Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of
herself to all people. Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself
with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter to the
members of the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg and stopped
at her father’s hotel, she got nowhere. They did not seem to know what
she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed, they
only laughed. “It’s not like that,” they said. “It’s as dull and
uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.”
With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with
Tom Willard, it was quite different. Always they seemed to understand
and sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the
darkness under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought
that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of
an unexpressed something in them.
And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that
came she felt for a time released and happy. She did not blame the men
who walked with her and later she did not blame Tom Willard. It was
always the same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild
emotions, with peace and then sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she
put her hand upon the face of the man and had always the same thought.
Even though he were large and bearded she thought he had become
suddenly a little boy. She wondered why he did not sob also.
In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House,
Elizabeth Willard lighted a lamp and put it on a dressing table that
stood by the door. A thought had come into her mind and she went to a
closet and brought out a small square box and set it on the table. The
box contained material for make-up and had been left with other things
by a theatrical company that had once been stranded in Winesburg.
Elizabeth Willard had decided that she would be beautiful. Her hair was
still black and there was a great mass of it braided and coiled about
her head. The scene that was to take place in the office below began to
grow in her mind. No ghostly worn-out figure should confront Tom
Willard, but something quite unexpected and startling. Tall and with
dusky cheeks and hair that fell in a mass from her shoulders, a figure
should come striding down the stairway before the startled loungers in
the hotel office. The figure would be silent—it would be swift and
terrible. As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear,
coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the
long wicked scissors in her hand.
With a little broken sob in her throat, Elizabeth Willard blew out the
light that stood upon the table and stood weak and trembling in the
darkness. The strength that had been as a miracle in her body left and
she half reeled across the floor, clutching at the back of the chair in
which she had spent so many long days staring out over the tin roofs
into the main street of Winesburg. In the hallway there was the sound
of footsteps and George Willard came in at the door. Sitting in a chair
beside his mother he began to talk. “I’m going to get out of here,” he
said. “I don’t know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going
away.”
The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. “I
suppose you had better wake up,” she said. “You think that? You will go
to the city and make money, eh? It will be better for you, you think,
to be a business man, to be brisk and smart and alive?” She waited and
trembled.
The son shook his head. “I suppose I can’t make you understand, but oh,
I wish I could,” he said earnestly. “I can’t even talk to father about
it. I don’t try. There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I
just want to go away and look at people and think.”
Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together. Again,
as on the other evenings, they were embarrassed. After a time the boy
tried again to talk. “I suppose it won’t be for a year or two but I’ve
been thinking about it,” he said, rising and going toward the door.
“Something father said makes it sure that I shall have to go away.” He
fumbled with the doorknob. In the room the silence became unbearable to
the woman. She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had
come from the lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become
impossible to her. “I think you had better go out among the boys. You
are too much indoors,” she said. “I thought I would go for a little
walk,” replied the son stepping awkwardly out of the room and closing
the door.
THE PHILOSOPHER
Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a
yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the
pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known
as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something
strange about his eyes. The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down
and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a
window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with
the cord.
Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard. It began when
George had been working for a year on the _Winesburg Eagle_ and the
acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor’s own making.
In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor of the _Eagle_,
went over to Tom Willy’s saloon. Along an alleyway he went and slipping
in at the back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made of a
combination of sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a sensualist
and had reached the age of forty-five. He imagined the gin renewed the
youth in him. Like most sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and
for an hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy. The saloon
keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with peculiarly marked hands.
That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints with red the faces
of men and women had touched with red Tom Willy’s fingers and the backs
of his hands. As he stood by the bar talking to Will Henderson he
rubbed the hands together. As he grew more and more excited the red of
his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had been dipped in
blood that had dried and faded.
As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red hands and talking
of women, his assistant, George Willard, sat in the office of the
_Winesburg Eagle_ and listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.
Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will Henderson had
disappeared. One might have supposed that the doctor had been watching
from his office window and had seen the editor going along the
alleyway. Coming in at the front door and finding himself a chair, he
lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs began to talk. He
seemed intent upon convincing the boy of the advisability of adopting a
line of conduct that he was himself unable to define.
“If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a
doctor I have mighty few patients,” he began. “There is a reason for
that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much
of medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The reason, you
see, does not appear on the surface. It lies in fact in my character,
which has, if you think about it, many strange turns. Why I want to
talk to you of the matter I don’t know. I might keep still and get more
credit in your eyes. I have a desire to make you admire me, that’s a
fact. I don’t know why. That’s why I talk. It’s very amusing, eh?”
Sometimes the doctor launched into long tales concerning himself. To
the boy the tales were very real and full of meaning. He began to
admire the fat unclean-looking man and, in the afternoon when Will
Henderson had gone, looked forward with keen interest to the doctor’s
coming.
Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years. He came from
Chicago and when he arrived was drunk and got into a fight with Albert
Longworth, the baggageman. The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the
doctor’s being escorted to the village lockup. When he was released he
rented a room above a shoe-repairing shop at the lower end of Main
Street and put out the sign that announced himself as a doctor.
Although he had but few patients and these of the poorer sort who were
unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money for his needs. He
slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at Biff
Carter’s lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroad
station. In the summer the lunch room was filled with flies and Biff
Carter’s white apron was more dirty than his floor. Doctor Parcival did
not mind. Into the lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents
upon the counter. “Feed me what you wish for that,” he said laughing.
“Use up food that you wouldn’t otherwise sell. It makes no difference
to me. I am a man of distinction, you see. Why should I concern myself
with what I eat.”
The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and
ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a
pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the
very essence of truth.
“I was a reporter like you here,” Doctor Parcival began. “It was in a
town in Iowa—or was it in Illinois? I don’t remember and anyway it
makes no difference. Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity and
don’t want to be very definite. Have you ever thought it strange that I
have money for my needs although I do nothing? I may have stolen a
great sum of money or been involved in a murder before I came here.
There is food for thought in that, eh? If you were a really smart
newspaper reporter you would look me up. In Chicago there was a Doctor
Cronin who was murdered. Have you heard of that? Some men murdered him
and put him in a trunk. In the early morning they hauled the trunk
across the city. It sat on the back of an express wagon and they were
on the seat as unconcerned as anything. Along they went through quiet
streets where everyone was asleep. The sun was just coming up over the
lake. Funny, eh—just to think of them smoking pipes and chattering as
they drove along as unconcerned as I am now. Perhaps I was one of those
men. That would be a strange turn of things, now wouldn’t it, eh?”
Again Doctor Parcival began his tale: “Well, anyway there I was, a
reporter on a paper just as you are here, running about and getting
little items to print. My mother was poor. She took in washing. Her
dream was to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying with
that end in view.
“My father had been insane for a number of years. He was in an asylum
over at Dayton, Ohio. There you see I have let it slip out! All of this
took place in Ohio, right here in Ohio. There is a clew if you ever get
the notion of looking me up.
“I was going to tell you of my brother. That’s the object of all this.
That’s what I’m getting at. My brother was a railroad painter and had a
job on the Big Four. You know that road runs through Ohio here. With
other men he lived in a box car and away they went from town to town
painting the railroad property-switches, crossing gates, bridges, and
stations.
“The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color. How I hated
that color! My brother was always covered with it. On pay days he used
to get drunk and come home wearing his paint-covered clothes and
bringing his money with him. He did not give it to mother but laid it
in a pile on our kitchen table.
“About the house he went in the clothes covered with the nasty orange
colored paint. I can see the picture. My mother, who was small and had
red, sad-looking eyes, would come into the house from a little shed at
the back. That’s where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing