Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
possession of her. In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a
boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man.
The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the
warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went
out of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited.
When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body
fall heavily against him. For George Willard the confusion was
immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of the woman
tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists
began to beat on his face. When the school teacher had run away and
left him alone, he walked up and down the office swearing furiously.
It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded
himself. When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad.
Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman
George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God
bearing a message of truth.
George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the
printshop went home. Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in
his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room.
The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When
he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.
George Willard rolled about in the bed on which he had lain in the
afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The
words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in
his ears. His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to
the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand what had happened.
He could not make it out. Over and over he turned the matter in his
mind. Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another
day to come. At four o’clock he pulled the covers up about his neck and
tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a
hand and with it groped about in the darkness. “I have missed
something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me,”
he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the
last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.
LONELINESS
He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road
leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the
town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of
the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the road before the
house a flock of chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the
deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his mother in those days and
when he was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High School.
Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth inclined to
silence. He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and
sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make
him realize where he was so that he would turn out of the beaten track
and let them pass.
When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York City and was a
city man for fifteen years. He studied French and went to an art
school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind
he planned to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the
masters there, but that never turned out.
Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could draw well enough
and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that
might have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he
was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development.
He never grew up and of course he couldn’t understand people and he
couldn’t make people understand him. The child in him kept bumping
against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions.
Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against an iron post. That
made him lame. It was one of the many things that kept things from
turning out for Enoch Robinson.
In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became
confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good
deal with young men. He got into a group of other young artists, both
men and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in
his room. Once he got drunk and was taken to a police station where a
police magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an
affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging
house. The woman and Enoch walked together three blocks and then the
young man grew afraid and ran away. The woman had been drinking and the
incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of a building and
laughed so heartily that another man stopped and laughed with her. The
two went away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his room
trembling and vexed.
The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington
Square and was long and narrow like a hallway. It is important to get
that fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a
room almost more than it is the story of a man.
And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends. There
was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were
artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists.
Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in
rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost
feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than
it does.
And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch
Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in
a corner and for the most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike
eyes stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made, crude
things, half finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in
their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side
to side. Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of
words, such as are always being said.
Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn’t know how. He was too excited to
talk coherently. When he tried he sputtered and stammered and his voice
sounded strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He knew
what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could never by any
possibility say it. When a picture he had painted was under discussion,
he wanted to burst out with something like this: “You don’t get the
point,” he wanted to explain; “the picture you see doesn’t consist of
the things you see and say words about. There is something else,
something you don’t see at all, something you aren’t intended to see.
Look at this one over here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that you might not notice
at all is, you see, the beginning of everything. There is a clump of
elders there such as used to grow beside the road before our house back
in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there is something hidden.
It is a woman, that’s what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and
the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see how the old man who
drives a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who has a
farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be ground into meal
at Comstock’s mill. He knows there is something in the elders,
something hidden away, and yet he doesn’t quite know.
“It’s a woman you see, that’s what it is! It’s a woman and, oh, she is
lovely! She is hurt and is suffering but she makes no sound. Don’t you
see how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty
comes out from her and spreads over everything. It is in the sky back
there and all around everywhere. I didn’t try to paint the woman, of
course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull to talk of
composition and such things! Why do you not look at the sky and then
run away as I used to do when I was a boy back there in Winesburg,
Ohio?”
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the
guests who came into his room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his
own mind. He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed
in the pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped
inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of
locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him,
that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began
to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he
explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.
His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among
whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself,
something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something
that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind the
elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all
children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple
reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of
his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could
harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to
be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last
and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a
kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing
Washington Square in the city of New York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to
touch actual flesh-and-bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind.
At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a
girl who sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and went to
live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the
woman he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations
are made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch’s life. He began to play at a new
game. For a while he was very proud of himself in the role of producing
citizen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things and played
with realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he had a
newspaper thrown on his porch each morning. When in the evening he came
home from work he got off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind
some business man, striving to look very substantial and important. As
a payer of taxes he thought he should post himself on how things are
run. “I’m getting to be of some moment, a real part of things, of the
state and the city and all that,” he told himself with an amusing
miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home from Philadelphia, he had a
discussion with a man met on a train. Enoch talked about the
advisability of the government’s owning and operating the railroads and
the man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch’s notion that such a move on the
part of the government would be a good thing, and he grew quite excited
as he talked. Later he remembered his own words with pleasure. “I gave
him something to think about, that fellow,” he muttered to himself as
he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
To be sure, Enoch’s marriage did not turn out. He himself brought it to
an end. He began to feel choked and walled in by the life in the
apartment, and to feel toward his wife and even toward his children as