Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
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 beside them. His body shook
and when he tried to talk his voice trembled.
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 father’s knee and returned
the look.
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 that.”
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 myself with drink and she is as yet only a
child.”
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 understand.”
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 Tandy.”
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
Tandy—Tandy 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 STRENGTH OF GOD
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 banker’s wife, thought him scholarly
and refined.
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 eyes and worried lest the horse become frightened and
run away.
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
philosophically.
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 that would touch and awaken the woman
apparently far gone in secret sin.
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 competent-looking
widow with money in the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with her
daughter Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school teacher was thirty
years old and had a neat trim-looking 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 Sunday mornings.
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 quietly and
earnestly.
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 Swift.
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 looking with rapt eyes into the
face of the Christ.
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