Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when she turned
out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of the New Willard House,
she began to tremble and her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.
The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She
personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired
youth running over hills, now a stern quiet man marked and scarred by
the business of living. In the darkness of her room she put out her
hand, thrusting it from under the covers of her bed, and she thought
that death like a living thing put out his hand to her. “Be patient,
lover,” she whispered. “Keep yourself young and beautiful and be
patient.”
On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon her and defeated
her plans for telling her son George of the eight hundred dollars
hidden away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading
with death for another hour of life. “Wait, dear! The boy! The boy! The
boy!” she pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to fight off
the arms of the lover she had wanted so earnestly.
Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her son George became
eighteen, and the young man had but little sense of the meaning of her
death. Only time could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the
doctor stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.
The young man went into his own room and closed the door. He had a
queer empty feeling in the region of his stomach. For a moment he sat
staring at the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the
station platform he went, and around through residence streets past the
high-school building, thinking almost entirely of his own affairs. The
notion of death could not get hold of him and he was in fact a little
annoyed that his mother had died on that day. He had just received a
note from Helen White, the daughter of the town banker, in answer to
one from him. “Tonight I could have gone to see her and now it will
have to be put off,” he thought half angrily.
Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock. It had been cold
and rainy in the morning but in the afternoon the sun came out. Before
she died she lay paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and
with only her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six days she
struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard
to his future, and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all
who saw it kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for years.
Even Tom Willard, who had always half resented his wife, forgot his
resentment and the tears ran out of his eyes and lodged in his
mustache. The mustache had begun to turn grey and Tom colored it with
dye. There was oil in the preparation he used for the purpose and the
tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed away by his hand,
formed a fine mist-like vapor. In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked
like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter
weather.
George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother’s
death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes,
went along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was
a candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a
chair by the bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out
his hand as though to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it
back again. The air of the room was heavy with the presence of the two
self-conscious human beings, and the man hurried away.
The dead woman’s son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a
change in his life, that he would leave Winesburg. “I will go to some
city. Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper,” he thought, and then
his mind turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening
and again he was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented
his going to her.
In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to
have thoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother’s
mind had played with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and
imagined that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips.
His body trembled and his hands shook. And then something happened. The
boy sprang to his feet and stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of
the dead woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over
him so that he began to weep. A new notion came into his mind and he
turned and looked guiltily about as though afraid he would be observed.
George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought that had come into
his mind gripped him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother
but someone else lay in the bed before him. The conviction was so real
that it was almost unbearable. The body under the sheets was long and
in death looked young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange
fancy, it was unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the body before him
was alive, that in another moment a lovely woman would spring out of
the bed and confront him, became so overpowering that he could not bear
the suspense. Again and again he put out his hand. Once he touched and
half lifted the white sheet that covered her, but his courage failed
and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and went out of the room. In the
hallway outside the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put
a hand against the wall to support himself. “That’s not my mother.
That’s not my mother in there,” he whispered to himself and again his
body shook with fright and uncertainty. When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who
had come to watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he put
his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head from side to
side, half blind with grief. “My mother is dead,” he said, and then
forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he
had just come. “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,” the boy, urged
by some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.
As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in
the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother’s bed.
Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the
plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband
was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. “I jammed
the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband,
unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that
after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her
lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.
SOPHISTICATION
It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County
Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been
clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike,
where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields
now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose
in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw
scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers
black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the
departing sun set it ablaze with colors.
In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the
sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran
madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town
worked terribly at the task of amusing itself.
Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard
concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy’s office and
looked at the people. With feverish eyes he watched the faces drifting
past under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head and he
did not want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and
looked sharply about. “Well, is she going to stay with him all day?
Have I done all this waiting for nothing?” he muttered.
George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and
new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam
of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about
to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work
on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken
possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt
old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new
sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He
wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of
him after his mother’s death.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time
takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he
crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of
his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in
the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something
happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his
name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices
outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of
life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at
all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the
first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched
in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his
time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and
again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has
come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf
blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in
spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in
uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to
wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years
he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of
humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants
to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be
touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a
woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that
she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.
When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind
turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker’s daughter. Always he had
been conscious of the girl growing into womanhood as he grew into
manhood. Once on a summer night when he was eighteen, he had walked
with her on a country road and in her presence had given way to an
impulse to boast, to make himself appear big and significant in her
eyes. Now he wanted to see her for another purpose. He wanted to tell
her of the new impulses that had come to him. He had tried to make her
think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted
to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had
taken place in his nature.
As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change. What
George felt, she in her young woman’s way felt also. She was no longer
a girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood.
She had come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to