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Шервуд Андерсон. Уайнсбург, Огайо (engl)

Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio

       Шервуд Андерсон -- Американский Писатель. 1876-1941
       Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio
       OCR: Ирина Нестеренко

     CONTENTS
     INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe
     THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
     THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
     HANDS, concerning Wing Biddlebaum
     PAPER PILLS, concerning Doctor Reefy
     MOTHER, concerning Elizabeth Willard
     THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival
     NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion
     GODLINESS, a Tale in Four Parts
     I, concerning Jesse Bentley
     II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
     III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley
     IV Terror, concerning David Hardy
     A MAN OF IDEAS, concerning Joe Welling
     ADVENTURE, concerning Alice Hindman
     RESPECTABILITY, concerning Wash Williams
     THE THINKER, concerning Seth Richmond
     TANDY, concerning Tandy Hard
     THE STRENGTH OF GOD, concerning the
     Reverend Curtis Hartman
     THE TEACHER, concerning Kate Swift
     LONELINESS, concerning Enoch Robinson
     AN AWAKENING, concerning Belle Carpenter
     "QUEER," concerning Elmer Cowley
     THE UNTOLD LIE, concerning Ray Pearson
     DRINK, concerning Tom Foster
     DEATH, concerning Doctor Reefy
     and Elizabeth Willard
     SOPHISTICATION, concerning Helen White
     DEPARTURE, concerning George Willard
     INTRODUCTION
     by Irving Howe
     I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first
chanced  upon  Winesburg, Ohio.  Gripped  by  these  stories and sketches of
Sherwood Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he was  opening for
me new  depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which nothing
in my young life had prepared me for. A  New York City boy who never saw the
crops grow  or  spent  time in the  small towns  that  lay  sprinkled across
America, I found  myself overwhelmed by  the scenes  of  wasted life, wasted
love--was this the "real" America?--that Anderson sketched in Winesburg.  In
those days only one other book seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and
that was Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.
     Several years later, as  I was about  to go overseas  as  a soldier,  I
spent my last weekend  pass on a somewhat quixotic  journey to  Clyde, Ohio,
the town upon which Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde  looked,  I suppose,
not very different  from  most  other American towns,  and  the  few  of its
residents  I  tried  to  engage  in   talk  about   Anderson  seemed   quite
uninterested.  This indifference would not have  surprised him; it certainly
should not surprise anyone who reads his book.
     Once freed from the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in
1951  I published a critical biography of  Anderson. It came  shortly  after
Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which
Anderson's reputation  would never quite recover. Trilling charged  Anderson
with  indulging  a  vaporous  sentimentalism,  a  kind  of  vague  emotional
meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity.  There was a
certain cogency  in Trilling's attack,  at  least with regard  to Anderson's
inferior work,  most of which  he wrote after Winesburg,  Ohio. In my book I
tried, somewhat awkwardly, to  bring together the kinds of judgment Trilling
had made with  my still  keen affection for the best of Anderson's writings.
By then, I had  read writers more complex,  perhaps  more distinguished than
Anderson, but  his muted stories kept a firm place  in my memories,  and the
book  I wrote might be seen as a gesture  of thanks for the light--a glow of
darkness, you might say--that he had brought to me.
     Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps fearing I might have
to surrender  an  admiration of youth.  (There  are  some writers one should
never return to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say  a  few
introductory  words  about Anderson and his work,  I have again fallen under
the spell of Winesburg,  Ohio, again responded to  the half-spoken  desires,
the flickers of longing that  spot  its pages.  Naturally, I  now  have some
changes of response:  a few of the stories no  longer haunt me as  once they
did, but the long story "Godliness," which years ago I considered a failure,
I now see  as a quaintly  effective account  of the way religious fanaticism
and material acquisitiveness can become intertwined in American experience.
     Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His childhood and  youth in
Clyde, a  town  with perhaps three thousand souls, were scarred  by bouts of
poverty,  but he also  knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial American
society. The country was  then  experiencing what  he  would  later  call "a
sudden and  almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards
our  modern  life of  machines."  There  were  still  people  in  Clyde  who
remembered the frontier,  and like America  itself,  the  town  lived  by  a
mixture of  diluted Calvinism  and  a strong  belief  in  "progress,"  Young
Sherwood, known as "Jobby"--the boy always ready to work--showed the kind of
entrepreneurial  spirit that Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a
"go-getter," And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago in his early twenties,
he  worked  in an advertising agency where he  proved  adept at turning  out
copy. "I create nothing, I boost, I boost,"  he said about himself, even as,
on the side, he was trying to write short stories.
     In 1904  Anderson married and three years later moved to Elyria, a town
forty  miles west of Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold paint.
"I was going to be a  rich man.... Next year a bigger house; and after that,
presumably, a country estate." Later he would say about his years in Elyria,
"I was a good deal of a Babbitt,  but never completely one." Something drove
him  to  write,   perhaps  one  of  those  shapeless   hungers--a  need  for
self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic  kind of experience?-- that
would become a recurrent motif in his fiction.
     And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in Anderson's life.
Plainly put, he suffered a nervous breakdown, though in his memoirs he would
elevate this into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the sterility
of commerce  and  turned  to  the  rewards  of literature. Nor  was this,  I
believe, merely  a deception on Anderson's part, since the breakdown painful
as it surely was, did help precipitate  a basic change in  his  life. At the
age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of
the rebellious  writers and cultural bohemians in the  group that has  since
come  to be  called the  "Chicago Renaissance."  Anderson  soon  adopted the
posture  of a  free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he
presented  himself  as a  sardonic  critic  of  American  provincialism  and
materialism. It was  in the freedom of the city,  in its readiness to put up
with  deviant styles of life, that Anderson  found  the strength  to  settle
accounts  with--but  also   to  release  his  affection  for--the  world  of
small-town  America.  The  dream of an  unconditional personal freedom, that
hazy American version of utopia, would remain central throughout  Anderson's
life and work. It was an inspiration; it was a delusion.
     In 1916 and  1917  Anderson  published  two  novels  mostly  written in
Elyria, Windy  McPherson's  Son  and  Marching  Men,  both  by  now  largely
forgotten.  They show patches  of talent  but also  a crudity of thought and
unsteadiness of language. No one reading  these novels was likely to suppose
that its author could  soon produce  anything  as  remarkable  as Winesburg,
Ohio.  Occasionally  there occurs  in  a writer's career  a  sudden,  almost
mysterious leap of talent,  beyond explanation, perhaps beyond  any need for
explanation.
     In  1915-16 Anderson had begun to  write  and in 1919 he  published the
stories that  comprise Winesburg, Ohio, stories that form, in sum, a sort of
looselystrung episodic novel. The book  was  an immediate critical  success,
and soon Anderson was being ranked as a significant literary figure. In 1921
the distinguished  literary magazine  The Dial awarded him its first  annual
literary  prize  of  $2,000,  the  significance  of  which  is  perhaps best
understood if one also knows that the second recipient was T. S.  Eliot. But
Anderson's moment of glory was brief, no more than  a decade, and sadly, the
remaining  years  until his  death in 1940 were marked by a sharp decline in
his literary standing.  Somehow,  except for  an occasional story  like  the
haunting "Death in the Woods," he was unable to repeat or surpass  his early
success. Still, about Winesburg,  Ohio and a  small  number  of stories like
"The  Egg"  and  "The Man Who Became  a Woman"  there  has  rarely been  any
critical doubt.
     No  sooner did Winesburg, Ohio  make its appearance  than  a number  of
critical  labels were fixed  on it:  the  revolt  against  the village,  the
espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may
once have had their point, but by now they seem  dated and stale. The revolt
against the village  (about which  Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded
into  history.  The  espousal of  sexual freedom  would  soon be exceeded in
boldness by other writers. And as for the effort to place Winesburg, Ohio in
a tradition of American realism, that now seems dubious. Only  rarely is the
object of Anderson's stories social verisimilitude, or  the  "photographing"
of familiar appearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a
novel  by Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair  Lewis.  Only  occasionally, and then
with  a  very light  touch,  does  Anderson  try  to  fill  out  the  social
arrangements of his imaginary town--although the fact that  his  stories are
set  in a mid-American  place like Winesburg does  constitute  an  important
formative  condition.  You  might even  say, with only slight overstatement,
that  what Anderson  is  doing in Winesburg,  Ohio  could  be  described  as
"antirealistic," fictions  notable less for precise locale and social detail
than for  a highly personal,  even strange vision  of American life. Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of
being, the collapse of  men and women  who have lost  their psychic bearings
and  now hover, at best tolerated,  at  the edge of  the little community in
which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occur
by now, if we  were to take Winesburg,  Ohio as a social  photograph of "the
typical  small  town"  (whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed
landscape  in  which  lost  souls  wander  about; they make  their  flitting
appearances  mostly in  the  darkness of night, these  stumps and  shades of
humanity. This  vision has its truth, and at its best it is  a  terrible  if
narrow  truth--but  it  is  itself also  grotesque,  with  the  tone  of the
authorial voice  and the mode of composition  forming muted  signals  of the
book's content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are
not, nor  are they  meant to  be, "fullyrounded" characters  such as we  can
expect  in realistic  fiction; they are  the shards  of life, glimpsed for a
moment,  the debris of suffering  and defeat. In  each  story  one  of  them
emerges,  shyly  or  with  a  false  assertiveness, trying  to  reach out to
companionship  and  love,  driven  almost  mad  by   the  search  for  human
connection.  In the economy  of Winesburg  these  grotesques matter  less in
their own right than as agents or symptoms of that "indefinable hunger"  for
meaning which is Anderson's preoccupation.
     Brushing against one another, passing one another in the streets or the
fields, they see bodies and hear voices, but it does not really matter--they
are  disconnected,  psychically  lost.  Is  this   due   to  the  particular
circumstances  of small-town America as Anderson saw it  at the turn of  the
century? Or does he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human condition
which makes  all of  us bear the burden  of loneliness? Alice Hindman in the
story "Adventure" turns her face to the wall and tries "to force  herself to
face the fact that many people must  live and die alone, even in Winesburg."
Or especially in Winesburg? Such impressions  have been put in  more general
terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor White:
     All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun
     derstanding they have themselves built, and
     most men die in silence and unnoticed behind
     the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from
     his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be
     comes absorbed in doing something that is per
     sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
     is carried over the walls.
     These  "walls" of misunderstanding  are  only seldom  due  to  physical
deformities (Wing  Biddlebaum in  "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements
(Kate Swift in  "The Teacher.")  Misunderstanding, loneliness, the inability
to  articulate, are all seen  by  Anderson  as  virtually a root  condition,
something deeply set in our  natures.  Nor are these people, the grotesques,
simply to be  pitied and dismissed; at some point  in their  lives they have
known  desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship. In all of
them there was  once something sweet, "like the  twisted little apples  that
grow in  the orchards  in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at
some  rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns  out  to bear the stamp of
monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering,  desperate to speak  out  but
unable to.  Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to life, and it
does so with a deep fraternal sadness,  a sympathy casting  a mild glow over
the  entire book. "Words," as the  American  writer Paula Fox has said, "are
nets through which all truth escapes." Yet what do we have but words?
     They  want,  these  Winesburg grotesques*, to  unpack their hearts,  to
release emotions buried and festering.  Wash Williams  tries to explain  his
eccentricity but hardly can; Louise  Bentley "tried  to talk  but  could say
nothing";  Enoch  Robinson  retreats to a fantasy world,  inventing "his own
people to whom he could  really talk and to whom he explained the  things he
had been unable to explain to living people."
     In his own  somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great
themes of American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the late
nineteenth  and  early twentieth centuries:  the struggle  for speech  as it
entails a search for the  self. Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing
the basic  movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in which the old  Doctor
Reefy sits "in his  empty office close by  a  window that  was  covered with
cobwebs,"  writes down some thoughts on slips of paper ("pyramids of truth,"
he calls them)  and  then  stuffs them into his pockets  where they  "become
round hard balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be  we
never know; Anderson simply  persuades us that  to this lonely old man  they
are utterly precious  and thereby incommunicable, forming a  kind of blurred
moral signature.
     After  a time the  attentive reader  will  notice  in these  stories  a
recurrent  pattern  of  theme and incident:  the grotesques, gathering up  a
little  courage, venture out  into  the streets  of Winesburg, often  in the
dark,  there to establish some  initiatory relationship with George Willard,
the young reporter  who hasn't yet  lived long enough to become a grotesque.
Hesitantly,  fearfully, or  with a sputtering incoherent rage, they approach
him,  pleading that he listen to their stories in the hope that perhaps they
can find some sort of renewal in his youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and
fragile boy they pour out their desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes
that  George Willard  "will write the book I may never get written," and for
Enoch  Robinson,  the  boy  represents  "the youthful  sadness, young  man's
sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the year's  end [which
may open] the lips of the old man."
     What the grotesques  really need is  each other, but their estrangement
is so extreme they  cannot  establish  direct ties--they  can only  hope for
connection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is more
than he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is sympathetic to their
complaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams. The grotesques
turn to  him  because  he  seems "different"--younger,  more  open,  not yet
hardened-- but it  is  precisely  this  "difference"  that  keeps  him  from
responding  as  warmly as  they want.  It is  hardly the  boy's fault; it is
simply  in the nature of things. For  George Willard, the  grotesques form a
moment in his education; for the  grotesques, their  encounters  with George
Willard come to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.
     The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem  at  first
glance to  be  simple:  short sentences, a sparse vocabulary,  uncomplicated
syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following
Mark  Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use  American speech
as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness
seldom  found  in  ordinary speech or  even oral  narration.  What  Anderson
employs  here is a  stylized  version  of  the American  language, sometimes
rising  to quite  formal rhetorical patterns  and  sometimes  sinking  to  a
self-conscious  mannerism.  But at  its  best,  Anderson's  prose  style  in
Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument, yielding that "low fine music" which
he admired so much in the stories of Turgenev.
     One  of  the  worst  fates  that   can  befall  a  writer  is  that  of
self-imitation: the effort later in life,  often desperate, to recapture the
tones and themes of youthful beginnings. Something of the sort happened with
Anderson's later writings. Most critics and readers  grew impatient with the
work he did  after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly repeating
his gestures  of emotional "groping"-- what he had called in Winesburg, Ohio
the  "indefinable  hunger" that  prods and  torments people.  It  became the
critical  fashion  to  see  Anderson's  "gropings"  as  a  sign  of  delayed
adolescence, a  failure  to  develop  as a writer. Once he  wrote a chilling
reply to  those  who  dismissed him in this  way: "I don't think it  matters
much, all this calling a man  a muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man  who
throws  such  words  as these knows  in his heart that he is also  facing  a
wall."  This remark  seems to me both dignified  and strong,  yet it must be
admitted that there was some justice  in the negative responses to his later
work. For what characterized  it was not so  much "groping" as the imitation
of "groping," the self-caricature of  a writer who feels driven back upon an
earlier self that is, alas, no longer available.
     But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and authentic. Most  of
its  stories  are composed in a minor  key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos
marking both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of himself
as a "minor writer.") In a few stories, however, he was able to reach beyond
pathos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story in Winesburg, Ohio
is,  I think, "The Untold  Lie," in which the  urgency of choice becomes  an
outer sign of a tragic element  in the  human  condition. And in  Anderson's
single  greatest  story,  "The  Egg,"  which  appeared  a  few  years  after
Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded  in bringing together a surface of farce  with
an undertone of tragedy. "The Egg" is an American masterpiece.
     Anderson's  influence upon later American writers, especially those who
wrote  short  stories, has  been  enormous.  Ernest  Hemingway  and  William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of feeling, a
new sense of introspectiveness to  the American short story. As Faulkner put
it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for exactitude, the  exact word  and phrase
within the limited scope of  a vocabulary  controlled and  even repressed by
what  was  in him  almost  a fetish  of simplicity  ...  to  seek  always to
penetrate to thought's uttermost end." And  in  many younger writers who may
not  even  be  aware of the Anderson influence, you  can see touches  of his
approach, echoes of his voice.
     Writing about the Elizabethan playwright  John Ford, the  poet Algernon
Swinburne once said: "If he touches you once he takes you, and what he takes
he keeps hold of; his work becomes  part of your thought and parcel of  your
spiritual  furniture  forever."  So  it  is, for  me and  many  others, with
Sherwood Anderson.

     To the memory of my mother,
     EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,
     whose keen observations on  the life about  her first  awoke  in me the
hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.

     THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

     THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE

     THE WRITER, an  old man with  a white mustache, had some  difficulty in
getting  into bed. The windows of the house in which he  lived were high and
he wanted to look at  the trees when he awoke in the  morning.  A  carpenter
came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.
     Quite a fuss  was made about the matter. The carpenter, who  had been a
soldier in the  Civil War, came into the writer's room and sat  down to talk
of building  a platform for  the purpose  of raising the bed. The writer had
cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
     For a  time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and  then they
talked of  other things.  The soldier  got on the  subject of  the  war. The
writer,  in fact, led  him  to that  subject. The carpenter had once been  a
prisoner in  Andersonville prison  and  had lost a brother. The  brother had
died  of starvation, and  whenever the carpenter got  upon  that subject  he
cried. He,  like the old writer, had a white mustache, and  when he cried he
puckered up his  lips and the mustache  bobbed up and  down. The weeping old
man  with the cigar in his  mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for
the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter  did  it in his
own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair
when he went to bed at night.
     In his bed the writer rolled  over on his side and lay quite still. For
years he had been beset  with notions  concerning  his  heart. He was a hard
smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would
some time die unexpectedly  and always when he  got  into bed he  thought of
that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and
not easily  explained.  It  made him more  alive, there in bed, than  at any
other time. Perfectly still he lay and  his body was old and not of much use
any more,  but something inside  him was altogether  young.  He  was  like a
pregnant woman, only that  the thing inside him was not a baby  but a youth.
