Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
his fifteenth year, she would have been half afraid to do anything of
the kind.
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 live 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 about the garden and
saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part.
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 was
determined to stick it out until the other boys were ready to come
back.”
“I’m glad you did stick it out,” replied the mother, half resentfully,
and kissing him upon the forehead pretended to busy herself with the
work about the house.
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 engaged in a discussion of politics.
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,
grey-mustached 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 McKinley bluffed and
don’t you forget it.”
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 empty milk bottle in his hand and an angry
sullen look in his eyes.
In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the “deep one.” “He’s like his
father,” men said as he went through the streets. “He’ll break out some
of these days. You wait and see.”
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 half-darkness 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
Willard.
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 and then see what fun I shall have.”
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 sitting here and
thinking it over and I’m going to do it.”
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 town with any ‘get-up’ to her.”
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, good-bye,” he said briefly.
George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to
look into Seth’s face. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do?
You stay here and let’s talk,” he urged.
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 never
tire of his eternal talking.”
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 activity.
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 some city and go to work. I’ll tell mother about it
tomorrow.”
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 half-witted 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 dangerously.
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