Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
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 a fuss about it, but I’m going to get out of here.”
Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness, 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 self-pity.
“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 to the door, I won’t know what to say.”
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 about. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to walk with
me?”
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 lamp-post, lighted the village lights so
that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the
deepening shadows cast by the low-branched 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 bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm
of night flies.
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
clearly across to the half-embarrassed 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’ sake,” he said and, turning,
walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.
“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 me to tell you and see
what you said.”
Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden
surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge
sat on a wooden bench beneath a bush.
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
love-making 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. For a moment he had thought the tree must
be the home of a swarm of bees.
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 waist-high 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 armies, singing as they worked.
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 head.
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 forever just being a boy.”
Seth’s voice became charged with boyish earnestness. “You see, I’ve got
to strike out. I’ve got to get to work. It’s what I’m good for.”
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 in its outlines.
“What will you do up there?” she whispered.
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 quiet.
That’s all I’ve got in my mind.”
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 when I’m around,” he
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 else—some fool—someone who talks a lot—someone like that
George Willard.”
TANDY
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 man who was almost always
drunk. 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
friends and were much together.
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