No, it wasn't a  youth,  it was a woman, young, and  wearing a  coat of mail
like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old
writer as he lay  on  his  high  bed  and listened to the fluttering of  his
heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the
writer, was thinking about.
     The old writer, like  all of  the people in  the world, had got, during
his long fife,  a great many notions  in his  head. He  had once been  quite
handsome  and  a  number of women had  been  in  love with him. And then, of
course,  he  had known  people,  many people, known  them  in  a  peculiarly
intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people.
At least that is  what the writer  thought and  the thought pleased him. Why
quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
     In  the  bed the writer  had a  dream that was not a dream. As  he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious,  figures began to appear before his
eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a
long procession of figures before his eyes.
     You see the interest  in all this lies  in the figures that went before
the eyes  of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men  and women
the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
     The grotesques were not all horrible. Some  were  amusing,  some almost
beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out  of shape, hurt the old man by her
grotesqueness.  When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.
Had you come  into  the  room  you might  have  supposed  the  old  man  had
unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
     For an hour the procession of grotesques  passed before the eyes of the
old man, and then, although it was  a painful thing to do, he crept  out  of
bed  and began  to  write.  Some  one  of the  grotesques had  made  a  deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
     At his desk the writer worked  for an hour.  In the end he wrote a book
which he called  "The Book of the Grotesque." It  was never published, but I
saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one
central thought that  is very strange  and  has always  remained with me. By
remembering it I have been able to understand many people  and things that I
was  never able to understand before. The thought  was involved but a simple
statement of it would be something like this:
     That in the beginning when the world was  young there were a great many
thoughts but no such  thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each
truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world
were the truths and they were all beautiful.
     The old man had listed hundreds of the truths  in his book. I  will not
try to tell you of all of them.  There was  the  truth of virginity  and the
truth  of  passion,  the truth of  wealth  and of poverty, of thrift  and of
profligacy, of carelessness  and abandon. Hundreds  and  hundreds  were  the
truths and they were all beautiful.
     And then the people  came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of
the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
     It  was the truths  that made  the people  grotesques. The  old man had
quite an elaborate  theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the
moment  one of  the people took one  of the truths to himself, called it his
truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood.
     You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life
writing and was filled  with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning
this matter. The subject would become so  big  in  his mind that he  himself
would be  in danger of becoming a  grotesque.  He didn't, I suppose, for the
same reason that he never published the  book. It was the young thing inside
him that saved the old man.
     Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for  the writer, I  only
mentioned him because he,
     THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE 7
     like  many  of what are called  very common  people, became the nearest
thing to what is understandable and  lovable  of  all  the grotesques in the
writer's book.

     HANDS
     UPON  THE HALF  decayed veranda of a small frame house  that stood near
the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat  little old man
walked  nervously up and down. Across a long field that  had been seeded for
clover  but that had produced only a dense crop  of yellow mustard weeds, he
could see the public highway along  which  went a wagon  filled  with  berry
pickers returning  from the  fields. The berry  pickers, youths and maidens,
laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the
wagon  and attempted to drag  after him one of the maidens, who screamed and
protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust
that  floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came
a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling
into  your eyes," commanded the voice to  the  man, who  was bald  and whose
nervous  little  hands  fiddled  about the  bare  white forehead  as  though
arranging a mass of tangled locks.
     Wing  Biddlebaum, forever  frightened  and  beset  by a ghostly band of
doubts, did not  think of himself  as in any  way a part of the life  of the
town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the  people of Winesburg
but one had come close  to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the
proprietor  of  the  New  Willard  House,  he  had  formed something like  a
friendship.  George Willard  was the  reporter  on the  Winesburg Eagle  and
sometimes  in  the  evenings  he  walked  out  along  the  highway  to  Wing
Biddlebaum's house. Now as the old  man walked  up and down on the  veranda,
his hands moving nervously  about,  he was hoping that George Willard  would
come and spend  the  evening  with him. After the wagon containing the berry
pickers had passed, he went across the field through  the tall mustard weeds
and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a
moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the
road, and then,  fear overcoming him,  ran back to walk again upon the porch
on his own house.
     In the presence  of George Willard,  Wing  Biddlebaum, who  for  twenty
years had been  the  town mystery, lost  something of his  timidity, and his
shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the
world. With the young reporter at his  side, he ventured in the light of day
into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own
house,  talking excitedly.  The voice that had been low and trembling became
shrill and loud. The bent  figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like
a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman,  Biddlebaum the  silent began
to talk, striving to put  into  words the ideas that had been accumulated by
his mind during long years of silence.
     Wing  Biddlebaum  talked much with his  hands. The  slender  expressive
fingers,  forever  active,  forever striving  to  conceal  themselves in his
pockets or  behind his back, came forth  and became the  piston rods  of his
machinery of expression.
     The story  of Wing  Biddlebaum is a  story  of  hands.  Their  restless
activity, like  unto the  beating  of the wings  of an  imprisoned bird, had
given him his name. Some obscure poet of  the town  had thought  of it.  The
hands  alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep  them hidden  away  and looked
with  amazement  at the  quiet  inexpressive  hands of  other men who worked
beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.
     When he talked to George Willard,  Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and
beat with  them upon a table  or on the walls of his house.  The action made
him more comfortable.  If the desire  to talk came to him when  the two were
walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and
with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.
     The  story of  Wing  Biddlebaum's  hands  is  worth a  book  in itself.
Sympathetically set  forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in
obscure men.  It is a job for a poet.  In Winesburg the hands  had attracted
attention  merely because  of their activity. With  them Wing Biddlebaum had
picked as high as a hundred  and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They
became his  distinguishing feature, the source  of his  fame. Also they made
more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was
proud  of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the  same spirit  in which it  was
proud of  Banker White's  new stone house  and Wesley Moyer's  bay stallion,
Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.
     As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands.
At times an almost overwhelming curiosity  had  taken hold of him.  He  felt
that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their inclination
to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept  him
from blurting out the questions that were often in his mind.
     Once  he had been on the  point of asking.  The two were walking in the
fields  on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All
afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked  as  one inspired. By a  fence  he  had
stopped  and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had  shouted
at George Willard, condemning his tendency  to be too much influenced by the
people about  him,  "You are destroying  yourself," he cried. "You have  the
inclination to be  alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want
to be like others in town here.  You hear  them talk and you  try to imitate
them."
     On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried  again to drive  his point
home. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh  of contentment
he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a dream.
     Out of  the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In
the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green
open  country came clean-limbed  young  men,  some afoot, some mounted  upon
horses. In crowds  the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man
who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them.
     Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired.  For once  he forgot the hands.
Slowly they stole  forth and lay upon George Willard's  shoulders. Something
new  and bold came into the voice  that talked. "You must try to forget  all
you have learned,"  said  the old  man. "You  must begin to dream. From this
time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices."
     Pausing  in  his  speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked  long and earnestly at
George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress the boy
and then a look of horror swept over his face.
     With  a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang  to his
feet and thrust his hands deep into  his trousers pockets. Tears came to his
eyes. "I must be getting along  home. I can talk no more with you,"  he said
nervously.
     Without  looking  back, the old man had hurried  down the hillside  and
across a meadow, leaving George  Willard perplexed and  frightened upon  the
grassy slope.  With a shiver  of dread the boy arose and went along the road
toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he thought, touched  by the
memory  of the  terror he had seen  in  the  man's  eyes. "There's something
wrong, but I  don't want to know what it is. His hands  have something to do
with his fear of me and of everyone."
     And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the
hands.  Perhaps  our  talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell the
hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering
pennants of promise.
     In his  youth Wing Biddlebaum  had been a  school teacher  in a town in
Pennsylvania. He was not then known as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the less
euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved by the boys
of his school.
     Adolph Myers  was  meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one
of those rare,  littleunderstood men who rule by  a power so  gentle that it
passes  as a lovable  weakness. In  their  feeling for  the boys under their
charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.
     And yet that is  but crudely stated. It needs the  poet there. With the
boys of his school,  Adolph  Myers  had  walked in the  evening  or had  sat
talking until dusk upon the  schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here
and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about
the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was
a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the
shoulders  and  the touching of  the hair  were a part of the schoolmaster's
effort to carry  a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his
fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that
creates  life is diffused, not  centralized. Under the caress  of his  hands
doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to
dream.
     And then  the tragedy.  A half-witted boy of the school became enamored
of the  young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and
in the morning  went  forth to  tell  his dreams as facts.  Strange, hideous
accusations fell from his loosehung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went
a shiver. Hidden,  shadowy doubts  that had been in men's  minds  concerning
Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.
     The tragedy did not linger. Trembling  lads were jerked out of  bed and
questioned. "He  put his arms about me," said one. "His fingers were  always
playing in my hair," said another.
     One afternoon a  man of the town, Henry  Bradford, who  kept  a saloon,
came to the schoolhouse door. Calling Adolph  Myers into the school  yard he
began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles  beat down  into  the
frightened  face  of  the  schoolmaster,  his  wrath became  more  and  more
terrible.  Screaming  with  dismay,  the  children  ran  here and there like
disturbed insects. "I'll teach  you to put your hands on my boy, you beast,"
roared the saloon  keeper, who,  tired of beating the master,  had  begun to
kick him about the yard.
     Adolph Myers was  driven from the Pennsylvania town in  the night. With
lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the  door  of the house where he
lived alone and commanded that he  dress and  come forth. It was raining and
one  of the men had  a rope  in his hands.  They had  intended  to  hang the
schoolmaster,  but something  in his  figure, so small, white, and  pitiful,
touched  their hearts  and  they  let  him  escape. As he ran away into  the
darkness  they  repented  of their  weakness and ran after him, swearing and
throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that  screamed and
ran faster and faster into the darkness.
     For twenty  years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but
forty but  looked sixtyfive. The  name of  Biddlebaum he got  from  a box of
goods seen at a freight station  as he hurried through an eastern Ohio town.
He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who raised  chickens,
and with her  he lived until she died.  He had been ill for a year after the
experience in Pennsylvania, and  after his recovery worked as a day  laborer
in  the fields, going timidly  about  and  striving  to conceal  his  hands.
Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must
be to  blame. Again  and again  the fathers of the  boys had  talked of  the
hands. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared, dancing,
with fury in the schoolhouse yard.
     Upon  the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued
to walk up  and down until the sun had disappeared and  the road  beyond the
field was lost  in the grey shadows.  Going into his house he cut  slices of
bread and  spread honey upon them. When the rumble of the evening train that
took away the express cars loaded with  the  day's  harvest of  berries  had
passed and restored the  silence of the summer night,  he went again to walk
upon the veranda. In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became
quiet. Although he still hungered for the presence  of the boy, who was  the
medium through which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a
part  of his loneliness  and his waiting.  Lighting a lamp,  Wing Biddlebaum
washed the  few dishes soiled by his simple meal and,  setting up a  folding
cot  by the  screen door that led to the  porch, prepared to undress for the
night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the
table; putting the lamp  upon a low  stool he began to pick up  the  crumbs,
carrying  them to  his mouth one by one with  unbelievable rapidity.  In the
dense blotch of light beneath the table,  the kneeling  figure looked like a
priest  engaged  in  some  service of  his  church.  The nervous  expressive
fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for
the fingers of  the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his
rosary.

     PAPER PILLS
     HE WAS AN old man with  a  white beard  and  huge  nose and hands. Long
before the time during which we will know him,  he was a  doctor and drove a
jaded  white  horse from house to  house through the  streets of  Winesburg.
Later he married  a girl who had  money.  She had been  left a large fertile
farm  when  her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many
people she seemed very  beautiful. Everyone  in  Winesburg wondered  why she
married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.
     The knuckles of the doctor's hands were extraordinarily large. When the
hands were  closed they looked like clusters of  unpainted  wooden balls  as
large  as walnuts  fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe and
after  his wife's death sat  all day in  his empty office close by  a window
that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once on a hot day
in August  he  tried but found it stuck fast and  after that he  forgot  all
about it.
     Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the
seeds of something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods Company's store,  he worked ceaselessly,  building
up something that he himself destroyed. Little  pyramids of truth he erected
and after erecting knocked them down again  that he might have the truths to
erect other pyramids.
     Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had  worn  one suit of  clothes for ten
years. It  was frayed at the sleeves and little holes  had appeared  at  the
knees  and  elbows. In the  office he  wore also  a  linen duster  with huge
pockets into which he continually  stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks
the scraps of  paper became little  hard  round balls, and when  the pockets
were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he  had but one
friend,  another  old man  named John Spaniard who  owned  a  tree  nursery.
Sometimes, in a  playful  mood,  old  Doctor Reefy took from his  pockets  a
handful of the paper  balls and threw them at the nursery man. "That  is  to
confound  you,  you blathering old  sentimentalist," he cried,  shaking with
laughter.
     The story of  Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the  tall dark girl who
became his wife and  left her money to  him is  a very  curious story. It is
delicious,  like the twisted  little apples  that  grow  in  the orchards of
Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with
frost underfoot. The apples have been  taken from the trees  by the pickers.
They have  been put in barrels and shipped to the  cities where they will be
eaten in  apartments that are filled  with books, magazines,  furniture, and
people. On the trees are only  a few gnarled apples  that the  pickers  have
rejected. They look like the  knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One  nibbles
at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the
apple has been gathered all  of  its  sweetness. One runs  from tree to tree
over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and  filling his
pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
     The girl and Doctor Reefy began their  courtship on a summer afternoon.
He was forty-five then and  already he had begun the practice of filling his
pockets with  the  scraps  of  paper  that became hard balls and were thrown
away. The habit had been  formed as  he  sat in his  buggy behind  the jaded
white horse and went  slowly along country roads. On the papers were written
thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.
     One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of  many
of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded
the world. It became terrible and then  faded away  and the little  thoughts
began again.
     The tall  dark  girl came to see Doctor  Reefy because  she was in  the
family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a
series of circumstances also curious.
     The death  of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had
come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels.  For two years she
saw suitors  almost  every evening. Except  two they  were  all alike.  They
talked  to her of passion and there  was  a strained eager  quality in their
voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different
were  much unlike  each other. One  of them, a slender young man with  white
hands, the son of a  jeweler in Winesburg, talked  continually of virginity.
When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired
boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get  her into
the darkness, where he began to kiss her.
     For a  time the  tall dark  girl thought  she would marry the jeweler's
son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and then she
began to be afraid of something.  Beneath his talk of virginity she began to
think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to
her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him
turning it slowly about in the white  hands and  staring at it. At night she
dreamed  that he had bitten into  her  body and that his jaws were dripping.
She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way  to the one
who said  nothing at  all but who in the moment of  his passion actually did
bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed.
     After the tall dark girl  came to know  Doctor Reefy  it seemed to  her
that she  never wanted  to  leave him again. She went  into  his office  one
morning  and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened
to her.
     In the office  of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept   the  bookstore   in   Winesburg.   Like   all  old-fashioned  country
practitioners,  Doctor Reefy  pulled teeth, and the woman who waited  held a
handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the
tooth  was taken out they both screamed and  blood ran down  on  the woman's
white  dress.  The tall dark girl  did not pay any attention. When the woman
and the man had gone the doctor  smiled.  "I will take  you driving into the
country with me," he said.
     For  several weeks the tall dark  girl  and  the  doctor were  together
almost every day.  The condition that had brought her to  him  passed  in an
illness, but she  was  like  one who  has discovered the  sweetness  of  the
twisted  apples,  she could  not get her mind  fixed again  upon  the  round
perfect fruit  that is  eaten in the city apartments. In  the fall after the
beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married  Doctor Reefy  and in
the  following spring she died. During the winter he read to  her all of the
odds  and ends  of thoughts he had scribbled on the  bits of paper. After he
had read  them he laughed and  stuffed them  away  in his  pockets to become
round hard balls.

     MOTHER
     ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and
her face was  marked  with smallpox scars. Although she was but  forty-five,
some obscure  disease had taken  the fire out of her  figure. Listlessly she
went about the disorderly  old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the
ragged  carpets and,  when  she was able to  be  about, doing  the work of a
chambermaid among  beds soiled by  the slumbers of  fat traveling  men.  Her
husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick
military  step, and a black mustache trained to turn sharply up at the ends,
tried to put  the wife  out  of his mind. The presence  of the tall  ghostly
figure, moving slowly  through the halls, he took as a  reproach to himself.
When he thought of her  he grew angry  and swore. The hotel was unprofitable
and forever on the edge of  failure  and he wished  himself  out  of  it. He
thought of the old house and the woman  who lived there with him  as  things
defeated and done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was
now  a  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 fide 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 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  makeup 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 people's dirty
clothes. In she would come and stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her
apron that was covered with soap-suds.
     "'Don't touch it! Don't you dare  touch that money,' my brother roared,
and then he  himself  took five or ten dollars and went tramping  off to the
saloons. When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more. He never
gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he had spent it  all,
a little at a time. Then he went back to  his job with  the painting crew on
the  railroad.  After  he had  gone  things began  to  arrive at  our house,
groceries and such things. Sometimes there would  be a dress for mother or a
pair of shoes for me.
     "Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother  much  more than  she  did me,
although he never said a kind word  to either of us and always raved  up and
down threatening us if  we dared so much as touch  the  money that sometimes
lay on the table three days.
     "We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister and prayed. I was
a regular ass about saying prayers. You should have heard me. When my father
died I prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother was in town
drinking  and  going  about buying the things  for us. In  the evening after
supper I knelt by the table where the money lay  and  prayed for hours. When
no one was looking I stole a dollar  or two and put it  in  my  pocket. That
makes me laugh now but then it was terrible. It was on my mind all the time.
I  got  six dollars  a week  from my  job on  the  paper and always  took it
straight home to mother. The  few dollars  I stole from my  brother's pile I
spent on  myself, you  know,  for  trifles,  candy  and  cigarettes and such
things.
