Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining room door. If they
were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not
recover his equilibrium for a week.
The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.
She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother
and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a
handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud
she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers
and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.
Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about
which no one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed
Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith’s Saloon, and went about with the
young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings. She did not think
that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of
the bartender and walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her
nature. She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds.
About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.
Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith’s saloon. His fists were large
and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to
conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.
At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle
in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars,
which Ed spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began
an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home
town with awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving
carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose
wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars. One night at a resort called
Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later
went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the
joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at
the resort with their sweethearts.
The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface
amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in
her company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley
Moyer’s livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she
was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon
him and he told her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry
and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so
simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his
intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body he
expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her
tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became
helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the
buggy. “When I get hold of you again I’ll not let you go. You can’t
play with me,” he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping
out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. “I’ll
keep you for good the next time,” he said. “You might as well make up
your mind to that. It’s you and me for it and I’m going to have you
before I get through.”
One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was
in Ed Handby’s mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter,
went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck’s
pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher.
Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent,
but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys
and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He
said that women should look out for themselves, that the fellow who
went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As he
talked he looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five
minutes and then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the
barber’s trade in Cal Prouse’s shop and already began to consider
himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing,
drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of a night when
he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher’s son held a cigar in the side of his mouth
and as he talked spat on the floor. “The women in the place couldn’t
embarrass me although they tried hard enough,” he boasted. “One of the
girls in the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she
began to talk I went and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed
when I kissed her. I taught her to let me alone.”
George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the
town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the
wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely.
Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do, George
went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets
filled with frame houses.
Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he
began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street
imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that
jingled as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector,
passing before a long line of men who stood at attention. He began to
examine the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and
began to scold. “Your pack is not in order,” he said sharply. “How many
times will I have to speak of this matter? Everything must be in order
here. We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be
done without order.”
Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. “There is a law for armies and for men
too,” he muttered, lost in reflection. “The law begins with little
things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little
thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their
clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that
law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that
swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to
learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”
George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his
body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had
just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For
the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been
talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and
when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. “To come out
of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and think things like that,” he
whispered. “It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the
boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been
thinking down here.”
In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not
yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on
the railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar
for the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small
cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more
comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.
With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked
into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly
lighted and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay
about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy.
For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading
of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world
towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he
stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place
that had been a part of some former existence. On an impulse he turned
out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds
in which lived the cows and pigs.
For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange
new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure
in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor
little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys
mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the
women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens,
the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the
stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children
crying—all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness,
oddly detached and apart from all life.
The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had
to be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and
throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big
and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing
and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them
into the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say
words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over
on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of
meaning. “Death,” he muttered, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.”
George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the
sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the
little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had
the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.
“If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we
would run until we were both tired out,” he thought. “That would make
me feel better.” With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out
of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He
thought she would understand his mood and that he could achieve in her
presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past
when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away
filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some
obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had
suddenly become too big to be used.
When George got to Belle Carpenter’s house there had already been a
visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling
Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask
the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came
and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen.
“You stay away from that kid,” he growled, thinking of George Willard,
and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. “If I catch