nds into  his  pockets and  looking
boldly into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've got to take  me
for a man or let me alone. That's how it is."
     Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George  had  finished talking they  turned down a  side street and
went across a  bridge into a path that ran up the side of  a hill.  The hill
began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward  to  the Winesburg Fair Grounds.
On the hillside grew dense bushes  and small trees and among the bushes were
little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and frozen.
     As he walked behind the woman  up the hill George Willard's heart began
to beat  rapidly and his shoulders  straightened. Suddenly he  decided  that
Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him.  The  new  force that
had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon her and had led
to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with the sense of masculine
power. Although he had  been annoyed that as they walked about she  had  not
seemed to be listening  to his words, the fact that she had  accompanied him
to  this place  took  all his  doubts away. "It is different. Everything has
become different,"  he thought and taking hold  of her shoulder  turned  her
about and stood looking at her, his eyes shining with pride.
     Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon  the  lips  she
leaned heavily against him and looked over  his shoulder into  the darkness.
In her whole  attitude there was  a suggestion of waiting. Again, as  in the
alleyway, George Willard's  mind ran off  into words and,  holding the woman
tightly he whispered the  words into the still night. "Lust,"  he whispered,
"lust and night and women."
     George Willard did not understand what  happened  to him that  night on
the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and then
grew half insane with anger  and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was sure
that all his  life he would continue to hate her. On the hillside he had led
the woman to one of the little open spaces among the bushes  and had dropped
to his knees beside her.  As in the vacant lot,  by the laborers' houses, he
had  put up his  hands  in gratitude for the new  power in himself  and  was
waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.
     The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had power
within himself  to accomplish his  purpose without using his fists. Gripping
George  by the  shoulder  and pulling him to his feet,  he held him with one
hand while he  looked  at Belle Carpenter seated  on the grass. Then with  a
quick wide movement of his arm  he sent the younger man sprawling away  into
the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had  risen to her feet. "You're
no good," he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you. I'd let
you alone if I didn't want you so much."
     On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man who had
humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be  thus
hurled ignominiously aside.
     Three  times the young  reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each  time the
bartender, catching him  by the  shoulder,  hurled him back into the bushes.
The  older man seemed prepared to  keep the exercise going  indefinitely but
George Willard's  head struck the root of a tree and  he lay still. Then  Ed
Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched her away.
     George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes.  As
he crept down the  hillside his heart was sick  within him. He hated himself
and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation. When his  mind
went  back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was puzzled and  stopping in
the darkness listened, hoping to hear  again the  voice outside himself that
had  so  short  a time before put new courage  into  his heart. When his way
homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the
sight and  began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that
now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

     "QUEER"
     FROM HIS SEAT on a box in the rough board  shed that stuck  like a burr
on the  rear of Cowley  & Son's store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior
member of the firm, could see through a dirty  window into the  printshop of
the Winesburg Eagle.  Elmer was putting new shoelaces in his shoes. They did
not go in readily and he had  to take the shoes  off. With the  shoes in his
hand he sat looking at  a  large  hole  in the heel of one of his stockings.
Then looking  quickly up he saw George Willard,  the only newspaper reporter
in Winesburg, standing at  the back door of  the Eagle printshop and staring
absentmindedly about. "Well,  well, what next!" exclaimed the young man with
the shoes  in his  hand,  jumping  to his  feet  and creeping away from  the
window.
     A flush crept into Elmer Cowley's face and his hands  began to tremble.
In Cowley & Son's store  a Jewish  traveling salesman  stood  by the counter
talking to his  father.  He  imagined the reporter could hear what was being
said and the thought made him furious. With one of  the  shoes still held in
his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot
upon the board floor.
     Cowley &  Son's store  did not  face the  main street of Winesburg. The
front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight's wagon shop and a  shed
for  the  sheltering  of farmers' horses.  Beside the store an alleyway  ran
behind the  main street stores and all day drays and delivery wagons, intent
on bringing in and taking out goods,  passed  up and down.  The store itself
was indescribable. Will Henderson once said  of it that  it  sold everything
and  nothing. In the window  facing Maumee  Street stood a chunk of coal  as
large as  an apple  barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were taken, and
beside the black mass of the coal stood three combs of honey grown brown and
dirty in their wooden frames.
     The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale
as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof paint,
bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that companioned the
honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.
     Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to  the eager
patter of words that fell  from the lips of the  traveling man, was tall and
lean and  looked  unwashed. On his  scrawny  neck was a  large wen partially
covered  by  a grey beard.  He  wore a long Prince Albert coat. The coat had
been purchased to serve as a  wedding  garment. Before he became a  merchant
Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore  the Prince Albert coat
to church on Sundays  and on  Saturday afternoons when he came into  town to
trade.  When  he  sold  the  farm to become  a  merchant he  wore  the  coat
constantly. It had become brown with  age and was covered with grease spots,
but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.
     As a  merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and  he  had not
been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family, consisting of
a daughter named Mabel and the  son, lived with him in rooms above the store
and  it did not cost them much to live. His troubles were not financial. His
unhappiness as a merchant  lay in  the fact that when  a traveling  man with
wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid. Behind the counter
he  stood shaking his head. He  was afraid,  first that he would  stubbornly
refuse to buy and thus lose the opportunity to  sell  again;  second that he
would not be stubborn  enough and would  in a moment  of  weakness buy  what
could not be sold.
     In the  store  on the  morning  when  Elmer Cowley  saw George  Willard
standing and apparently listening at the back door of the Eagle printshop, a
situation had arisen that always stirred  the son's wrath. The traveling man
talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty.  "You
see how quickly it  is  done,"  said the traveling  man, who  had for sale a
small flat  metal substitute for collar  buttons. With one  hand  he quickly
unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed
a  flattering wheedling tone. "I tell you what, men have  come to the end of
all this fooling with collar buttons and  you are the man to  make money out
of the change that  is coming.  I am  offering you  the exclusive agency for
this town. Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I'll not visit any other
store. I'll leave the field to you."
     The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on
Ebenezer's breast.  "It's an opportunity  and I  want  you  to take  it," he
urged. "A friend of mine told me about you. 'See that  man Cowley,' he said.
'He's a live one.'"
     The traveling man paused and waited. Taking  a  book from his pocket he
began writing out the order. Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley
went  through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass showcase near
the front door. He took  a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it
about.  "You  get  out of here!"  he  shrieked. "We  don't want  any  collar
fasteners here." An idea  came to him. "Mind, I'm not making any threat," he
added. "I don't  say I'll shoot.  Maybe I just took this gun out of the case
to look  at it. But  you better get out. Yes sir,  I'll say that. You better
grab up your things and get out."
     The young  storekeeper's voice  rose to  a  scream and going behind the
counter  he began to advance  upon  the two men. "We're  through being fools
here!" he cried. "We ain't going to  buy any  more  stuff until we begin  to
sell.  We  ain't  going  to keep  on being queer and  have folks staring and
listening. You get out of here!"
     The traveling man left. Raking  the samples of collar fasteners off the
counter  into a black leather  bag,  he ran. He  was  a  small  man and very
bow-legged and he ran  awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door  and
he stumbled and fell. "Crazy, that's  what he is--crazy!" he sputtered as he
arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.
     In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that
the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was embarrassed.
"Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough," he declared, going
to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting on a barrel he pulled on
and fastened the  shoe he had been holding in his  hand. He was waiting  for
some word of understanding from his father but when Ebenezer spoke his words
only  served  to reawaken the wrath in the son  and the young man ran out of
the store without replying. Scratching his grey  beard with  his  long dirty
fingers, the  merchant looked  at his  son with the same wavering  uncertain
stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. "I'll be starched," he
said softly. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!"
     Elmer  Cowley went out of  Winesburg  and along  a  country  road  that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or what he
was going  to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after turning
sharply to  the right,  dipped under the tracks he stopped  and  the passion
that  had been  the cause of  his outburst in the store began  to again find
expression. "I will  not be queer--one to be looked at and listened  to," he
declared aloud. "I'll  be like  other people. I'll show that George Willard.
He'll find out. I'll show him!"
     The distraught  young man stood in the middle  of the road  and  glared
back at the  town. He did not know  the  reporter George  Willard and had no
special feeling concerning  the tall boy who  ran  about  town gathering the
town  news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the office  and
in the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young
merchant's mind. He thought the boy who passed  and repassed  Cowley & Son's
store and who stopped to  talk  to people in the street must be thinking  of
him  and  perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt, belonged to  the
town, typified  the town, represented in his person  the spirit of the town.
Elmer  Cowley could not have believed that George  Willard had also his days
of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also
his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion
of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to  queerness? Did he  not walk whistling
and  laughing  through Main Street?  Might not  one by striking  his  person
strike  also  the  greater enemy--the  thing  that smiled  and  went its own
way--the judgment of Winesburg?
     Elmer Cowley  was  extraordinarily tall  and  his arms  were  long  and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to grow
upon  his  chin,  were  pale almost  to whiteness.  His teeth protruded from
between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless blueness  of  the
marbles called "aggies" that the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets.
Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year  and had made no friends. He was, he
felt, one  condemned  to go through  life  without friends and he hated  the
thought.
     Sullenly  the tall  young man  tramped along  the  road with his  hands
stuffed into  his trouser pockets.  The  day  was cold with a  raw wind, but
presently  the  sun began to shine  and the road  became soft and muddy. The
tops of the ridges of frozen mud that  formed the road began to melt and the
mud clung to Elmer's shoes. His feet became cold. When  he had gone  several
miles  he turned off the road, crossed  a field  and entered a wood.  In the
wood  he gathered sticks  to  build a  fire, by which he sat  trying to warm
himself, miserable in body and in mind.
     For  two hours he  sat on the log  by the fire and  then,  arising  and
creeping cautiously  through a mass of underbrush,  he went  to a fence  and
looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded  by low  sheds. A smile
came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms to a man who
was husking corn in one of the fields.
     In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to whom
he felt he could explain  himself. The man on the farm was a half-witted old
fellow named  Mook. He had  once  been  employed by Ebenezer  Cowley and had
stayed  on the farm  when  it was sold.  The  old man lived in  one  of  the
unpainted sheds  back of the  farmhouse  and  puttered about all day in  the
fields.
     Mook  the half-wit lived happily. With childlike  faith  he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the  sheds with him,  and when
he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with
the  chickens  that  ran about  the  barnyard. He  it  was  who had put  the
expression  regarding  being  "laundered"  into  the  mouth  of  his  former
employer.  When  excited  or  surprised  by  anything he smiled vaguely  and
muttered: "I'll  be washed and ironed. Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed
and starched."
     When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood  to  meet  Elmer  Cowley,  he  was  neither  surprised  nor  especially
interested in the  sudden appearance  of the young man.  His  feet also were
cold  and  he  sat  on the  log by the  fire,  grateful  for the  warmth and
apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.
     Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking  up and down and
waving his arms about. "You don't understand what's the matter with me so of
course  you  don't  care," he declared. "With me it's different. Look how it
has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was queer, too. Even the
clothes  mother used to wear were  not like other people's clothes, and look
at that coat in which father goes about there in town, thinking he's dressed
up, too. Why don't  he get a new one? It wouldn't cost much.  I'll  tell you
why.  Father doesn't know  and when mother was alive she didn't know either.
Mabel is  different. She knows but  she  won't say anything. I will, though.
I'm  not  going  to be  stared  at  any  longer. Why look here, Mook, father
doesn't know that his store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he'll
never sell the stuff  he buys.  He knows nothing about it. Sometimes  he's a
little  worried that trade doesn't come and then he goes and  buys something
else. In the evenings he  sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will come
after  a while.  He isn't worried. He's queer. He doesn't know  enough to be
worried."
     The excited  young man became more excited. "He don't know but I know,"
he  shouted, stopping to gaze  down into the  dumb, unresponsive face of the
half-wit. "I  know too well. I can't stand it. When we lived out here it was
different. I worked and at night I went to  bed and  slept. I wasn't  always
seeing people and thinking as  I am now. In the evening, there in town, I go
to the post office or to the depot to see the train come in, and no one says
anything to me. Everyone stands around and laughs and they talk but they say
nothing to me. Then I feel so queer  that I can't  talk either. I go away. I
don't say anything. I can't."
     The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. "I won't stand it," he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. "I'm not made to stand
it."
     Maddened  by  the dull face of  the man  on the log  by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the town of
Winesburg.  "Go on  back to  work," he screamed. "What good does it do me to
talk to you?" A  thought  came to him and his  voice  dropped. "I'm a coward
too, eh?" he muttered. "Do you  know why I  came clear out here afoot? I had
to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell. I hunted out another
queer one,  you see. I ran away,  that's what I  did. I couldn't stand up to
someone like that George Willard.  I had to come to you. I ought to tell him
and I will."
     Again his voice  arose to a shout and his arms flew about. "I will tell
him. I won't be queer. I don't care what they think. I won't stand it."
     Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the  half-wit sitting on  the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the fence
went back to his work in the corn. "I'll be washed and ironed and starched,"
he declared. "Well, well, I'll  be washed and ironed." Mook was  interested.
He  went along  a lane to a field  where  two cows stood nibbling at a straw
stack. "Elmer  was here," he  said to the  cows. "Elmer is crazy. You better
get behind the stack  where  he don't see you. He'll hurt someone yet, Elmer
will."
     At eight o'clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard  sat writing.
His  cap was pulled down over  his eyes and  a sullen determined look was on
his face.  "You come  on outside with me," he said, stepping in  and closing
the  door. He kept his hand on the knob as  though prepared to resist anyone
else coming in. "You just come along outside. I want to see you."
     George Willard and  Elmer  Cowley  walked through  the main  street  of
Winesburg.  The night was cold  and George Willard had on a new overcoat and
looked  very spruce  and dressed  up. He thrust his hands into the  overcoat
pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long been wanting to
make friends with the young  merchant and find out what was in his mind. Now
he thought he saw a  chance  and was delighted.  "I wonder  what he's up to?
Perhaps  he thinks he has a  piece of news for the paper. It can't be a fire
because I haven't heard the  fire bell and there isn't  anyone running,"  he
thought.
     In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening,  but few
citizens  appeared and these hurried  along bent on getting to the stove  at
the  back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and the wind
rattled the tin sign that hung over the  entrance to the stairway leading to
Doctor Welling's office. Before Hern's Grocery a basket of apples and a rack
filled with new brooms stood on the sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood
facing  George  Willard.  He tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and
down. His face worked spasmodically. He seemed about to shout.  "Oh,  you go
on  back," he cried. "Don't  stay out here with  me. I ain't got anything to
tell you. I don't want to see you at all."
     For three  hours  the distracted  young  merchant wandered through  the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his failure to
declare  his  determination not to  be queer. Bitterly  the  sense of defeat
settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours of futile sputtering
at nothingness that  had  occupied  the  afternoon  and  his failure in  the
presence of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope of a  future
for himself.
     And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley & Son
had for over a year waited vainly for trade  to come, he crept stealthily in
and  felt  about  in a barrel  that stood by the stove  at the rear.  In the
barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box  containing Cowley & Son's cash. Every
evening Ebenezer Cowley put the  box in the barrel when he closed the  store
and  went upstairs to bed.  "They wouldn't never  think  of a careless place
like that," he told himself, thinking of robbers.
     Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the  little  roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left  from the sale of the
farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly out at the
front door and walked again in the streets.
     The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. "I will get out of here, run away from  home," he told himself.
He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg  at midnight and
went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would steal a ride on the
local and when he got to Cleveland would lose himself in  the  crowds there.
He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and
would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer
be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning
for him as it had for others.
     The  tall  awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed  at
himself because  he  had  been angry  and  had been half  afraid  of  George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter before he
left  town, that he would  tell  him about  things,  perhaps  challenge him,
challenge all of Winesburg through him.
     Aglow with  new confidence Elmer went to the office  of the New Willard
House  and  pounded  on the door.  A  sleep-eyed boy slept on a  cot in  the
office. He received no salary but  was fed at  the hotel table and bore with
pride the title of "night clerk." Before the boy Elmer was bold,  insistent.
"You 'wake him up," he commanded. "You tell him to come down by the depot. I
got to see him and I'm  going away on the local. Tell him to dress and  come
on down. I ain't got much time."
     The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing  to  resume their flight
east. George  Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new  overcoat,
ran down to  the  station platform afire with  curiosity. "Well,  here I am.
What do you want? You've got something to tell me, eh?" he said.
     Elmer tried  to explain. He wet his lips  with his tongue and looked at
the train that  had begun to groan and get under  way. "Well,  you see,"  he
began, and then lost control of his tongue. "I'll be washed and ironed. I'll
be washed and ironed and starched," he muttered half incoherently.
     Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped  into the air and bobbed up and  down
before his eyes. Taking the  two ten-dollar  bills from his pocket he thrust
them into George Willard's hand. "Take them," he  cried. "I don't want them.
Give them to father.  I stole them." With a snarl of rage he  turned and his
long arms began to flay the  air. Like one struggling for release from hands
that held him  he struck out, hitting  George Willard blow after blow on the
breast, the neck, the  mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious,  stunned by  the  terrific  force of the blows.  Springing
aboard the passing train  and  running  over the  tops of cars, Elmer sprang
down  to a flat car  and  lying on his face looked  back, trying  to see the
fallen  man  in the darkness.  Pride surged  up  in him.  "I showed him," he
cried. "I guess I showed him. I ain't so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't
so queer."

     THE UNTOLD LIE
     RAY PEARSON and Hal  Winters  were farm hands employed on  a farm three
miles north  of Winesburg.  On Saturday afternoons  they came into town  and
wandered about through the streets with other fellows from the country.
     Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty with a brown beard
and shoulders rounded  by too much and too hard labor.  In his nature he was
as unlike Hal Winters as two men can be unlike.
     Ray was an altogether serious man  and had a little sharp-featured wife
who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged children,
lived in a  tumble-down frame house beside a creek  at the  back  end of the
Wills farm where Ray was employed.
     Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow. He was not of the
Ned Winters family, who were very respectable people  in Winesburg, but  was
one  of  the three sons of the  old man called Windpeter  Winters  who had a
sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who was looked upon by everyone
in Winesburg as a confirmed old reprobate.
     People  from the part  of Northern Ohio  in which Winesburg  lies  will
remember old Windpeter by his unusual  and tragic  death.  He got drunk  one
evening in town and started to drive home to Unionville  along  the railroad
tracks. Henry Brattenburg,  the butcher, who lived out that way, stopped him
at the edge of the town and told him he was sure to meet the down train  but
Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and drove  on. When  the train struck
and killed  him and his  two horses a farmer and  his wife who were  driving
home along  a  nearby road  saw the accident.  They said that old  Windpeter
stood up on  the seat  of  his wagon, raving  and swearing at  the onrushing
locomotive, and that he fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened
by his incessant slashing  at them, rushed straight ahead  to certain death.
Boys like young George Willard and Seth Richmond will remember the  incident
quite  vividly because, although everyone  in our town said that the old man
would go straight to hell and that the community was better off without him,
they had a secret  conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his
foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously
instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.
     But  this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor  yet of his son Hal
who worked on the Wills farm with  Ray Pearson. It  is Ray's story. It will,
however, be  necessary to  talk a little of young Hal so that you  will  get
into the spirit of it.
     Hal  was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were three of the Winters
boys in that family, John, Hal, and Edward, all broad-shouldered big fellows
like old Windpeter himself  and all fighters and woman-chasers and generally
all-around bad ones.
     Hal was the  worst of the lot and always up to some  devilment. He once
stole  a load of  boards from his father's mill and sold them in  Winesburg.
With the  money he bought himself a suit of  cheap, flashy clothes. Then  he
got  drunk  and when his father came raving into town to  find him, they met
and  fought with  their fists on Main Street and were arrested and  put into
jail together.
     Hal went to work on  the  Wills farm because there was a country school
teacher  out that way who had  taken his fancy. He was  only twenty-two then
but had already been in two or three of what  were spoken of in Winesburg as
"women  scrapes."  Everyone who  heard  of  his  infatuation for  the school
teacher was sure it would turn out badly.  "He'll only get her into trouble,
you'll see," was the word that went around.
     And so these two men, Ray and Hal, were at work in a field on a day  in
the late October. They were husking corn and occasionally something was said
and  they laughed. Then came silence. Ray, who  was  the more  sensitive and
always minded things more, had chapped hands and they hurt. He put them into
his  coat pockets  and  looked away across  the  fields.  He was in  a  sad,
distracted  mood and was affected by the beauty of the country.  If you knew
the  Winesburg country  in the fall  and how the low hills  are all splashed
with yellows and reds you would understand his feeling. He began to think of
the time, long ago when he was a young fellow living with his father, then a
baker in Winesburg, and how on such days he had wandered away into the woods
to gather nuts, hunt rabbits, or just to loaf about  and smoke his pipe. His
marriage had come about through one of his days of wandering. He had induced
a girl who waited on trade in his father's shop to go with him and something
had happened. He was thinking of that afternoon and how it had  affected his
whole life when a spirit of protest awoke in him. He had forgotten about Hal
and muttered words. "Tricked by Gad, that's what I  was, tricked by life and
made a fool of," he said in a low voice.
     As  though understanding his thoughts, Hal Winters spoke up. "Well, has
it been worth while? What about it, eh? What about  marriage and all  that?"
he asked and  then laughed. Hal tried to keep on laughing but he too  was in
an earnest mood. He began to talk earnestly. "Has a fellow got to do it?" he
asked. "Has he got to be harnessed up and driven through life like a horse?"
     Hal didn't wait for an answer but sprang to his  feet and began to walk
back  and  forth  between  the  corn shocks.  He was  getting more and  more
excited.  Bending down suddenly  he picked up an  ear of the yellow corn and
threw it  at the fence.  "I've got Nell Gunther  in  trouble," he said. "I'm
telling you, but you keep your mouth shut."
     Ray Pearson arose and stood staring. He was almost a foot  shorter than
Hal, and when the  younger man came and put his two hands on the older man's
shoulders they made a picture. There they stood in  the big empty field with
the quiet corn shocks  standing in  rows behind them and  the red and yellow
hills in the distance,  and from being just two indifferent workmen they had
become all  alive to each other. Hal  sensed it and because that was his way
he laughed. "Well, old daddy,"  he said awkwardly, "come on, advise me. I've
got Nell in  trouble. Perhaps you've been in the same  fix yourself.  I know
what everyone would say is the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall
I marry and settle down? Shall I  put myself into the harness to be worn out
like  an old horse? You know me,  Ray. There can't anyone break me but I can
break  myself. Shall I do it or shall  I tell Nell to go to the  devil? Come
on, you tell me. Whatever you say, Ray, I'll do."
     Ray  couldn't answer.  He  shook Hal's hands loose  and turning  walked
straight away toward  the  barn. He was a sensitive man and there were tears
in his eyes. He knew there was only one thing to  say to Hal Winters, son of
old  Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own training and all the
beliefs of  the people  he knew would approve, but for his life  he couldn't
say what he knew he should say.
     At half-past four that afternoon Ray was puttering about  the  barnyard
when  his wife came  up the lane along the  creek and  called him. After the
talk with Hal he hadn't returned to the cornfield but worked about the barn.
He had already done  the evening chores and  had seen Hal, dressed and ready
for a roistering night  in town, come out of the  farmhouse and go into  the
road. Along the path to his own house he trudged behind his wife, looking at
the ground  and thinking. He couldn't make out what was wrong. Every time he
raised  his  eyes and saw the beauty of the country  in the failing light he
wanted to do something he had never done before, shout or  scream or hit his
wife with his  fists or  something equally unexpected and terrifying.  Along
the path he  went scratching his head and trying to  make it out.  He looked
hard at his wife's back but she seemed all right.
     She  only wanted him to go into  town for groceries and as soon  as she
had told him what she wanted began to  scold. "You're always puttering," she
said.  "Now I  want  you to hustle. There  isn't anything  in  the house for
supper and you've got to get to town and back in a hurry."
     Ray went into his  own house  and  took an overcoat from a hook back of
the door. It  was torn about the pockets and the collar was shiny.  His wife
went into the bedroom and presently came out with a soiled cloth in one hand
and three  silver dollars in the other.  Somewhere in the house a child wept
bitterly  and a dog that  had  been sleeping by the stove arose  and yawned.
Again the wife scolded. "The children will cry and  cry.  Why are you always
puttering?" she asked.
     Ray  went  out of the house and climbed the  fence into a field. It was
just growing dark and the  scene that lay before him was lovely. All the low
hills were washed with color and even the little  clusters of bushes  in the
corners of the fences were alive with beauty. The whole world seemed to  Ray
Pearson to have become alive with something just as  he and Hal had suddenly
become alive when they  stood in  the corn field  stating into each  other's
eyes.
     The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much  for Ray on that
fall  evening. That is all there was to  it.  He  could  not stand  it. Of a
sudden he  forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the
torn  overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a protest
against his life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.
"There was no promise  made," he  cried into the empty spaces that lay about
him. "I didn't promise my Minnie anything and Hal hasn't made any promise to
Nell.  I know he hasn't. She went into the woods with him because she wanted
to  go. What he wanted she wanted. Why should I pay? Why should Hal pay? Why
should anyone pay? I don't  want Hal to become  old and  worn out. I'll tell
him. I won't let it  go on. I'll catch Hal before  he gets  to town and I'll
tell him."
     Ray ran clumsily  and once he stumbled and fell down. "I must catch Hal
and tell him," he kept  thinking, and  although his breath  came in gasps he
kept running  harder and harder. As  he ran he thought of things that hadn't
come into his mind for years--how at the  time he  married he had planned to
go west to his uncle  in Portland, Oregon--how he hadn't wanted to be a farm
hand,  but had  thought when he  got out West he  would go to sea and  be  a
sailor or get a job on a ranch and ride a horse into Western towns, shouting
and laughing and waking the people in  the  houses with his wild cries. Then
as he ran he remembered his children and in fancy felt their hands clutching
at him. All of his  thoughts of  himself were involved with the thoughts  of
Hal and he thought  the children were  clutching at  the  younger  man also.
"They are the accidents of  life,  Hal," he cried.  "They  are  not mine  or
yours. I had nothing to do with them."
     Darkness began  to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on.
His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge of the
road and confronted  Hal Winters, all  dressed up and smoking  a  pipe as he
walked jauntily along, he could  not have told  what  he  thought or what he
wanted.
     Ray Pearson lost his nerve and this is really the end  of the story  of
what happened to him. It was almost dark when he got to the fence and he put
his hands on the top  bar and stood staring. Hal Winters  jumped a ditch and
coming up close to Ray put his hands into his pockets and laughed. He seemed
to have lost his own  sense of what had happened  in the corn field and when
he put up a strong hand  and  took hold  of the lapel of Ray's coat he shook
the old man as he might have shaken a dog that had misbehaved.
     "You  came  to tell me,  eh?" he  said. "Well,  never  mind telling  me
anything. I'm not a coward and I've already  made  up my  mind."  He laughed
again and jumped back across  the ditch. "Nell ain't no fool," he said. "She
didn't ask me to  marry her. I want to  marry her. I want to settle down and
have kids."
     Ray Pearson also laughed. He felt like  laughing at himself and all the
world.
     As the form of Hal Winters disappeared in the dusk  that  lay over  the
road that  led to Winesburg,  he turned and  walked  slowly  back across the
fields to  where he had left his torn overcoat. As  he  went some memory  of
pleasant evenings  spent with the thin-legged  children  in the  tumble-down
house  by  the creek must  have come  into  his mind, for he muttered words.
"It's just as well.  Whatever  I  told him would have been a  lie,"  he said
softly, and then his form also disappeared into the darkness of the fields.

     DRINK
     TOM FOSTER came to  Winesburg from  Cincinnati when he was  still young
and  could get  many  new  impressions. His grandmother had been raised on a
farm near  the  town  and as  a  young girl had  gone  to  school there when
Winesburg was a  village  of twelve  or fifteen  houses  clustered  about  a
general store on the Trunion Pike.
     What a life the old woman had led since she went away from the frontier
settlement and what a strong, capable little old thing she was! She had been
in  Kansas,  in Canada,  and in  New  York City,  traveling about  with  her
husband,  a mechanic,  before  he died. Later she  went  to  stay  with  her
daughter, who had also married a  mechanic and lived in Covington, Kentucky,
across the river from Cincinnati.
     Then began  the hard  years  for  Tom Foster's  grandmother.  First her
son-in-law  was killed by a policeman during a strike and then  Tom's mother
became an invalid and  died also. The grandmother had  saved a little money,
but it was swept away  by the illness of the daughter and by the cost of the
two funerals. She became a half worn-out old woman worker and lived with the
grandson above a junk shop on a side  street in  Cincinnati. For five  years
she scrubbed the floors in an office building  and then got  a place as dish
washer in a restaurant. Her hands were all twisted  out of  shape. When  she
took  hold of a  mop or a broom handle the hands looked like the dried stems
of an old creeping vine clinging to a tree.
     The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got the chance. One
evening as she was  coming home from work she found a pocket-book containing
thirty-seven dollars,  and  that  opened  the  way.  The trip  was  a  great
adventure  for  the  boy. It  was  past  seven  o'clock  at  night  when the
grandmother came home with the pocket-book held tightly in her old hands and
she  was  so  excited she  could  scarcely  speak.  She insisted on  leaving
Cincinnati that night, saying that if they stayed until morning the owner of
the money would be sure to find them out and make trouble. Tom, who was then
sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the station with the old woman,
bearing all of  their earthly belongings  done  up in a worn-out blanket and
slung  across  his back.  By  his  side  walked  the grandmother  urging him
forward. Her toothless old mouth twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary
and wanted to put the pack down at a street crossing, she snatched it up and
if he  had not  prevented would have slung it across her own back. When they
got into the train and  it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a
girl and talked as the boy had never heard her talk before.
     All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother  told
Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy  his  life  working in  the
fields  and  shooting wild things in the woods  there. She could not believe
that the tiny village of fifty years before had  grown into a  thriving town
in her absence, and in  the morning when the train came to Winesburg did not
want to get off. "It isn't what I thought. It may be hard for you here," she
said,  and then the train  went  on its way  and the two stood confused, not
knowing where  to  turn, in the presence of Albert  Longworth, the Winesburg
baggage master.
     But  Tom Foster did  get  along all  right. He  was  one  to  get along
anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker's wife, employed his grandmother to work in
the kitchen and he got a place as stable boy in the banker's new brick barn.
     In Winesburg servants were hard to  get.  The  woman who wanted help in
her housework employed a "hired girl"  who insisted on sitting at  the table
with the family.  Mrs.  White was sick  of hired  girls  and snatched at the
chance to get  hold of  the old city woman. She furnished a room for the boy
Tom  upstairs in the barn.  "He  can mow the lawn and run  errands  when the
horses do not need attention," she explained to her husband.
     Tom  Foster was rather small  for his age  and had a large head covered
with stiff  black hair  that  stood  straight  up. The hair  emphasized  the
bigness of  his head. His voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he was
himself  so gentle and quiet that  he  slipped into the  life  of  the  town
without attracting the least bit of attention.
     One  could not help  wondering where Tom Foster got his  gentleness. In
Cincinnati he had lived in a neighborhood where  gangs of tough boys prowled
through  the streets, and all through his early formative years he ran about
with  tough boys. For a while he was a messenger for a telegraph company and
delivered messages in a neighborhood sprinkled  with houses of prostitution.
The women in the houses knew and loved Tom Foster and the  tough boys in the
gangs loved him also.
     He never asserted himself. That was one thing that  helped  him escape.
In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand
in the shadow. He saw the men and women in the houses of  lust, sensed their
casual and horrible love affairs, saw  boys  fighting and listened to  their
tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.
     Once  Tom  did steal. That was while  he  still lived in  the city. The
grandmother was ill  at the time and he himself was out  of  work. There was
nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into  a harness  shop on  a side
street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash drawer.
     The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache. He saw the
boy  lurking  about and thought  nothing of it.  When he  went  out into the
street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the money
walked away. Later he was  caught and his grandmother settled  the matter by
offering to come twice  a week for a month and scrub the shop.  The boy  was
ashamed, but  he was rather  glad, too. "It is all right to  be ashamed  and
makes me understand new things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know
what the boy was talking about but  loved him so  much that it didn't matter
whether she understood or not.
     For a year Tom Foster lived in  the banker's stable and  then lost  his
place there.  He  didn't take very  good  care of  the horses  and he was  a
constant source  of irritation to the banker's wife. She told him to mow the
lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store or to the post office and
he did not come back but joined a group of men and  boys and spent the whole
afternoon  with  them,  standing about,  listening  and  occasionally,  when
addressed, saying a few words. As in the city in the  houses of prostitution
and  with  the rowdy  boys running  through  the streets  at  night,  so  in
Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet
distinctly apart from the life about him.
     After Tom  lost  his  place at Banker  White's he did not live with his
grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him.  He rented
a  room  at  the  rear of  a  little  frame building belonging to old  Rufus
Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just  off Main  Street,  and  had
been used  for years  as  a  law office by the old  man, who  had become too
feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but  did not realize
his  inefficiency.  He liked  Tom and let him  have the room  for a dollar a
month. In the late  afternoon when the lawyer  had gone home the boy had the
place to  himself  and  spent  hours lying on  the  floor by  the stove  and
thinking of  things. In the  evening  the grandmother  came  and sat  in the
lawyer's chair to smoke a pipe while Tom remained  silent, as he always, did
in the presence of everyone.
     Often  the old  woman talked with great  vigor. Sometimes she was angry
about some happening at  the banker's house and scolded away  for hours. Out
of her own earnings she bought a  mop  and  regularly scrubbed  the lawyer's
office.  Then when  the place was spotlessly  clean  and  smelled clean  she
lighted her clay pipe  and she and  Tom had a smoke  together. "When you get
ready to die  then I  will die also," she said to the boy lying on the floor
beside her chair.
     Tom Foster enjoyed  life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs, such as cutting
wood for kitchen stoves  and mowing the grass before houses. In late May and
early June he picked strawberries in the  fields. He had time to loaf and he
enjoyed  loafing.  Banker White had given him a  cast-off coat which was too
large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat,
got  at the  same place,  that was lined with fur. The fur  was worn away in
spots, but the coat was  warm and  in the winter Tom slept in it. He thought
his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied with the
way fife in Winesburg had turned out for him.
     The most absurd  little things made Tom  Foster happy. That, I suppose,
was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery they would be roasting coffee on
Friday  afternoon, preparatory to the  Saturday rush of trade, and the  rich
odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at  the
rear  of  the store. For an hour  he did not move  but sat perfectly  still,
filling his  being with  the  spicy  odor  that  made  him  half drunk  with
happiness.  "I like it," he said gently. "It  makes me  think  of things far
away, places and things like that."
     One night Tom Foster got drunk.  That came  about in a curious way.  He
never had been drunk before,  and  indeed in all his fife had  never taken a
drink of anything intoxicating, but he  felt he needed to be drunk that  one
time and so went and did it.
     In Cincinnati,  when he  lived there,  Tom had found  out  many things,
things about ugliness and crime  and lust. Indeed,  he  knew more  of  these
things  than anyone else in Winesburg. The  matter of sex in particular  had
presented  itself  to  him in a quite  horrible  way and  had  made  a  deep
impression on  his mind.  He  thought,  after what he had seen  of the women
standing before the squalid houses  on  cold nights and the look he had seen
in the eyes of the  men who  stopped to talk  to them, that he would put sex
altogether out of his own life. One of the women of the neighborhood tempted
him once and he went into a room with her.  He never forgot the smell of the
room nor  the greedy look that came into the eyes  of the woman. It sickened
him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always before
thought of  women as quite innocent  things, much like  his grandmother, but
after that  one experience in the room  he dismissed women from his mind. So
gentle was his nature  that he could not hate anything and not being able to
understand he decided to forget.
     And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there
for two  years something began to stir in  him.  On all  sides  he saw youth
making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had happened  he
was in love also. He fell in  love with Helen White, daughter of the man for
whom he had worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.
     That  was a  problem for Tom and he settled it in  his own way. He  let
himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and only
concerned himself with the  manner of his  thoughts. He had a fight, a quiet
determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where
he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was victorious.
     And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild  on that
night. He  was like an innocent young buck  of the forest  that has eaten of
some maddening weed.  The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in  one
night,  and  you may be  sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for
Tom's outbreak.
     In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk.
The trees along the residence streets of  the town were all newly clothed in
soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about
in vegetable  gardens, and in  the  air there was a hush,  a waiting kind of
silence very stirring to the blood.
     Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young night began to make
itself  felt. First he walked through the streets, going  softly and quietly
along, thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He said that Helen
White was a flame  dancing in the air and  that he was a little tree without
leaves standing out sharply against  the sky. Then he said  that  she  was a
wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the darkness of a stormy sea and
that he was a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman.
     That idea  pleased the boy and  he  sauntered along playing with it. He
went into Main Street and sat on the curbing  before Wacker's tobacco store.
For an  hour he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but  it did not
interest him much and he slipped away. Then he decided to get drunk and went
into Willy's saloon and bought a bottle of whiskey.  Putting the bottle into
his pocket,  he walked out  of town,  wanting  to  be  alone to  think  more
thoughts and to drink the whiskey.
     Tom got  drunk sitting on a  bank of new grass beside the road about  a
mile  north of  town. Before him was a  white  road and at his back an apple
orchard in full bloom. He took  a drink out of the bottle  and then lay down
on  the grass.  He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how the stones in
the  graveled  driveway  by  Banker  White's house  were wet  with  dew  and
glistened in the morning light. He thought of the nights in the barn when it
rained  and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the  raindrops and smelling
the warm smell of horses  and of hay. Then  he  thought of a storm that  had
gone roaring through Winesburg several days before and, his mind going back,
he relived the night he had spent on the train with his grandmother when the
two were coming  from Cincinnati. Sharply he  remembered how strange it  had
seemed  to  sit  quietly in the coach and to feel the  power  of  the engine
hurling the train along through the night.
     Tom  got drunk in a very  short  time. He kept  taking  drinks from the
bottle as  the thoughts  visited him and when his head began to reel got  up
and walked along the road going  away from Winesburg. There  was a bridge on
the road  that ran  out of Winesburg north to  Lake Erie and the drunken boy
made his way along  the road  to  the bridge. There he sat down. He tried to
drink again, but when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he  became ill
and put it quickly back. His head was  rocking back and forth and  so he sat
on the stone approach to the bridge and sighed. His head seemed to be flying
about like a pinwheel and then projecting itself off into space and his arms
and legs flopped helplessly about.
     At eleven o'clock Tom  got back  into  town.  George  Willard found him
wandering about and took him into the Eagle printshop. Then he became afraid
that the drunken boy would make a mess  on the floor and helped him into the
alleyway.
     The  reporter  was confused by  Tom Foster.  The drunken  boy talked of
Helen White and said he had been with her on the shore of a sea and had made
love to  her.  George had seen Helen White  walking in the  street  with her
father  during  the  evening  and  decided that Tom was  out of  his head. A
sentiment concerning Helen White  that lurked in his own heart flamed up and
he  became angry. "Now you quit that,"  he said.  "I won't let Helen White's
name be dragged into this. I  won't let that happen." He began shaking Tom's
shoulder, trying to make him understand. "You quit it," he said again.
     For three hours  the  two young men,  thus strangely  thrown  together,
stayed in the printshop. When  he had a little recovered George took Tom for
a walk. They went into the country and sat on a log near the edge of a wood.
Something in the still night drew them together and  when  the drunken boy's
head began to clear they talked.
     "It  was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught me something. I
won't have to  do it again. I will think more dearly after this. You see how
it is."
     George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning Helen White passed
and  he  felt drawn toward the pale, shaken boy as he had  never before been
drawn toward anyone. With  motherly solicitude, he insisted that  Tom get to
his feet and walk about. Again they went back to the  printshop  and sat  in
silence in the darkness.
     The  reporter  could  not  get  the  purpose  of  Tom  Foster's  action
straightened out  in his mind. When  Tom spoke again of Helen White he again
grew  angry  and began to  scold.  "You  quit that,"  he said  sharply. "You
haven't  been with her. What makes  you  say you have? What  makes you  keep
saying such things? Now you quit it, do you hear?"
     Tom  was hurt. He couldn't  quarrel with George  Willard because he was
incapable of  quarreling,  so he got up to go  away. When George Willard was
insistent he put out  his hand, laying it on the older  boy's arm, and tried
to explain.
     "Well," he said softly, "I don't know how  it was. I was happy. You see
how  that was. Helen White made me happy and the night did  too. I wanted to
suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I wanted to
suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. I thought of a lot
of things to do, but they wouldn't work. They all hurt someone else."
     Tom  Foster's  voice  arose, and for once in his life he  became almost
excited. "It was like making love, that's what I mean," he explained. "Don't
you see how it  is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange.
That's why  I did it. I'm  glad,  too.  It  taught me  something, that's it,
that's  what I wanted. Don't you understand? I  wanted to learn things,  you
see. That's why I did it."

     DEATH
     THE STAIRWAY LEADING up to Doctor  Reefy's office, in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods  store,  was but dimly lighted. At the head of the
stairway hung a lamp  with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a bracket to
the wall. The lamp  had  a tin  reflector, brown with rust and covered  with
dust. The people who went up the stairway followed  with their feet the feet
of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the stairs had yielded under
the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked the way.
     At the top  of the  stairway  a turn  to the  right brought  you to the
doctor's  door.  To  the left was a dark  hallway filled  with rubbish.  Old
chairs, carpenter's horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the darkness
waiting for shins to be  barked. The pile  of  rubbish belonged to the Paris
Dry Goods Company.  When a counter or a row  of shelves in the store  became
useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it on the pile.
