Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
spend a day at the Fair. She also had begun to have memories. During
the day she sat in the grand-stand with a young man, one of the
instructors from the college, who was a guest of her mother’s. The
young man was of a pedantic turn of mind and she felt at once he would
not do for her purpose. At the Fair she was glad to be seen in his
company as he was well dressed and a stranger. She knew that the fact
of his presence would create an impression. During the day she was
happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless. She wanted to
drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence. While they sat
together in the grand-stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates
were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew
interested. “A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money,”
he mused.
Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily
through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening
when they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again. She
thought that the months she had spent in the city, the going to
theaters and the seeing of great crowds wandering in lighted
thoroughfares, had changed her profoundly. She wanted him to feel and
be conscious of the change in her nature.
The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of
both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been
rather stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country
road. Then they had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and
George had taken off his coat and let it hang on his arm. “Well, I’ve
stayed here in Winesburg—yes—I’ve not yet gone away but I’m growing
up,” he had said. “I’ve been reading books and I’ve been thinking. I’m
going to try to amount to something in life.
“Well,” he explained, “that isn’t the point. Perhaps I’d better quit
talking.”
The confused boy put his hand on the girl’s arm. His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town. In his
desperation George boasted, “I’m going to be a big man, the biggest
that ever lived here in Winesburg,” he declared. “I want you to do
something, I don’t know what. Perhaps it is none of my business. I want
you to try to be different from other women. You see the point. It’s
none of my business I tell you. I want you to be a beautiful woman. You
see what I want.”
The boy’s voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and
went along the street to Helen White’s house. At the gate he tried to
say something impressive. Speeches he had thought out came into his
head, but they seemed utterly pointless. “I thought—I used to think—I
had it in my mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now I know you won’t,”
was all he could find to say as she went through the gate and toward
the door of her house.
On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway and looked at the
crowd drifting through Main Street, George thought of the talk beside
the field of young corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of
himself. In the street the people surged up and down like cattle
confined in a pen. Buggies and wagons almost filled the narrow
thoroughfare. A band played and small boys raced along the sidewalk,
diving between the legs of men. Young men with shining red faces walked
awkwardly about with girls on their arms. In a room above one of the
stores, where a dance was to be held, the fiddlers tuned their
instruments. The broken sounds floated down through an open window and
out across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the horns of the
band. The medley of sounds got on young Willard’s nerves. Everywhere,
on all sides, the sense of crowding, moving life closed in about him.
He wanted to run away by himself and think. “If she wants to stay with
that fellow she may. Why should I care? What difference does it make to
me?” he growled and went along Main Street and through Hern’s Grocery
into a side street.
George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he wanted to weep but
pride made him walk rapidly along, swinging his arms. He came to Wesley
Moyer’s livery barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a group of
men who talked of a race Wesley’s stallion, Tony Tip, had won at the
Fair during the afternoon. A crowd had gathered in front of the barn
and before the crowd walked Wesley, prancing up and down boasting. He
held a whip in his hand and kept tapping the ground. Little puffs of
dust arose in the lamplight. “Hell, quit your talking,” Wesley
exclaimed. “I wasn’t afraid, I knew I had ’em beat all the time. I
wasn’t afraid.”
Ordinarily George Willard would have been intensely interested in the
boasting of Moyer, the horseman. Now it made him angry. He turned and
hurried away along the street. “Old windbag,” he sputtered. “Why does
he want to be bragging? Why don’t he shut up?”
George went into a vacant lot and, as he hurried along, fell over a
pile of rubbish. A nail protruding from an empty barrel tore his
trousers. He sat down on the ground and swore. With a pin he mended the
torn place and then arose and went on. “I’ll go to Helen White’s house,
that’s what I’ll do. I’ll walk right in. I’ll say that I want to see
her. I’ll walk right in and sit down, that’s what I’ll do,” he
declared, climbing over a fence and beginning to run.
On the veranda of Banker White’s house Helen was restless and
distraught. The instructor sat between the mother and daughter. His
talk wearied the girl. Although he had also been raised in an Ohio
town, the instructor began to put on the airs of the city. He wanted to
appear cosmopolitan. “I like the chance you have given me to study the
background out of which most of our girls come,” he declared. “It was
good of you, Mrs. White, to have me down for the day.” He turned to
Helen and laughed. “Your life is still bound up with the life of this
town?” he asked. “There are people here in whom you are interested?” To
the girl his voice sounded pompous and heavy.
Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at
the back she stopped and stood listening. Her mother began to talk.
“There is no one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen’s
breeding,” she said.
Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the
garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to
her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words. Afire
with eagerness she ran through a garden gate and, turning a corner by
the banker’s barn, went into a little side street. “George! Where are
you, George?” she cried, filled with nervous excitement. She stopped
running, and leaned against a tree to laugh hysterically. Along the
dark little street came George Willard, still saying words. “I’m going
to walk right into her house. I’ll go right in and sit down,” he
declared as he came up to her. He stopped and stared stupidly. “Come
on,” he said and took hold of her hand. With hanging heads they walked
away along the street under the trees. Dry leaves rustled under foot.
Now that he had found her George wondered what he had better do and
say.
At the upper end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half
decayed old grand-stand. It has never been painted and the boards are
all warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill
rising out of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can
see at night, over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected
against the sky.
George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the
path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that
had come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both
broken and intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was
reflected in her.
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm
unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and
remembers, and the older, the more sophisticated thing had possession
of George Willard. Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled
with respect. When they got to the grand-stand they climbed up under
the roof and sat down on one of the long bench-like seats.
There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into
a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a
night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never
to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of
living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people
pouring in from the town and the country around. Farmers with their
wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame
houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed
and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The
place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and
squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away.
The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing
silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective
tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of
the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the
people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that
tears come into the eyes.
In the darkness under the roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat
beside Helen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the
scheme of existence. Now that he had come out of town where the
presence of the people stirring about, busy with a multitude of
affairs, had been so irritating, the irritation was all gone. The
presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. It was as though her
woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the
machinery of his life. He began to think of the people in the town
where he had always lived with something like reverence. He had
reverence for Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by her, but he
did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood. In the
darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand
on her shoulder. A wind began to blow and he shivered. With all his
strength he tried to hold and to understand the mood that had come upon
him. In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human
atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the
same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this
other,” was the substance of the thing felt.
In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of
the late fall. Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads
pulling their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of
goods in off the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores. In the Opera
House a crowd had gathered to see a show and further down Main Street
the fiddlers, their instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the
feet of youth flying over a dance floor.
In the darkness in the grand-stand Helen White and George Willard
remained silent. Now and then the spell that held them was broken and
they turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other’s eyes.
They kissed but that impulse did not last. At the upper end of the Fair
Ground a half dozen men worked over horses that had raced during the
afternoon. The men had built a fire and were heating kettles of water.
Only their legs could be seen as they passed back and forth in the
light. When the wind blew the little flames of the fire danced crazily
about.
George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went
along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind
whispered among the dry corn blades. For a moment during the walk back