Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. “I had come to the time
in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and
prayed to them,” he said. “I did not say my prayers in words nor did I
kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon
when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days
were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she
worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the
office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to
find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot
be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and
women in all sorts of places.”
On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the
office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.
Sometimes the doctor made philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a
hint given that strangely illuminated the life of the speaker, a wish
became a desire, or a dream, half dead, flared suddenly into life. For
the most part the words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.
Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper’s wife talked a
little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down
the stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against
the dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing
to her body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by
the window of her room and when darkness had come on and a girl from
the hotel dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow
cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing
for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when
adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion
had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words
madly over and over: “You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!” The words,
she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved
in life.
In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and
forth. The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears.
“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black
night,” he had said. “You must not try to make love definite. It is the
divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it
and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long
hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from
passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”
Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had died when she
was but five years old. Her girlhood had been lived in the most
haphazard manner imaginable. Her father was a man who had wanted to be
let alone and the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also
had lived and died a sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face,
but by ten o’clock in the morning all the joy had gone out of his
heart. When a guest complained of the fare in the hotel dining room or
one of the girls who made up the beds got married and went away, he
stamped on the floor and swore. At night when he went to bed he thought
of his daughter growing up among the stream of people that drifted in
and out of the hotel and was overcome with sadness. As the girl grew
older and began to walk out in the evening with men he wanted to talk
to her, but when he tried was not successful. He always forgot what he
wanted to say and spent the time complaining of his own affairs.
In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried to be a real
adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she
married Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure prompted
by desire alone. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real
lover. Always there was something she sought blindly, passionately,
some hidden wonder in life. The tall beautiful girl with the swinging
stride who had walked under the trees with men was forever putting out
her hand into the darkness and trying to get hold of some other hand.
In all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom
she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true
word.
Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her father’s hotel,
because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like most young girls,
she thought marriage would change the face of life. If there was in her
mind a doubt of the outcome of the marriage with Tom she brushed it
aside. Her father was ill and near death at the time and she was
perplexed because of the meaningless outcome of an affair in which she
had just been involved. Other girls of her age in Winesburg were
marrying men she had always known, grocery clerks or young farmers. In
the evening they walked in Main Street with their husbands and when she
passed they smiled happily. She began to think that the fact of
marriage might be full of some hidden significance. Young wives with
whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. “It changes things to have a
man of your own,” they said.
On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had
not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and
advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He
abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk’s
defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When
she would not let him walk about he began to complain. “I’ve never been
let alone,” he said. “Although I’ve worked hard I’ve not made the hotel
pay. Even now I owe money at the bank. You’ll find that out when I’m
gone.”
The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness. Being unable
to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl’s head down beside
his own. “There’s a way out,” he whispered. “Don’t marry Tom Willard or
anyone else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin
box in my trunk. Take it and go away.”
Again the sick man’s voice became querulous. “You’ve got to promise,”
he declared. “If you won’t promise not to marry, give me your word that
you’ll never tell Tom about the money. It is mine and if I give it to
you I’ve the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is to make up
to you for my failure as a father. Some time it may prove to be a door,
a great open door to you. Come now, I tell you I’m about to die, give
me your promise.”
In Doctor Reefy’s office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a
small desk near the window sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead
pencil that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a married
woman. She became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as
a lay figure to give point to her tale. “And then I was married and it
did not turn out at all,” she said bitterly. “As soon as I had gone
into it I began to be afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then
perhaps I found out too much during my first night with him. I don’t
remember.
“What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what
the girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.
It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I
leaned out of the window and thought of the life I had led. I didn’t
want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me. I even
began to be afraid Tom would change his mind.”
The woman’s voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came
an odd illusion. He thought that as she talked the woman’s body was
changing, that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he
could not shake off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist.
“It is good for both her body and her mind, this talking,” he muttered.
The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon
a few months after her marriage. Her voice became steadier. “In the
late afternoon I went for a drive alone,” she said. “I had a buggy and
a little grey pony I kept in Moyer’s Livery. Tom was painting and
repapering rooms in the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to make
up my mind to tell him about the eight hundred dollars father had given
to me. I couldn’t decide to do it. I didn’t like him well enough. There
was always paint on his hands and face during those days and he smelled
of paint. He was trying to fix up the old hotel, and make it new and
smart.”
The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told of the drive alone on the
spring afternoon. “It was cloudy and a storm threatened,” she said.
“Black clouds made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so
that the colors hurt my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a mile or more
and then turned into a side road. The little horse went quickly along
up hill and down. I was impatient. Thoughts came and I wanted to get
away from my thoughts. I began to beat the horse. The black clouds
settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at a terrible speed,
to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get out of town, out of my
clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any
more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I
fell and hurt my side. I wanted to run away from everything but I
wanted to run towards something too. Don’t you see, dear, how it was?”
Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the
office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone
walk before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that
intoxicated him. When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair
he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. “I cried
all the way home,” she said, as she tried to continue the story of her
wild ride, but he did not listen. “You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you
lovely dear!” he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the
tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had
been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the
body of the tired-out woman.
Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the summer afternoon in the office when he was on
the point of becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident
brought his love-making quickly to an end. As the man and woman held
each other tightly heavy feet came tramping up the office stairs. The
two sprang to their feet and stood listening and trembling. The noise
on the stairs was made by a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Company.
With a loud bang he threw an empty box on the pile of rubbish in the
hallway and then went heavily down the stairs. Elizabeth followed him
almost immediately. The thing that had come to life in her as she
talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was hysterical, as was also
Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk. Along the street