     Doctor  Reefy's office was as  large as a barn.  A  stove with a  round
paunch sat in the  middle  of  the room. Around  its base was piled sawdust,
held in place by heavy  planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a huge
table that had once been a part of the furniture of Herrick's Clothing Store
and that had been used for  displaying  custom-made  clothes. It was covered
with books, bottles,  and surgical instruments.  Near the edge  of the table
lay three or four apples  left by  John  Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was
Doctor Reefy's friend, and who had slipped  the apples  out of his pocket as
he came in at the door.
     At middle age Doctor  Reefy  was  tall and awkward. The grey  beard  he
later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache.
He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much occupied with
the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.
     On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her
son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went
up  the  worn steps  to Doctor Reefy's office. Already the woman's naturally
tall  figure  had  begun to  droop  and  to  drag  itself  listlessly about.
Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but on the half
dozen occasions when she had been  to see him  the outcome of the visits did
not primarily concern her health. She and the doctor talked of that but they
talked most of her life, of  their two lives and of the  ideas that had come
to them as they lived their lives in Winesburg.
     In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other
and they were a  good deal alike. Their  bodies were different, as were also
the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of
their existence, but something inside them meant the same  thing, wanted the
same release,  would  have  left  the  same impression  on the  memory of an
onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a young wife, the doctor
often talked to her of the hours spent with  the  sick woman and expressed a
good many things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a
poet in his old age and his notion  of what happened took a poetic  turn. "I
had  come  to the  time in my  life when prayer  became necessary  and  so I
invented gods and prayed to them," he  said. "I did  not say my  prayers  in
words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in  my chair. In the late
afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the
days were gloomy, the gods  came into  the office and I thought no one  knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped
also the same gods. I have a notion that she came  to the office because she
thought the gods would be  there but she was happy to find herself not alone
just  the same. It was an experience  that cannot  be explained,  although I
suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places."
     On  the  summer afternoons when  Elizabeth  and  the doctor  sat in the
office  and  talked of  their  two  lives they talked of  other lives  also.
Sometimes  the  doctor  made  philosophic  epigrams.  Then he  chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a hint
given that  strangely illuminated the  fife of the speaker, a wish  became a
desire, or a dream, half dead, flared  suddenly into life. For the most part
the words came from the woman and she said them without looking at the man.
     Each time she came to see the  doctor the hotel keeper's wife talked  a
little  more freely  and after an hour or two in his presence went down  the
stairway into  Main  Street  feeling renewed  and strengthened  against  the
dullness  of her days. With something approaching  a  girlhood swing to  her
body she walked along, but when she had got  back to her chair by the window
of her room  and  when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel dining
room  brought her dinner  on a tray, she let it grow  cold. Her thoughts ran
away  to  her girlhood  with its  passionate longing for  adventure and  she
remembered the arms  of men  that had held her when adventure was a possible
thing for her. Particularly she remembered  one who  had for a time been her
lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to  her more than a
hundred times, saying the  same words madly over and  over: "You  dear!  You
dear!  You  lovely dear!"  The words, she thought, expressed  something  she
would have liked to have achieved in life.
     In her room in the shabby  old hotel the sick wife of the  hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and forth. The
words of her one  friend, Doctor  Reefy, rang  in  her ears. "Love is like a
wind  stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said.  "You
must not try to make love definite.  It is the  divine accident of life.  If
you try  to be definite and sure about it  and  to  live beneath the  trees,
where  soft  night  winds blow,  the long  hot  day of disappointment  comes
swiftly and the gritty dust  from passing wagons gathers upon  lips inflamed
and made tender by kisses."
     Elizabeth  Willard could not remember her mother who had  died when she
was but five years old.  Her girlhood  had  been lived in the most haphazard
manner imaginable. Her father was a man who  had wanted to  be let alone and
the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also had lived and died
a  sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face, but by ten o'clock  in
the morning all the joy  had gone out of  his heart. When a guest complained
of the fare in the hotel dining room  or one of the  girls who made  up  the
beds got married and  went away, he stamped on the floor and swore. At night
when he went to bed he  thought of  his daughter growing up among the stream
of people  that  drifted  in  and  out  of the  hotel  and was overcome with
sadness.  As  the girl grew older and began to walk out  in the evening with
men  he  wanted to talk to  her, but when  he  tried  was not successful. He
always forgot what he  wanted to say and  spent the time complaining of  his
own affairs.
     In her girlhood  and young womanhood Elizabeth  had tried to  be a real
adventurer  in life.  At eighteen life had so  gripped her  that she  was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she married
Tom  Willard, she  had never  entered upon an adventure  prompted by  desire
alone.  Like all  the  women in  the world, she wanted a real lover.  Always
there was something she sought blindly, passionately,  some hidden wonder in
life. The tall  beautiful girl with the swinging stride who had walked under
the trees with men was  forever  putting out her hand into the  darkness and
trying to get hold of some other hand. In all  the babble of words that fell
from the  lips of  the men with  whom she adventured she was trying  to find
what would be for her the true word,
     Elizabeth  had  married  Tom  Willard, a clerk in  her father's  hotel,
because  he  was  at  hand  and  wanted  to  marry  at  the  time  when  the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like  most young girls, she
thought marriage  would  change the face of life. If there was in her mind a
doubt  of  the  outcome of  the marriage with Tom she brushed it  aside. Her
father was ill and  near death at the time and she was perplexed  because of
the meaningless outcome  of an affair in which  she had just  been involved.
Other girls of  her age in Winesburg were marrying men she had always known,
grocery clerks or young farmers.  In the evening they walked  in Main Street
with  their husbands and when she  passed they  smiled happily. She began to
think that the fact of marriage  might be full of some  hidden significance.
Young  wives with whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. "It changes things
to have a man of your own," they said.
     On the evening before  her marriage the perplexed girl  had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if  the hours alone with the sick man had not
led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and  advised the
daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard,
and that led  Elizabeth  to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became
excited and tried  to get out  of bed. When she would not let him walk about
he began to complain.  "I've never  been let alone," he said. "Although I've
worked hard I've not made the hotel pay.  Even now I owe money  at the bank.
You'll find that out when I'm gone."
     The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness.  Being  unable
to arise,  he put out his hand and  pulled the girl's  head down beside  his
own. "There's a way out," he whispered. "Don't  marry Tom Willard  or anyone
else here in  Winesburg. There is eight  hundred dollars  in a tin box in my
trunk. Take it and go away."
     Again the sick man's voice became querulous. "You've  got to  promise,"
he declared. "If  you won't  promise  not  to marry, give me  your word that
you'll never tell Tom about the  money. It is mine and if I  give it to  you
I've  the right to make that demand. Hide it  away. It  is to make up to you
for my  failure  as a father. Some time  it may prove  to be a door, a great
open door  to you.  Come  now, I tell you  I'm about  to die, give  me  your
promise."
     In  Doctor  Reefy's  office,  Elizabeth,  a  tired gaunt old  woman  at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a small
desk  near  the window sat the doctor. His hands played  with a lead  pencil
that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked  of her  life as a married woman. She
became impersonal and forgot her husband, only  using him as a lay figure to
give point to her  tale. "And then I was married and it did not  turn out at
all," she said bitterly. "As soon  as I  had  gone  into  it I  began  to be
afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then perhaps I found out too much
during my first night with him. I don't remember.
     "What a fool I was. When father gave me  the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought  of marriage, I  would  not listen. I thought of what the
girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.  It wasn't
Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I leaned out of the
window  and  thought of the life I had led. I didn't want to be a bad woman.
The town was full of stories about me. I even began  to be  afraid Tom would
change his mind."
     The woman's voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what  was happening had begun to love her,  there  came an
odd illusion.  He thought that as  she talked the woman's body was changing,
that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he could not shake
off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist. "It is good for both
her body and her mind, this talking," he muttered.
     The woman began telling of  an incident that had happened one afternoon
a  few months after  her  marriage. Her voice became  steadier. "In the late
afternoon I  went for a drive alone," she said. "I had a buggy and a  little
grey pony I kept in Moyer's Livery. Tom was painting and repapering rooms in
the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to  make up  my mind to tell him
about the eight hundred dollars father had given to me. I couldn't decide to
do it. I  didn't  like him well enough.  There was always paint on his hands
and face during those days and he smelled of paint. He was trying to fix  up
the old hotel, and make it new and smart."
