tell you what, men have come to the end of all this fooling with collar buttons and you are the man to make

money out of the change that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town. Take twenty

dozen of these fasteners and I'll not visit any other store. I'll leave the field to you."

The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on Ebenezer's breast. "It's an

opportunity and I want you to take it," he urged. "A friend of mine told me about you. 'See that man Cowley,'

The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book from his pocket he began writing out the order. Still

holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass

showcase near the front door. He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it about. "You get

out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar fasteners here." An idea came to him. "Mind, I'm not

making any threat," he added. "I don't say I'll shoot. Maybe I just took this gun out of the case to look at it.

But you better get out. Yes sir, I'll say that. You better grab up your things and get out."

The young storekeeper's voice rose to a scream and going behind the counter he began to advance upon the

two men. "We're through being fools here!" he cried. "We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to

sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and listening. You get out of here!"

The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the counter into a black leather bag, he ran.

He was a small man and very bowlegged and he ran awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door and

he stumbled and fell. "Crazy, that's what he iscrazy!" he sputtered as he arose from the sidewalk and

In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that the immediate object of his wrath had

fled, the younger man was embarrassed. "Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough," he

declared, going to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting on a barrel he pulled on and fastened the

shoe he had been holding in his hand. He was waiting for some word of understanding from his father but

when Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the wrath in the son and the young man ran out of

the store without replying. Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his

son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. "I'll be

starched," he said softly. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!"

Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that paralleled the railroad track. He did not

know where he was going or what he was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after

turning sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped and the passion that had been the cause of his

outburst in the store began to again find expression. "I will not be queerone to be looked at and listened

to," he declared aloud. "I'll be like other people. I'll show that George Willard. He'll find out. I'll show him!"

The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared back at the town. He did not know the

reporter George Willard and had no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering the

town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office and in the printshop of the

Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young merchant's mind. He thought the boy who passed and

repassed Cowley & Son's store and who stopped to talk to people in the street must be thinking of him and

perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his

person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days of

unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did he not represent

public opinion and had not the public opinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he

not walk whistling and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person strike also the

greater enemythe thing that smiled and went its own waythe judgment of Winesburg?

Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the

grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded from between his lips and his eyes

were blue with the colorless blueness of the marbles called "aggies" that the boys of Winesburg carried in

their pockets. Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends. He was, he felt, one

Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day

was cold with a raw wind, but presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy. The tops

of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt and the mud clung to Elmer's shoes. His feet

became cold. When he had gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood. In

the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in

For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and creeping cautiously through a mass of

underbrush, he went to a fence and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds. A

smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who was husking corn in

In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where he had lived through boyhood and

where there was another human being to whom he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a

halfwitted old fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the

farm when it was sold. The old man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered

Mook the halfwit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in the intelligence of the animals that lived

in the sheds with him, and when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with

the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had put the 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 halfwitted 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

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

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 halfwit. "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

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

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

Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the halfwit 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

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

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

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

Elmer took twenty dollars, two tendollar 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

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

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

Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard House and pounded on the door. A

sleepeyed 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

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?

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

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 tendollar 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."

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

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 sharpfeatured wife who had also a sharp voice. The two,

with half a dozen thinlegged children, lived in a tumbledown frame house beside a creek at the back end of

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

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

Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters boys in that family, John, Hal, and

Edward, all broadshouldered big fellows like old Windpeter himself and all fighters and womanchasers

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

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 twentytwo 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,

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

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

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

At halfpast 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

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

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.

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

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

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 yearshow at the time he married he had planned to go west to his uncle in

Portland, Oregonhow 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

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

"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."

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 thinlegged children in the tumbledown 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.

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

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

Then began the hard years for Tom Foster's grandmother. First her soninlaw 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 wornout 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

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 pocketbook containing thirtyseven 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 pocketbook 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 wornout blanket and slung

across his back. By his side walked the grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth twitched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 castoff 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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught me something. I won't have to do it again. I will think

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

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

"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

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

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

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 custommade 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,

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

In Doctor Reefy's office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at fortyone, 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

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

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 tiredout woman of fortyone but a lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to

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 lovemaking 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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 grandstand 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 grandstand 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

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

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 WinesburgyesI'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.

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

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 thoughtI used to thinkI 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the upper end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half decayed old grandstand. 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 grandstand one can see at night, over a cornfield, the lights of the

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 grandstand

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

In the darkness under the roof of the grandstand, 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,"

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

In the darkness in the grandstand 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

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

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

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

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

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 fortyfive 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

George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven o'clock. Tom Willard carried his

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

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

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

After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was surprised to see that the train was still

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 thingsTurk 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

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