     "When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I went over there. I
borrowed some money  from the man for whom I worked and went on the train at
night. It was  raining. In the  asylum they treated  me as  though I were  a
king.
     "The men who had jobs in the  asylum had found out I  was  a  newspaper
reporter.  That made  them  afraid.  There  had  been some negligence,  some
carelessness,  you see, when father was  ill. They  thought perhaps I  would
write it up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do anything of
the kind.
     "Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed the
dead body. I wonder what put that notion into my  head. Wouldn't my brother,
the  painter, have  laughed,  though.  There I stood over the dead body  and
spread  out my  hands.  The  superintendent of the asylum  and some  of  his
helpers came in and  stood about looking sheepish.  It was  very  amusing. I
spread out my hands and  said, 'Let peace brood  over  this carcass.' That's
what I said. "
     Jumping to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor Parcival began to
walk up and  down in the office of  the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard
sat listening. He was  awkward  and, as  the office was  small,  continually
knocked against things. "What a fool I am  to be talking," he said. "That is
not  my object in  coming here  and forcing my  acquaintanceship upon you. I
have  something else in mind. You are a reporter just as I was once and  you
have attracted my attention. You may end by becoming just such another fool.
I want to warn you and keep on warning you. That's why I seek you out."
     Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard's attitude  toward men.
It  seemed  to the  boy  that  the  man had but one object  in view, to make
everyone seem  despicable. "I want to  fill  you with hatred and contempt so
that you will be a superior being," he declared. "Look at  my brother. There
was a fellow, eh? He despised everyone, you see.  You have no idea with what
contempt he looked upon mother and me. And was he not our superior? You know
he was. You  have  not seen him and  yet  I  have made you feel that. I have
given you a sense of  it. He is dead. Once when  he was drunk he lay down on
the tracks and  the car in which he  lived  with the other painters ran over
him."
     One day  in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg. For a
month George  Willard  had been going each  morning to spend  an hour in the
doctor's office.  The visits  came about through a desire on the part of the
doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a  book he was in the process of
writing.  To write  the book Doctor  Parcival declared was the object of his
coming to Winesburg to live.
     On the morning in August before the coming of the boy,  an incident had
happened in the doctor's office. There had been an  accident on Main Street.
A team  of horses had  been frightened by a train and had run away. A little
girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown from a buggy and killed.
     On  Main Street everyone had become  excited  and a cry for doctors had
gone up. All three of the active practitioners of the town had  come quickly
but  had found the child dead. From the  crowd someone had run to the office
of Doctor  Parcival who  had bluntly refused to go down out of his office to
the  dead child.  The useless  cruelty of his refusal had  passed unnoticed.
Indeed, the  man who had come up the stairway to summon him had hurried away
without hearing the refusal.
     All of this, Doctor Parcival  did not know and when George Willard came
to his office he found the man shaking with terror. "What I  have  done will
arouse the people of this town," he declared excitedly. "Do I not know human
nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word of my refusal will be whispered
about. Presently men will  get together in groups and talk of it.  They will
come here. We will quarrel and there will be talk of hanging. Then they will
come again bearing a rope in their hands."
     Doctor Parcival shook with fright. "I have a presentiment," he declared
emphatically. "It  may be that what I am talking  about will  not occur this
morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged. Everyone will
get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main Street."
     Going to the door of his dirty  office,  Doctor Parcival looked timidly
down  the stairway leading to the street.  When he returned  the fright that
had been in his eyes was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming on tiptoe
across  the room he tapped  George  Willard  on  the shoulder. "If  not now,
sometime," he  whispered, shaking his head. "In the end I will be crucified,
uselessly crucified."
     Doctor  Parcival  began to plead with  George  Willard. "You  must  pay
attention to me," he urged. "If something  happens  perhaps you will be able
to write the book that I may never  get written. The idea is very simple, so
simple  that if  you are not  careful you  will forget it. It is  this--that
everyone in the world  is Christ and  they are  all crucified. That's what I
want to  say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens,  don't  you  dare let
yourself forget."

     NOBODY KNOWS
     LOOKING CAUTIOUSLY  ABOUT,  George Willard  arose from his  desk in the
office of the Winesburg  Eagle and went  hurriedly out at the back door. The
night  was warm and  cloudy and although it  was not yet eight o'clock,  the
alleyway back of the Eagle office was pitch dark. A team of horses tied to a
post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the hardbaked ground. A cat sprang
from under George Willard's feet and ran away into the night. The  young man
was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed by a blow. In
the alleyway he trembled as though with fright.
     In  the  darkness  George  Willard walked  along  the  alleyway,  going
carefully and cautiously. The back doors  of the Winesburg  stores were open
and he  could  see  men sitting  about under the  store lamps. In Myerbaum's
Notion Store Mrs. Willy the saloon keeper's wife stood by the counter with a
basket on her arm. Sid  Green the  clerk was waiting on  her. He leaned over
the counter and talked earnestly.
     George Willard  crouched and then jumped through the path of light that
came  out  at the door. He began to  run  forward in the darkness. Behind Ed
Griffith's saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the ground.
The runner stumbled over the sprawling legs. He laughed brokenly.
     George  Willard had set forth  upon an adventure. All day he  had  been
trying to make up his  mind to go through with the adventure  and now he was
acting. In the  office of the Winesburg Eagle he had  been sitting since six
o'clock trying to think.
     There had been no  decision. He had just jumped to  his  feet,  hurried
past Will  Henderson who  was reading proof in the printshop  and started to
run along the alleyway.
     Through  street after  street went George  Willard, avoiding the people
who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he  passed a street lamp
he  pulled  his hat down over his face. He did  not dare think. In  his mind
there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid  the adventure
on which he had  set out  would be  spoiled,  that he would lose courage and
turn back.
     George Willard  found  Louise Trunnion in  the  kitchen of her father's
house. She was  washing dishes  by  the light  of a kerosene lamp. There she
stood behind  the  screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the back of
the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried to control the
shaking  of  his body.  Only  a narrow potato  patch separated  him from the
adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt sure enough of himself to call
to her. "Louise! Oh, Louise!" he called. The  cry stuck  in  his throat. His
voice became a hoarse whisper.
     Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth
in her hand. "How do  you know I want to go out with you," she said sulkily.
"What makes you so sure?"
     George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness
with the fence between them. "You go on  along,"  she said. "Pa's in  there.
I'll come along. You wait by Williams' barn."
     The  young  newspaper  reporter  had  received  a  letter  from  Louise
Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The
letter  was  brief.  "I'm  yours  if you want me," it  said.  He thought  it
annoying that in the darkness  by  the  fence she had  pretended  there  was
nothing between  them.  "She has a nerve!  Well,  gracious sakes,  she has a
nerve,"  he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of  vacant
lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had been  planted right
down to the sidewalk.
     When Louise Trunnion came out  of the front door of her house she still
wore the gingham dress in  which  she had been washing dishes. There was  no
hat on  her head.  The  boy could see her standing with  the doorknob in her
hand talking  to someone within,  no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her father.
Old Jake was half deaf and she shouted. The door closed  and everything  was
dark and  silent  in  the  little side street. George Willard trembled  more
violently than ever.
     In the shadows by Williams' barn George and Louise stood, not daring to
talk. She was  not particularly comely and there was a  black smudge on  the
side of  her nose.  George thought she  must have  rubbed her  nose with her
finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.
     The young man began to laugh nervously. "It's warm," he said. He wanted
to touch her with his hand. "I'm not  very bold," he thought. Just to  touch
the folds  of the soiled gingham  dress would, he  decided,  be an exquisite
pleasure. She began  to  quibble. "You  think you're better than I am. Don't
tell me, I guess I know," she said drawing closer to him.
     A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that
had lurked in the girl's eyes when they had  met on the  streets and thought
of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered  tales concerning
her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male,
bold and aggressive. In  his heart there was no  sympathy for her. "Ah, come
on,  it'll  be all right. There won't  be anyone know anything. How can they
know?" he urged.
     They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the  cracks of
which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks  were missing and the sidewalk was
rough  and  irregular.  He took  hold  of her hand that  was also rough  and
thought it delightfully small. "I can't go far," she  said and her voice was
quiet, unperturbed.
     They  crossed a bridge that  ran over a tiny  stream and passed another
vacant lot in which corn grew. The street ended. In the path at  the side of
the road  they were  compelled to walk one behind the other.  Will Overton's
berry field  lay beside  the road and  there was a pile of boards. "Will  is
going to build a shed to store berry  crates here," said George and they sat
down upon the boards.
     When George Willard got back into Main  Street it  was past ten o'clock
and had begun to rain. Three times he walked up and down the  length of Main
Street. Sylvester West's Drug Store was still open and he went in and bought
a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was
pleased. For five  minutes the two stood in the shelter  of the store awning
and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had wanted  more than anything
else  to talk to some man.  Around a corner toward the New Willard  House he
went whistling softly.
     On the sidewalk at the side of Winney's Dry Goods Store where there was
a high board fence covered  with circus pictures, he  stopped whistling  and
stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening  as though for a
voice  calling his name. Then  again he  laughed  nervously. "She hasn't got
anything on me. Nobody knows," he muttered doggedly and went on his way.

     GODLINESS
     A Tale in Four Parts
     THERE  WERE ALWAYS three or four old people  sitting on the front porch
of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the
old  people were women  and sisters to Jesse. They were  a  colorless,  soft
voiced  lot. Then  there was a  silent old man with thin white hair who  was
Jesse's uncle.
     The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outercovering over a framework
of logs. It was  in reality not one  house but a  cluster  of houses  joined
together  in  a  rather haphazard  manner.  Inside, the  place was  full  of
surprises. One went  up steps  from the living room into the dining room and
there were always steps to be ascended or descended in passing from one room
to another. At  meal  times the place was like a beehive.  At one moment all
was  quiet, then doors began to open, feet clattered  on stairs, a murmur of
soft voices arose and people appeared from a dozen obscure corners.
     Besides the  old people,  already mentioned, many others  lived in  the
Bentley house. There were  four hired men,  a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe,
who  was  in charge  of  the housekeeping,  a  dull-witted girl  named Eliza
Stoughton,  who  made beds and  helped with the milking, a boy who worked in
the stables, and Jesse Bentley himself, the owner and overlord of it all.
     By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that
part of Northern Ohio where the  Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge  from
pioneer life. Jesse then owned machinery  for harvesting grain. He had built
modern  barns and most  of his land  was  drained  with  carefully laid tile
drain, but in order to understand the man we  will have to  go  back  to  an
earlier day.
     The Bentley family had  been  in Northern Ohio  for several generations
before Jesse's time. They came from New York State and took up land when the
country was new and land could be had  at a low price. For a long time they,
in common with all the other Middle Western people, were very poor. The land
they had settled  upon was  heavily wooded  and covered with fallen logs and
underbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing these away and cutting the
timber,  there were still the stumps to be reckoned  with. Plows run through
the fields  caught on hidden roots, stones lay  all about, on the low places
water gathered, and the young corn turned yellow, sickened and died.
     When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers  had come into their ownership
of the place, much of the harder part of the work of clearing had been done,
but they clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals.  They lived
as  practically all of  the farming people of the time lived. In the  spring
and  through most  of  the winter  the  highways  leading  into  the town of
Winesburg were a sea  of mud. The four  young men of the family  worked hard
all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night
slept like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into  their lives came little that
was not coarse  and  brutal  and  outwardly they  were themselves coarse and
brutal.  On  Saturday  afternoons  they  hitched  a  team  of  horses  to  a
three-seated wagon and went off to town. In town they stood about the stoves
in the stores talking to other  farmers or to  the  store keepers. They were
dressed in  overalls and in  the winter  wore heavy coats  that were flecked
with mud. Their hands as  they stretched them out  to the heat of the stoves
were cracked and red. It was  difficult for them to talk and so they for the
most  part  kept  silent. When they had bought meat, flour, sugar, and salt,
they  went into one  of the Winesburg saloons  and  drank  beer.  Under  the
influence of drink  the  naturally  strong  lusts  of  their  natures,  kept
suppressed by  the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released.  A
kind of crude and animallike poetic fervor  took  possession of them. On the
road  home  they stood  up on  the wagon  seats  and shouted  at  the stars.
Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke  forth
into  songs. Once  Enoch  Bentley,  the  older one of  the boys,  struck his
father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a teamster's whip, and the old man
seemed likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in the loft of the
stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passion turned out to be
murder. He was kept alive with food brought by his mother, who also kept him
informed of the injured man's condition. When all turned out well he emerged
from his hiding place and went back to the work of  clearing land  as though
nothing had happened.
     The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the  fortunes of the Bentleys and
was responsible  for the rise  of the  youngest  son, Jesse. Enoch,  Edward,
Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they were
all  killed. For a time after  they went away to the South, old Tom tried to
run the place, but he was not successful. When the last of the four had been
killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come home.
     Then  the mother,  who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and
the father  became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and
moving into  town. All day he went about shaking his head and muttering. The
work in the  fields was neglected and weeds  grew high in the  corn. Old Tim
hired men but he did not use them intelligently. When  they had gone away to
the fields in the morning he wandered into the woods and  sat down on a log.
Sometimes he forgot to come home at night and one of the daughters had to go
in search of him.
     When  Jesse Bentley came home  to the farm and began  to take charge of
things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man  of twenty-two. At eighteen he
had left home to go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a
minister of the Presbyterian Church. All  through  his boyhood he  had  been
what  in our country was called an  "odd sheep" and  had not got on with his
brothers. Of all the family  only his mother had  understood him and she was
now dead. When he came  home to take charge  of the farm, that  had  at that
time grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone  on  the farms about and
in  the nearby town of  Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle
the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.
     There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse
did  not look like a man at all. He was  small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true  to the  traditions  of young ministers, wore a long black
coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused  when they saw
him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when  they saw the
woman he had married in the city.
     As  a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon  go under. That was perhaps
Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War
was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate. Jesse
was  hard with  her as he was  with everybody about him  in those days.  She
tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her
go on without interference. She helped to do the milking and did part of the
housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a year
she worked every day from sunrise  until late at night and then after giving
birth to a child she died.
     As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately built man  there was
something  within him  that  could  not easily be killed. He had brown curly
hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and
uncertain. Not  only was he slender but  he was also  short of  stature. His
mouth was like  the mouth  of a sensitive and very  determined child.  Jesse
Bentley was a fanatic. He was  a man born out of his time and place and  for
this he  suffered  and  made others suffer. Never did he succeed in  getting
what he wanted out of fife and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very
short time after he came home to the Bentley farm  he  made everyone there a
little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his
mother had been, was afraid also. At the  end of two weeks after his coming,
old Tom  Bentley made over to  him the  entire ownership  of the  place  and
retired into the background.  Everyone retired into the background. In spite
of his youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of
his people. He was so in earnest in everything he did  and said that  no one
understood him. He made  everyone on the farm  work as they had never worked
before and  yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well they  went
well  for Jesse and  never  for the people who  were his dependents.  Like a
thousand other strong men  who have come into the  world here  in America in
these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could  master others but he
could not master himself. The running  of the farm as it had never  been run
before was easy for him. When he came home  from Cleveland where he had been
in school,  he shut  himself off from all of his people  and  began to  make
plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men  on  the farms  about him worked  too  hard and were too fired  to
think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its
success  was  a  relief  to  Jesse. It partially satisfied  something in his
passionate nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on  to
the old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked
into the barnyard  and other windows that  looked off across  the fields. By
the window he sat  down  to think.  Hour after hour and day after day he sat
and looked  over the  land  and  thought  out  his new  place  in  life. The
passionate burning thing in his nature  flamed up and his eyes  became hard.
He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced
before and  then  he wanted something else.  It  was the  indefinable hunger
within that made  his eyes  waver and  that kept  him  always  more and more
silent  before people. He would have given much to achieve peace and  in him
was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
     All over his body Jesse  Bentley  was  alive.  In  his  small frame was
gathered the  force  of a  long  line  of  strong men.  He  had always  been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm  and later when he
was a young man  in school. In the school  he had studied and thought of God
and the Bible with  his whole mind and heart. As time passed and he grew  to
know people better,  he began to  think of  himself as an extraordinary man,
one set  apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing
of great importance, and as he looked about at his  fellow men  and saw  how
like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also
such a clod. Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he
was blind to the fact that his young wife  was  doing a strong woman's  work
even after she had become large with child and that she  was killing herself
in his service, he did not  intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted  with toil, made over to him the  ownership of  the farm
and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he shrugged
his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.
     In the room by  the window overlooking the  land  that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs.  In the stables he could hear the
tramping of his horses and the restless movement  of his cattle. Away in the
fields  he could see other cattle wandering over green  hills. The voices of
men, his men who worked for him, came in to him through the window. From the
milkhouse there was the steady  thump, thump of a churn being manipulated by
the half-witted  girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind went back to the men of
Old Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God
had come down out of the skies and talked to  these men and he wanted God to
notice and  to talk to him also.  A kind of  feverish boyish eagerness to in
some  way achieve in his own life the flavor of  significance that  had hung
over these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his  own words strengthened and fed his
eagerness.
     "I  am  a new kind of man  come  into possession  of  these fields," he
declared. "Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all
the men who have gone  before me here! O  God, create in me  another  Jesse,
like that one of  old, to rule  over men and  to be  the father of sons  who
shall  be rulers!" Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and  jumping to his
feet walked up and down in  the room. In fancy  he saw himself living in old
times and among old  peoples.  The  land  that lay stretched out  before him
became of vast significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of
men sprung from himself. It seemed to him that in  his day as in those other
and  older  days, kingdoms might be created  and  new impulses given to  the
lives  of men  by  the power of  God  speaking  through a chosen servant. He
longed to  be such a servant. "It  is God's work  I have come to the land to
do,"  he declared in a loud voice  and his  short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.
     It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men  and women of a later
day  to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last  fifty years a vast change has
taken  place in the  lives of  our  people. A revolution has  in fact  taken
place. The coming  of industrialism, attended by all the  roar and rattle of
affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new  voices that have come among us
from overseas, the going  and  coming of  trains, the growth  of cities, the
building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past
farmhouses, and  now  in these later days the coming of  the automobiles has
worked a tremendous change in the lives and in  the habits of thought of our
people of  Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be
in  the hurry  of our  times, are in every household, magazines circulate by
the millions of  copies,  newspapers  are  everywhere.  In our day  a farmer
standing  by the stove in the  store in his village  has  his mind filled to
overflowing with the words of other men. The  newspapers and  the  magazines
have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a
kind of  beautiful childlike  innocence is  gone forever.  The farmer by the
stove is brother to the men of  the cities, and if you listen you  will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.
     In Jesse Bentley's  time  and  in the  country  districts of  the whole
Middle West in  the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored too
hard and were too  tired  to read. In them  was no desire for words  printed
upon paper. As  they worked in  the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took
possession of them. They believed in God and in God's power to control their
lives. In the little Protestant  churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of
God  and  his  works.  The churches  were  the  center  of  the  social  and
intellectual  life of the times. The figure  of God was big in the hearts of
men.
     And so, having been  born an imaginative child and having within him  a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward
God. When the war took his brothers  away, he saw  the hand  of God in that.
When his father became ill and could no  longer attend to the running of the
farm, he took that also  as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came
to him, he walked about at  night through the streets thinking of the matter
and when he had come home and had got  the work on the  farm well under way,
he went again at night  to walk through  the forests and  over the low hills
and to think of God.
     As he walked the importance of his own figure in  some divine plan grew
in his  mind.  He grew avaricious and was impatient  that the farm contained
only  six  hundred acres.  Kneeling  in  a fence corner at the edge  of some
meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence  and looking up he saw the
stars shining down at him.
     One evening, some months  after his father's death, and when  his  wife
Katherine  was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of  childbirth, Jesse
left his house and went for a long  walk. The Bentley farm was situated in a
tiny valley  watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of  the
stream to the end  of  his  own  land  and  on through  the  fields  of  his
neighbors.  As he walked the valley broadened and then narrowed again. Great
open  stretches  of field  and wood lay before him. The moon  came  out from
behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat down to think.
     Jesse  thought  that as the true  servant of God the  entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his possession. He
thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder
and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over
stones, and he began to think of the men  of old times who like himself  had
owned flocks and lands.
     A fantastic impulse, half  fear, half  greediness,  took possession  of
Jesse  Bentley.  He remembered  how  in the  old  Bible story the  Lord  had
appeared  to  that other Jesse and told him to send his son  David  to where
Saul and the men  of  Israel were  fighting the Philistines in the Valley of
Elah. Into Jesse's mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who
owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies  of God.
"Suppose," he  whispered to himself, "there should come from among  them one
who, like Goliath the Philistine of Gath,  could defeat me and take  from me
my possessions." In fancy he  felt the sickening  dread that he thought must
have lain heavy on the  heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to
his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His
voice carried far over the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to
me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall  help me to pluck at last all
of these lands out  of the hands of the Philistines and  turn  them  to  Thy
service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth."

     II
     DAVID HARDY OF Winesburg, Ohio, was the  grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley  farms. When he was  twelve years  old he  went to the  old
Bentley place  to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the  girl who came  into
the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that
he be given a son, had grown to  womanhood on the farm and had married young
John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not
live happily  together and everyone agreed that she was to blame.  She was a
small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been
inclined to  fits  of  temper and  when  not  angry she was often morose and
silent.  In  Winesburg it  was said that she drank. Her husband, the banker,
who  was a careful,  shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy. When he began
to  make money he  bought  for her  a large  brick  house on  Elm  Street in
Winesburg  and  he was the first man in that  town to keep a  manservant  to
drive his wife's carriage.
     But Louise could not be made happy.  She flew into  half insane fits of
temper  during  which   she  was  sometimes  silent,  sometimes  noisy   and
quarrelsome.  She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from the
kitchen and threatened her husband's life. Once she deliberately set fire to
the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her own room and would
see  no one. Her life, lived as  a half recluse, gave rise to all  sorts  of
stories  concerning her.  It was  said that she took drugs and that  she hid
herself  away from people because she was often  so  under the  influence of
drink  that  her  condition  could  not be  concealed.  Sometimes on  summer
afternoons she  came out of the  house and got into her carriage. Dismissing
the driver  she took the reins in her own hands and drove  off at  top speed
through the streets. If a pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead
and the frightened citizen  had to escape as best he could. To the people of
the  town  it seemed  as though she wanted  to run  them down. When she  had
driven  through  several streets,  tearing  around  corners and beating  the
horses with the whip, she  drove off into  the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow down
to  a walk  and her  wild,  reckless mood passed. She  became thoughtful and
muttered words. Sometimes  tears came into her  eyes. And then when she came
back into  town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets. But for
the influence of  her husband and  the respect he inspired in people's minds
she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.
     Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this  woman and as can well
be imagined there  was not much  joy in his childhood. He was too young then
to have opinions of his own about people, but at times  it was difficult for
him not to have  very definite opinions  about the woman who was his mother.
David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the
people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard. His eyes were brown and as
a child he had a habit  of looking at things and people  a long time without
appearing  to see what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of
harshly or when he overheard her berating his  father, he was frightened and
ran  away  to  hide.  Sometimes he could  not find a  hiding place and  that
confused him. Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the
wall, he closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything.  He had a habit
of talking aloud  to himself, and early in life a  spirit of  quiet  sadness
often took possession of him.
     On the  occasions  when David  went to  visit  his  grandfather  on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished that he
would never have to go back  to town and once when he had come home from the
farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his
mind.
     David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to  go about his  own affairs and  left the boy at  the head  of the
street in which  the Hardy house stood. It  was early dusk of a fall evening
and  the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could
not bear to go into the house where  his mother and father lived, and  on an
impulse he decided to run away from home. He intended to go back to the farm
and  to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered  weeping
and frightened on country roads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in
the sky. The boy's  imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see
and hear  strange things in the  darkness. Into his mind came the conviction
that he was walking and  running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The  darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind
blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team  of horses approached along the
road in which he  walked he was  frightened and  climbed  a fence. Through a
field he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt
of the soft ground with his fingers.  But for the figure of his grandfather,
whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the world
must be  altogether empty. When his cries  were heard  by a  farmer  who was
walking home from town and he was brought back to his father's house, he was
so tired and excited that he did not know what was happening to him.
     By chance David's father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son's return to
town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy with
several men of  the town went to search  the country. The report  that David
had been kidnapped ran about through the  streets of Winesburg. When he came
home there were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched
him  eagerly in her  arms. David  thought she  had  suddenly  become another
woman. He could not  believe that  so delightful a thing had  happened. With
her own hands Louise  Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food.
She would not let him go to bed but, when he had put on his  nightgown, blew
out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms.  For an hour
the woman  sat in  the darkness and held  her  boy. All  the  time  she kept
talking in a low voice. David could not understand  what had so changed her.
Her habitually dissatisfied  face had become, he thought, the most  peaceful
and  lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held  him more
and more  tightly. On and on  went her voice. It was  not harsh or shrill as
when  she talked  to  her husband,  but  was  like  rain  falling on  trees.
Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found,
but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them away. He thought
it must be a game his mother and the men  of the  town were playing with him
and laughed joyously. Into  his mind came the thought  that his having  been
lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter. He
thought  that  he  would have  been  willing  to  go through  the  frightful
experience a thousand  times to be sure  of  finding at the  end of the long
black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become.
     During the  last years of young  David's  boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she  became for  him  just a woman with whom he  had once  lived.
Still he could not get  her  figure out  of his mind and as he grew older it
became more  definite. When he  was twelve  years old he went to the Bentley
farm to live. Old Jesse came into town  and fairly demanded that he be given
charge of the boy. The old man was excited  and determined on having his own
way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and
then the  two men went to the house  on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They
both expected her to make trouble  but were mistaken. She was very quiet and
when Jesse  had explained his  mission and had gone on at  some length about
the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and  in the quiet
atmosphere of the old farmhouse, she nodded her head  in approval. "It is an
atmosphere not corrupted by  my  presence," she said sharply. Her  shoulders
shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. "It is a place for a
man  child, although  it  was never a place for me," she went on. "You never
wanted me  there and of course the air of your house did me no  good. It was
like poison in my blood but it will be different with him."
     Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two  men  to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her room for
days. Even when the boy's clothes were packed  and he was taken away she did
not  appear. The loss of  her  son made a  sharp break  in her  life and she
seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John Hardy thought it  had
all turned out very well indeed.
     And  so young David went to  live  in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two  of  the  old farmer's sisters were alive and still  lived in the house.
They were afraid of  Jesse  and rarely spoke when  he was about. One  of the
women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she was younger was a
born mother and became the boy's caretaker. Every night when he had  gone to
bed she went into his  room and sat  on the floor until he fell asleep. When
he became drowsy she became bold and  whispered things that he later thought
he must have dreamed.
     Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed  that  his
mother had  come to  him and that she had  changed so that she was always as
she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and reaching out
his  hand stroked  the  face of  the  woman  on  the  floor so that she  was
ecstatically happy.  Everyone in the old  house became  happy after the  boy
went  there. The  hard insistent thing in  Jesse Bentley that  had  kept the
people  in  the  house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by
the presence of the girl Louise was apparently swept  away by the coming  of
the boy. It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.
     The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in  all
the valley of  Wine Creek,  and  who had  wanted  God to send him  a sign of
approval by  way of a son out of the womb of Katherine,  began to think that
at  last his prayers  had been  answered. Although  he was at that time only
fiftyfive years  old he looked seventy  and was worn out  with much thinking
and  scheming.  The effort he had made to  extend his land holdings had been
successful  and  there  were few farms in the valley that  did not belong to
him, but until David came he was a bitterly disappointed man.
     There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been  a battleground  for these influences. First there was the old
thing  in him. He wanted to be a  man of God and a  leader among men of God.
His walking in the fields and through  the forests at night  had brought him
close to nature and there were forces in the passionately religious man that
ran out to  the  forces  in nature. The disappointment that had come  to him
when a daughter and not a son had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him
like a blow struck by some  unseen hand  and the blow had  somewhat softened
his egotism.  He  still believed that God might at any moment  make  himself
manifest out of the winds or the  clouds, but  he  no  longer demanded  such
recognition. Instead  he prayed for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful
and thought God had deserted  the world. He  regretted the fate that had not
let  him live  in a simpler and sweeter time  when  at the beckoning of some
strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into
the wilderness  to  create new races. While he worked night and day  to make
his farms  more productive and to extend his holdings of land,  he regretted
that he  could not  use his own  restless energy in the building of temples,
the slaying of unbelievers and  in general in the  work of  glorifying God's
name on earth.
     That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the Civil War
and  he,  like all men of his time, had been touched by the  deep influences
that were at work in the country during those years when modem industrialism
was being born.  He  began to  buy machines that would permit  him to do the
work of the farms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if
he were  a  younger  man he  would  give  up  farming altogether and start a
factory in Winesburg for the making of machinery.  Jesse formed the habit of
reading  newspapers and  magazines. He invented a machine  for the making of
fence out of  wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and
places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign
to  the  thing that was growing up  in the minds of others. The beginning of
the most materialistic age  in the history of the world, when  wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only  pay attention
to  moral standards, when the will to power would replace  the will to serve
and  beauty  would  be well-nigh forgotten in the  terrible headlong rush of
mankind  toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse
the man  of God as  it was to  the men about him.  The greedy  thing in  him
wanted to make money faster than it could be made  by tilling the land. More
than once  he went into  Winesburg to talk  with  his son-in-law  John Hardy
about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I  never had," he said
and his eyes shone. "I  am thinking about it  all  the time.  Big things are
going to be done in the country and there will be more money to be made than
I  ever dreamed of. You  get into  it. I  wish I  were younger  and had your
chance." Jesse Bentley walked  up  and down in the bank office and grew more
and more  excited  as he talked.  At one  time  in  his  life  he  had  been
threatened  with paralysis and his  left side remained somewhat weakened. As
he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later  when  he drove back home and when
night  came  on and  the stars came  out  it  was harder to get back the old
feeling of a  close and  personal God who lived  in the sky overhead and who
might at  any moment  reach out his hand, touch  him  on  the shoulder,  and
appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the
things  read in newspapers and magazines,  on  fortunes to  be  made  almost
without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the  coming of the
boy David did much to bring back with  renewed  force the  old faith and  it
seemed to him that God had at last looked with favor upon him.
     As for the boy on the farm,  life began to reveal  itself  to him  in a
thousand  new and  delightful ways. The  kindly attitude  of  all about  him
expanded his quiet  nature and he lost  the half timid, hesitating manner he
had always had with  his people. At night when he went  to bed after a  long
day of adventures in the stables, in the  fields, or driving about from farm
to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the house. If
Sherley Bentley, the woman who came  each night to  sit on the floor by  his
bedside, did not  appear at  once,  he  went  to  the head of the stairs and
shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow halls where for so  long
there had been a tradition of silence. In the morning when he  awoke and lay
still in bed, the sounds that came in to  him through the windows filled him
with  delight.  He  thought  with  a shudder  of  the  life in the house  in
Winesburg and of his mother's  angry voice that had always made him tremble.
There in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. When  he awoke at dawn
the  barnyard  back of the house  also awoke. In  the  house  people stirred
about. Eliza Stoughton the half-witted girl was poked in  the ribs by a farm
hand  and  giggled  noisily, in some  distant  field  a cow bawled  and  was
answered by the cattle  in  the stables,  and one of  the farm  hands  spoke
sharply to the horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped out of
bed and ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excited  his mind,
and he wondered what his mother was doing in the house in town.
     From  the  windows  of his own room he could  not see directly into the
barnyard  where the  farm hands  had  now  all assembled to  do the  morning
shores,  but he could hear the voices of  the men and  the  neighing  of the
horses.  When one of the  men laughed, he laughed also.  Leaning out  at the
open window, he looked into an orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a
litter of tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning  he counted the pigs. "Four,
five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up
and down marks on the  window ledge.  David ran to put  on  his trousers and
shirt. A feverish desire to get out of doors took  possession of him.  Every
morning  he  made such  a  noise  coming down stairs that  Aunt Callie,  the
housekeeper, declared he was trying to tear the  house down. When he had run
through  the  long  old house, shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he
came into the barnyard and looked about with an amazed air of expectancy. It
seemed  to him that in such a place tremendous  things might  have  happened
during  the night.  The farm hands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader,
an old man who had been on the farm since Jesse came into possession and who
before David's time had never been known to make  a joke, made the same joke
every morning.  It amused David so that he  laughed  and  clapped his hands.
"See, come here and  look,"  cried the old  man. "Grandfather Jesse's  white
mare has tom the black stocking she wears on her foot."
     Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to
farm  up and  down the valley of Wine Creek, and his grandson went with him.
They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white horse. The old man
scratched his thin  white  beard  and talked  to  himself  of his  plans for
increasing the productiveness of  the  fields they visited and of God's part
in the plans all men made. Sometimes he looked  at David  and smiled happily
and then for a long time he appeared to forget the boy's existence. More and
more every day now his mind turned back again  to the dreams that had filled
his mind  when he had  first come out of the  city to live on the land.  One
afternoon he startled David by letting his dreams take entire  possession of
him. With the boy as a witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about
an accident that nearly  destroyed  the  companionship that was  growing  up
between them.
     Jesse and his grandson  were  driving in  a distant part of  the valley
some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the  forest
Wine  Creek  wriggled  its way over stones  toward a distant river.  All the
afternoon Jesse had been in a  meditative mood and now he began to talk. His
mind went  back to the night  when he had  been  frightened by thoughts of a
giant that  might  come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again
as on that night when he  had  run through the fields crying for  a  son, he
became excited to the edge of insanity. Stopping the horse he got out of the
buggy and  asked  David  to get out also. The two climbed over  a fence  and
walked along  the  bank  of the  stream. The boy paid  no attention  to  the
muttering of his grandfather, but ran along beside him and wondered what was
going to happen.  When a rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he
clapped his hands and  danced with delight.  He looked at the tall trees and
was sorry  that he was not a little animal to climb high in the air  without
being frightened. Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the
head of his grandfather into a clump of  bushes. "Wake up, little animal. Go
and climb to the top of the trees," he shouted in a shrill voice.
     Jesse Bentley  went along under the trees with his head bowed  and with
his mind  in  a  ferment.  His earnestness affected  the boy,  who presently
became silent  and a little alarmed.  Into  the  old man's mind had come the
notion that  now he could bring from God  a word or a sign out  of  the sky,
that the presence  of the boy and man on their knees  in some lonely spot in
the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost inevitable.
"It was in just such a place as this that other David tended the sheep  when
his father came and told him to go down unto Saul," he muttered.
     Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen
log  and when he had come to an  open place among the  trees he dropped upon
his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.
     A  kind of terror he had  never known before  took possession of David.
Crouching beneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him and his
own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the presence not
only of  his grandfather but of someone else,  someone  who might  hurt him,
someone who  was not kindly but  dangerous and  brutal. He began  to cry and
reaching down picked up a small stick,  which he held tightly gripped in his
fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in  his  own idea, suddenly arose  and
advanced  toward him, his  terror grew  until  his whole body shook. In  the
woods an intense silence seemed to lie  over everything and suddenly out  of
the silence came the old man's harsh and insistent voice. Gripping the boy's
shoulders, Jesse turned his face to the sky and shouted. The whole left side
of his face twitched and his hand on the boy's shoulder twitched also. "Make
a sign to me, God," he cried. "Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to
me out of the sky and make Thy presence known to me."
     With