Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
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 twenty-five two things happened
to disturb the dull uneventfulness of her days. Her mother married Bush
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 called The
Epworth League.
When Will Hurley, a middle-aged 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 determined in her loyalty to Ned
Currie.
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 am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with
people.”
During the early fall of her twenty-seventh 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 answer from life.
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 here alone?” she
muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned 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 within her.
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 to run naked through the streets took possession of
her.
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 cried. “Don’t go away.
Whoever you are, you must wait.”
The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man
and somewhat deaf. Putting his hand to his mouth, he shouted. “What?
What say?” he called.
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 in
Winesburg.
RESPECTABILITY
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 summer evening after
he has closed his office for the night.”
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 looked soiled.
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 him by some bitch or another?” he
asked.
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 the
woman with a love as absorbing as the hatred he later felt for all
women.
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 about in this way:
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 then that the operator
told the young reporter his story of hate.
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