Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
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 amazement.
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. That’s
foolish.”
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 this—suppose 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 down us. I should say
not.”
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 don’t it?”
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, listening—absorbed, 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 for Sarah, now can
you? Of course you can’t. You know that.”
ADVENTURE
Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven 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 a second
husband.
Alice’s step-father was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His
story is an odd one. It will be worth telling some day.
At twenty-seven 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 a
continual ferment went on.
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
torn 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 pay no
attention to us.”
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 said as he left the girl at her father’s door.
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, did he think of her at all.
In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a woman. When she
was twenty-two 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
induced her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end return to
her.
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 owning herself and
giving and taking for her own ends in life.
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 interest would
support both herself and her future husband.
“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 re-echoed 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 would never come back grew
stronger within her.
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, looking
like a toy thing in the distance.