Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he went spruce and
business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped
and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel
and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. “Damn such a
life, damn it!” he sputtered aimlessly.
Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been
the leading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. Some day, he
told himself, the tide of things political will turn in my favor and
the years of ineffectual service count big in the bestowal of rewards.
He dreamed of going to Congress and even of becoming governor. Once
when a younger member of the party arose at a political conference and
began to boast of his faithful service, Tom Willard grew white with
fury. “Shut up, you,” he roared, glaring about. “What do you know of
service? What are you but a boy? Look at what I’ve done here! I was a
Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the
old days they fairly hunted us with guns.”
Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed
bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In
the son’s presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he
hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into
his room and closing the door knelt by a little desk, made of a kitchen
table, that sat near a window. In the room by the desk she went through
a ceremony that was half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the
skies. In the boyish figure she yearned to see something half forgotten
that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned
that. “Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you,” she
cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her
eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead and see him
becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back,” she
declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will
pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that
may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us
both.” Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about the boy’s room. “And
do not let him become smart and successful either,” she added vaguely.
The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a
formal thing without meaning. When she was ill and sat by the window in
her room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat
by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into
Main Street. By turning their heads they could see through another
window, along an alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and
into the back door of Abner Groff’s bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus
a picture of village life presented itself to them. At the back door of
his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or an empty milk bottle in
his hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker and a grey
cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. The boy and his
mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently
emerge followed by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The
baker’s eyes were small and red and his black hair and beard were
filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the
cat had disappeared, he hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even
some of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at the
back of Sinning’s Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched
behind barrels filled with torn paper and broken bottles above which
flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she was alone, and after
watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker,
Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept.
After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to
forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like
a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.
In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the
silence made them both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening
train came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and
down upon a board sidewalk. In the station yard, after the evening
train had gone, there was a heavy silence. Perhaps Skinner Leason, the
express agent, moved a truck the length of the station platform. Over
on Main Street sounded a man’s voice, laughing. The door of the express
office banged. George Willard arose and crossing the room fumbled for
the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked against a chair, making it scrape
along the floor. By the window sat the sick woman, perfectly still,
listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless, could be seen drooping
over the ends of the arms of the chair. “I think you had better be out
among the boys. You are too much indoors,” she said, striving to
relieve the embarrassment of the departure. “I thought I would take a
walk,” replied George Willard, who felt awkward and confused.
One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard
House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted
only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth
Willard had an adventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and
her son had not come to visit her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of
life that remained in her body was blown into a flame by her anxiety
and she crept out of bed, dressed and hurried along the hallway toward
her son’s room, shaking with exaggerated fears. As she went along she
steadied herself with her hand, slipped along the papered walls of the
hall and breathed with difficulty. The air whistled through her teeth.
As she hurried forward she thought how foolish she was. “He is
concerned with boyish affairs,” she told herself. “Perhaps he has now
begun to walk about in the evening with girls.”
Elizabeth Willard had a dread of being seen by guests in the hotel that
had once belonged to her father and the ownership of which still stood
recorded in her name in the county courthouse. The hotel was
continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought
of herself as also shabby. Her own room was in an obscure corner and
when she felt able to work she voluntarily worked among the beds,
preferring the labor that could be done when the guests were abroad
seeking trade among the merchants of Winesburg.
By the door of her son’s room the mother knelt upon the floor and
listened for some sound from within. When she heard the boy moving
about and talking in low tones a smile came to her lips. George Willard
had a habit of talking aloud to himself and to hear him doing so had
always given his mother a peculiar pleasure. The habit in him, she
felt, strengthened the secret bond that existed between them. A
thousand times she had whispered to herself of the matter. “He is
groping about, trying to find himself,” she thought. “He is not a dull
clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something
that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself.”
In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and
started again toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would
open and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance
and was about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and
bracing herself with her hands waited, thinking to shake off a
trembling fit of weakness that had come upon her. The presence of the
boy in the room had made her happy. In her bed, during the long hours
alone, the little fears that had visited her had become giants. Now
they were all gone. “When I get back to my room I shall sleep,” she
murmured gratefully.
But Elizabeth Willard was not to return to her bed and to sleep. As she
stood trembling in the darkness the door of her son’s room opened and
the boy’s father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed
out at the door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he
said infuriated the woman.
Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself
as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out
successfully. However, when he was out of sight of the New Willard
House and had no fear of coming upon his wife, he swaggered and began
to dramatize himself as one of the chief men of the town. He wanted his
son to succeed. He it was who had secured for the boy the position on
the _Winesburg Eagle_. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he
was advising concerning some course of conduct. “I tell you what,
George, you’ve got to wake up,” he said sharply. “Will Henderson has
spoken to me three times concerning the matter. He says you go along
for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky
girl. What ails you?” Tom Willard laughed good-naturedly. “Well, I
guess you’ll get over it,” he said. “I told Will that. You’re not a
fool and you’re not a woman. You’re Tom Willard’s son and you’ll wake
up. I’m not afraid. What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper
man had put the notion of becoming a writer into your mind that’s all
right. Only I guess you’ll have to wake up to do that too, eh?”
Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a flight of stairs
to the office. The woman in the darkness could hear him laughing and
talking with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by
dozing in a chair by the office door. She returned to the door of her
son’s room. The weakness had passed from her body as by a miracle and
she stepped boldly along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When
she heard the scraping of a chair and the sound of a pen scratching
upon paper, she again turned and went back along the hallway to her own
room.
A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of
the Winesburg hotel keeper. The determination was the result of long
years of quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. “Now,” she told
herself, “I will act. There is something threatening my boy and I will
ward it off.” The fact that the conversation between Tom Willard and
his son had been rather quiet and natural, as though an understanding
existed between them, maddened her. Although for years she had hated
her husband, her hatred had always before been a quite impersonal
thing. He had been merely a part of something else that she hated. Now,
and by the few words at the door, he had become the thing personified.
In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists and glared
about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she took
out a long pair of sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a
dagger. “I will stab him,” she said aloud. “He has chosen to be the
voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him something
will snap within myself and I will die also. It will be a release for
all of us.”
In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had
borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been
what is called “stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with
traveling men guests at her father’s hotel, wearing loud clothes and
urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had
come. Once she startled the town by putting on men’s clothes and riding
a bicycle down Main Street.
In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much
confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in
two ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big
definite movement to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her
mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering