Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
he had felt concerning the friends who once came to visit him. He began
to tell little lies about business engagements that would give him
freedom to walk alone in the street at night and, the chance offering,
he secretly re-rented the room facing Washington Square. Then Mrs. Al
Robinson died on the farm near Winesburg, and he got eight thousand
dollars from the bank that acted as trustee of her estate. That took
Enoch out of the world of men altogether. He gave the money to his wife
and told her he could not live in the apartment any more. She cried and
was angry and threatened, but he only stared at her and went his own
way. In reality the wife did not care much. She thought Enoch slightly
insane and was a little afraid of him. When it was quite sure that he
would never come back, she took the two children and went to a village
in Connecticut where she had lived as a girl. In the end she married a
man who bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.
And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among the people of
his fancy, playing with them, talking to them, happy as a child is
happy. They were an odd lot, Enoch’s people. They were made, I suppose,
out of real people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason made
an appeal to him. There was a woman with a sword in her hand, an old
man with a long white beard who went about followed by a dog, a young
girl whose stockings were always coming down and hanging over her shoe
tops. There must have been two dozen of the shadow people, invented by
the child-mind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with him.
And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked the door. With an
absurd air of importance he talked aloud, giving instructions, making
comments on life. He was happy and satisfied to go on making his living
in the advertising place until something happened. Of course something
did happen. That is why he went back to live in Winesburg and why we
know about him. The thing that happened was a woman. It would be that
way. He was too happy. Something had to come into his world. Something
had to drive him out of the New York room to live out his life an
obscure, jerky little figure, bobbing up and down on the streets of an
Ohio town at evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of
Wesley Moyer’s livery barn.
About the thing that happened. Enoch told George Willard about it one
night. He wanted to talk to someone, and he chose the young newspaper
reporter because the two happened to be thrown together at a time when
the younger man was in a mood to understand.
Youthful sadness, young man’s sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in
a village at the year’s end, opened the lips of the old man. The
sadness was in the heart of George Willard and was without meaning, but
it appealed to Enoch Robinson.
It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a drizzly wet
October rain. The fruition of the year had come and the night should
have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of
frost in the air, but it wasn’t that way. It rained and little puddles
of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in
the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.
Beneath the trees wet leaves were pasted against tree roots that
protruded from the ground. In gardens back of houses in Winesburg dry
shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on the ground. Men who had
finished the evening meal and who had planned to go uptown to talk the
evening away with other men at the back of some store changed their
minds. George Willard tramped about in the rain and was glad that it
rained. He felt that way. He was like Enoch Robinson on the evenings
when the old man came down out of his room and wandered alone in the
streets. He was like that only that George Willard had become a tall
young man and did not think it manly to weep and carry on. For a month
his mother had been very ill and that had something to do with his
sadness, but not much. He thought about himself and to the young that
always brings sadness.
Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden awning that
extended out over the sidewalk before Voight’s wagon shop on Maumee
Street just off the main street of Winesburg. They went together from
there through the rain-washed streets to the older man’s room on the
third floor of the Heffner Block. The young reporter went willingly
enough. Enoch Robinson asked him to go after the two had talked for ten
minutes. The boy was a little afraid but had never been more curious in
his life. A hundred times he had heard the old man spoken of as a
little off his head and he thought himself rather brave and manly to go
at all. From the very beginning, in the street in the rain, the old man
talked in a queer way, trying to tell the story of the room in
Washington Square and of his life in the room. “You’ll understand if
you try hard enough,” he said conclusively. “I have looked at you when
you went past me on the street and I think you can understand. It isn’t
hard. All you have to do is to believe what I say, just listen and
believe, that’s all there is to it.”
It was past eleven o’clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to
George Willard in the room in the Heffner Block, came to the vital
thing, the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to
live out his life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by
the window with his head in his hand and George Willard was in a chair
by a table. A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room, although
almost bare of furniture, was scrupulously clean. As the man talked
George Willard began to feel that he would like to get out of the chair
and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put his arms about the little old
man. In the half darkness the man talked and the boy listened, filled
with sadness.
“She got to coming in there after there hadn’t been anyone in the room
for years,” said Enoch Robinson. “She saw me in the hallway of the
house and we got acquainted. I don’t know just what she did in her own
room. I never went there. I think she was a musician and played a
violin. Every now and then she came and knocked at the door and I
opened it. In she came and sat down beside me, just sat and looked
about and said nothing. Anyway, she said nothing that mattered.”
The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat
he wore was wet from the rain and drops of water kept falling with a
soft thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard
got out of the chair and sat beside him.
“I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she
was too big for the room. I felt that she was driving everything else
away. We just talked of little things, but I couldn’t sit still. I
wanted to touch her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so
strong and her face was so good and she looked at me all the time.”
The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as
from a chill. “I was afraid,” he whispered. “I was terribly afraid. I
didn’t want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I
couldn’t sit still. ‘No, no,’ I said to myself, but I got up and opened
the door just the same. She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman.
I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that room.”
Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes
shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. “I wanted her and all the
time I didn’t want her,” he explained. “Then I began to tell her about
my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep
quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn’t. I felt just as I did
about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never
come back any more.”
The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with excitement.
“One night something happened. I became mad to make her understand me
and to know what a big thing I was in that room. I wanted her to see
how important I was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go
away, I ran and locked the door. I followed her about. I talked and
talked and then all of a sudden things went to smash. A look came into
her eyes and I knew she did understand. Maybe she had understood all
the time. I was furious. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted her to
understand but, don’t you see, I couldn’t let her understand. I felt
that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned
out, you see. That’s how it is. I don’t know why.”
The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the boy listened,
filled with awe. “Go away, boy,” said the man. “Don’t stay here with me
any more. I thought it might be a good thing to tell you but it isn’t.
I don’t want to talk any more. Go away.”
George Willard shook his head and a note of command came into his
voice. “Don’t stop now. Tell me the rest of it,” he commanded sharply.
“What happened? Tell me the rest of the story.”
Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window that looked
down into the deserted main street of Winesburg. George Willard
followed. By the window the two stood, the tall awkward boy-man and the
little wrinkled man-boy. The childish, eager voice carried forward the
tale. “I swore at her,” he explained. “I said vile words. I ordered her
to go away and not to come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first
she pretended not to understand but I kept at it. I screamed and
stamped on the floor. I made the house ring with my curses. I didn’t
want ever to see her again and I knew, after some of the things I said,
that I never would see her again.”
The old man’s voice broke and he shook his head. “Things went to
smash,” he said quietly and sadly. “Out she went through the door and
all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all
of my people away. They all went out through the door after her. That’s
the way it was.”
George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson’s room. In the
darkness by the window, as he went through the door, he could hear the
thin old voice whimpering and complaining. “I’m alone, all alone here,”
said the voice. “It was warm and friendly in my room but now I’m all
alone.”
AN AWAKENING
Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was
tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and
wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She
worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the
day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the
daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of
Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was
no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from
its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that
sometimes persisted all through the night.
When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his
power over her. The bookkeeper’s life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a
closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age.
At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had
invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his
street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a