     The  excited woman sat  up  very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told  of the drive alone on the spring
afternoon. "It was cloudy and  a storm threatened,"  she said. "Black clouds
made the green of  the trees and the grass stand out so that the colors hurt
my eyes. I went out Trunion  Pike a mile or more and then turned into a side
road. The little horse went quickly along up hill and down. I was impatient.
Thoughts came and I wanted to get away from my thoughts. I began to beat the
horse. The black clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at
a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get  out of  town,
out of my  clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the  horse, making him run, and when he could not run any more
I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I fell and hurt
my side. I  wanted to run away from  everything but I wanted to  run towards
something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"
     Elizabeth  sprang out  of the chair  and began  to  walk  about in  the
office.  She  walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had  never  seen anyone walk
before. To her whole  body there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him.
When she came  and knelt on the floor beside his chair he took  her into his
arms and began to kiss  her  passionately.  "I cried  all the way home," she
said,  as  she tried  to continue the story of her wild ride, but he did not
listen.  "You dear!  You lovely dear! Oh you  lovely dear!" he  muttered and
thought  he held in  his arms not  the tired-out woman  of forty-one  but  a
lovely  and innocent  girl  who  had been able by  some  miracle  to project
herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman.
     Doctor  Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the  summer afternoon in the  office  when he was on the
point  of becoming her lover a  half grotesque  little incident brought  his
love-making quickly to an end. As the man  and woman held each other tightly
heavy feet came tramping up  the office stairs. The two sprang to their feet
and stood  listening and  trembling.  The noise on  the stairs was made by a
clerk from the Paris  Dry Goods Company. With a  loud bang he threw an empty
box  on the pile of  rubbish in the  hallway and then went  heavily down the
stairs. Elizabeth followed him almost immediately. The  thing that had  come
to  life in  her as she  talked to  her  one friend  died  suddenly. She was
hysterical, as was also Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk.
Along the street she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when
she turned out  of Main Street and saw ahead  the lights of the  New Willard
House,  she began  to tremble  and  her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.
     The  sick woman spent  the last few  months of  her  life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She personified
the figure of death and made him now a strong blackhaired youth running over
hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living. In
the darkness  of her room she put out her hand, thrusting it  from under the
covers of her bed, and she  thought  that death like a living thing  put out
his hand to her.  "Be patient, lover," she  whispered. "Keep  yourself young
and beautiful and be patient."
     On the evening when disease  laid its heavy hand upon her  and defeated
her plans  for telling her son George of  the eight  hundred  dollars hidden
away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading  with death
for  another hour  of  life. "Wait, dear! The boy!  The boy!  The  boy!" she
pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to  fight off the  arms of the
lover she had wanted so earnestly.
     Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when  her son George became
eighteen, and  the young man had but  little  sense of  the meaning  of  her
death. Only  time could  give him that. For a month he  had seen  her  lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the doctor
stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.
     The young man went  into his  own  room and closed  the door. He  had a
queer  empty feeling  in  the  region of  his stomach.  For a moment he  sat
staring at, the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the station
platform he  went, and around through residence streets past  the highschool
building, thinking  almost entirely of his own affairs. The notion of  death
could  not  get hold of  him and  he was in fact  a little  annoyed that his
mother had died on that day.  He had  just received a note from Helen White,
the daughter of the town banker, in answer to one from him. "Tonight I could
have gone  to see her and now it  will have to be  put off," he thought half
angrily.
     Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o'clock. It had been cold
and  rainy in the morning but in  the afternoon the sun came out. Before she
died she lay paralyzed for six days  unable to speak or  move  and with only
her mind and her  eyes  alive.  For  three  of  the  six days she struggled,
thinking of her boy, trying to say some few  words in regard  to his future,
and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it kept the
memory of the dying woman  in their minds for  years.  Even Tom Willard, who
had always half  resented  his wife, forgot his resentment and the tears ran
out of his  eyes and lodged in his mustache. The mustache had  begun to turn
grey and Tom colored it with dye. There  was oil  in the preparation he used
for the purpose  and the tears, catching in the mustache and  being  brushed
away by his hand, formed  a fine mistlike vapor. In his  grief Tom Willard's
face looked  like the face of a little dog that has been out  a long time in
bitter weather.
     George came home  along Main Street at dark on the day  of his mother's
death and, after going to his  own room  to brush his hair and clothes, went
along the hallway and into the room where  the body lay. There was  a candle
on the dressing table  by the door and Doctor Reefy sat  in  a  chair by the
bed. The doctor  arose and started  to go out. He put out his hand as though
to greet the younger man and then  awkwardly drew it back again. The  air of
the  room was heavy with the presence of the two selfconscious human beings,
and the man hurried away.
     The dead woman's son sat down  in  a chair  and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own  affairs  and definitely  decided he would  make  a
change in his fife, that he would  leave Winesburg. "I will go to some city.
Perhaps I can get a job on  some newspaper," he  thought, and then his  mind
turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening and  again he
was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented his going to her.
     In  the dimly  lighted  room with the dead woman the young man began to
have  thoughts. His mind  played with thoughts of life as  his mother's mind
had played with the thought of death. He  closed  his eyes and imagined that
the red young  lips of  Helen  White touched his own lips. His body trembled
and his hands shook. And then something happened. The boy sprang to his feet
and stood  stiffly.  He  looked at the  figure of the dead  woman  under the
sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over him so that he began to weep. A
new notion came  into his mind and  he  turned and  looked guiltily about as
though afraid he would be observed.
     George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought  that had come into his
mind gripped him terribly. He  became  convinced  that not  his  mother  but
someone else lay in  the  bed before him. The conviction was so real that it
was  almost unbearable.  The body  under  the  sheets was long and in  death
looked  young and graceful. To the boy,  held by  some strange fancy, it was
unspeakably lovely.  The feeling that the body before him was alive, that in
another moment a lovely woman would spring  out of the bed and confront him,
became so overpowering that he could not bear the  suspense. Again and again
he put out his  hand. Once he touched  and half lifted  the white sheet that
covered  her, but his  courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned  and
went  out  of the room.  In  the hallway  outside  the door he  stopped  and
trembled  so that he had to put  a hand against the wall to support himself.
"That's not  my  mother.  That's  not my mother in there," he  whispered  to
himself  and  again his body  shook  with  fright and uncertainty. When Aunt
Elizabeth  Swift,  who had  come to  watch  over  the body,  came out  of an
adjoining room he put his hand into  hers and began to sob, shaking his head
from side to side, half blind with grief. "My mother is dead," he said,  and
then forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door  through which he
had just come. "The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,"  the  boy, urged by
some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.
     As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin
box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had put it
there a week  after her marriage, breaking the plaster  away with  a  stick.
Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about
the hotel to mend the wall. "I jammed the corner of the bed against it," she
had  explained to  her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of
release, the release  that after  all came to her but twice in her life,  in
the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.

     SOPHISTICATION
     IT WAS  EARLY  evening of a  day  in, the  late fall and the  Winesburg
County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been
clear and the  night came on warm and pleasant. On  the Trunion  Pike, where
the road after it left town stretched  away between berry fields now covered
with  dry  brown  leaves,  the  dust from passing wagons  arose  in  clouds.
Children,  curled into little  balls, slept on the straw  scattered on wagon
beds. Their hair was full of dust and  their fingers  black  and sticky. The
dust  rolled away over the fields and the departing  sun set it ablaze  with
colors.
     In  the main  street  of  Winesburg  crowds filled  the  stores and the
sidewalks. Night  came  on, horses  whinnied,  the clerks in  the stores ran
madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked
terribly at the task of amusing itself.
     Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard
concealed himself in  the  stairway  leading to  Doctor  Reefy's office  and
looked at the people. With feverish eyes he  watched the faces drifting past
under the store lights. Thoughts kept  coming into his  head and  he did not
want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply
about. "Well,  is she going to stay with him  all day? Have  I done all this
waiting for nothing?" he muttered.
     George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and
new  thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid  the  jam of
people  at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave
Winesburg  to go away to some  city where he hoped to  get  work on  a  city
newspaper  and he felt grown  up. The mood that had  taken possession of him
was a  thing  known  to men and unknown  to boys. He  felt old  and a little
tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind  his new sense of maturity set him
apart, made of him a halftragic figure. He wanted someone to  understand the
feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.
     There is a time in the  life of every boy  when he  for  the first time
takes the backward view of  life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses
the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He
is  thinking of  the  future and  of the figure  he will cut  in the  world.
Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops
under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things
creep  into his consciousness;  the  voices  outside  of  himself  whisper a
message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself
and his future  he becomes not at all  sure. If he be an imaginative  boy  a
door is tom open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing,
as though  they  marched in procession before him,  the countless figures of
men who before his time have come  out of nothingness  into the world, lived
their  lives  and  again  disappeared  into  nothingness.  The   sadness  of
sophistication has  come  to the boy. With a  little gasp he sees himself as
merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows
that in  spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die  in
uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to  wilt
in  the sun. He shivers and  looks eagerly about. The eighteen years  he has
lived seem but a moment,  a breathing  space in the  long march of humanity.
Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to
some other human,  touch someone with  his hands, be touched by the  hand of
another. If  he  prefers  that  the other  be  a  woman,  that is because he
believes that a woman will be gentle, that she  will understand.  He  wants,
most of all, understanding.
     When the  moment of  sophistication  came to  George Willard  his  mind
turned to Helen White,  the Winesburg banker's daughter. Always  he had been
conscious of the girl growing  into womanhood as he  grew into manhood. Once
on a summer  night when he was eighteen, he had walked with her on a country
road and in her presence had given  way  to an  impulse to  boast,  to  make
himself appear big and significant in her eyes. Now he wanted to see her for
another purpose. He wanted to tell her of the  new impulses that had come to
him. He had tried to make her think of him as a man  when he knew nothing of
manhood and  now he wanted to be with her and  to try  to make  her feel the
change he believed had taken place in his nature.
     As  for Helen  White,  she also  had come to  a  period of change. What
George felt, she in  her young woman's  way  felt also.  She was no longer a
girl and hungered to reach into the grace  and beauty  of womanhood. She had
come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to spend a day at
the Fair. She also had begun to have memories. During the day she sat in the
grand-stand with a young man,  one  of the instructors from the college, who
was a guest  of her mother's. The young man  was of a pedantic  turn of mind
and she felt at  once he would not  do for her purpose. At  the Fair she was
glad to be  seen in his company as he was well dressed and a  stranger.  She
knew that the fact of  his presence would  create  an impression. During the
day  she was happy,  but when night came on she began to  grow restless. She
wanted to drive the instructor  away, to get out of his presence. While they
sat  together in  the grand-stand and while  the  eyes of former schoolmates
were upon  them, she paid  so  much attention  to her  escort  that  he grew
interested. "A scholar needs  money. I should marry a woman with  money," he
mused.
     Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily
through the crowds thinking of  her. She remembered  the summer evening when
they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again. She thought that
the months she  had spent  in the city, the going to theaters and the seeing
of  great  crowds  wandering  in  lighted  thoroughfares,  had  changed  her
profoundly. She wanted him  to feel and be conscious of  the  change  in her
nature.
     The  summer evening  together that had  left its mark on the  memory of
both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather
stupidly spent.  They had walked out of town along a country road. Then they
had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and  George had taken  off
his  coat  and  let  it  hang  on  his  arm.  "Well,  I've  stayed  here  in
Winesburg--yes--I've not yet  gone  away but I'm  growing up," he had  said.
"I've been reading books and  I've been thinking. I'm going to try to amount
to something in life.
     "Well," he explained,  "that isn't  the point. Perhaps I'd better  quit
talking."
     The confused boy put  his hand on the  girl's arm.  His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back  along the road toward town. In his desperation
George boasted, "I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here
in Winesburg," he declared. "I want you to do something,  I don't know what.
Perhaps it  is none  of my business. I want you to try to  be different from
other women. You see the  point. It's none of my business I tell you. I want
you to be a beautiful woman. You see what I want."
     The boy's voice failed and in silence the two  came back into  town and
went along the street  to Helen  White's house. At the  gate he tried to say
something impressive.  Speeches he  had thought out came into his head,  but
they  seemed utterly pointless. "I thought--I  used to think--I had it in my
mind you would marry Seth Richmond. Now  I know you won't," was all he could
find to say as she went through the gate and toward the door of her house.
     On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway  and looked at the
crowd drifting  through Main Street, George  thought  of the talk beside the
field of young corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of himself. In
the  street the  people surged up  and down like  cattle confined  in a pen.
Buggies and  wagons almost filled the narrow thoroughfare. A band played and
small boys raced along the sidewalk, diving between the legs  of men.  Young
men with shining red  faces walked awkwardly about with girls on their arms.
In  a room  above  one  of the stores,  where  a dance was  to be held,  the
fiddlers tuned their instruments.  The broken sounds floated down through an
open window and  out across the murmur of voices and the loud  blare of  the
horns  of the band. The medley  of  sounds got  on young  Willard's  nerves.
Everywhere, on all sides, the sense of crowding, moving life closed in about
him. He wanted to run away by himself  and think. "If she wants to stay with
that fellow she may. Why should I care? What difference does it make to me?"
he growled and went along Main Street and through Hern's Grocery into a side
street.
     George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he wanted to  weep  but
pride made  him walk rapidly along,  swinging  his arms. He came  to  Wesley
Moyer's livery barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a  group  of men
who talked of a race Wesley's stallion, Tony Tip, had won at the Fair during
the  afternoon. A crowd had gathered  in front  of  the barn and before  the
crowd walked Wesley, prancing up  and down boasting. He  held a  whip in his
hand  and kept  tapping  the  ground.  Little puffs  of dust  arose  in  the
lamplight. "Hell, quit your talking," Wesley  exclaimed. "I wasn't afraid, I
knew I had 'em beat all the time. I wasn't afraid."
     Ordinarily George Willard would have been  intensely  interested in the
boasting  of Moyer, the  horseman. Now it  made  him  angry.  He  turned and
hurried away along  the street. "Old windbag," he  sputtered.  "Why  does he
want to be bragging? Why don't he shut up?"
     George went  into a  vacant lot and, as he hurried along,  fell over  a
pile of rubbish. A nail protruding  from an empty barrel tore his  trousers.
He sat down on the ground and swore. With a pin he mended the torn place and
then arose  and went on. "I'll  go to Helen White's house, that's what  I'll
do. I'll walk right in. I'll  say that I want to see her. I'll walk right in
and sit down, that's what I'll do," he declared,  climbing over  a fence and
beginning to run.
     On  the  veranda  of  Banker  White's  house  Helen  was  restless  and
distraught. The instructor  sat between  the  mother and daughter. His  talk
wearied  the girl.  Although he had  also been  raised in an Ohio town,  the
instructor began to  put  on the airs  of  the  city.  He  wanted  to appear
cosmopolitan.  "I like the chance you  have given me to study the background
out of which most of our girls come," he declared. "It was good of you, Mrs.
White, to have me down  for the day." He turned to  Helen and laughed. "Your
life is  still  bound  up with the life of this town?" he asked.  "There are
people  here in whom  you  are  interested?" To  the  girl his voice sounded
pompous and heavy.
     Helen arose and went into the house. At the door leading to a garden at
the  back she stopped and stood listening. Her mother  began to talk. "There
is no one here fit to associate with a girl of Helen's breeding," she said.
     Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the
garden.  In the darkness she stopped  and stood trembling. It seemed  to her
that  the world  was full  of meaningless people saying  words.  Afire  with
eagerness  she  ran  through  a  garden gate  and, turning  a corner  by the
banker's  barn,  went  into  a  little side street. "George! Where  are you,
George?" she cried, filled with nervous excitement. She stopped running, and
leaned against a  tree to laugh hysterically.  Along the dark  little street
came George Willard, still  saying words. "I'm going to walk  right into her
house. I'll go right in and sit down, " he declared as he came up to her. He
stopped and stared stupidly. "Come on," he  said and took hold of  her hand.
With  hanging  heads they walked away along  the street under the trees. Dry
leaves rustled under foot. Now that he had found her George wondered what he
had better do and say.
     At  the upper  end of the Fair  Ground,  in Winesburg,  there is a half
decayed  old grand-stand. It  has never  been painted and the boards are all
warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of  a low hill rising out
of  the  valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can see at night,
over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected against the sky.
     George and  Helen  climbed  the  hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the
path past Waterworks Pond. The  feeling of loneliness and isolation that had
come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and
intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her.
     In  youth  there  are  always two forces  fighting  in people. The warm
unthinking  little animal  struggles  against the thing  that  reflects  and
remembers, and the  older,  the  more sophisticated  thing had possession of
George  Willard.  Sensing  his  mood,  Helen walked beside  him  filled with
respect. When they got to the grand-stand they climbed up under the roof and
sat down on one of the long bench-like seats.
     There is something memorable in the  experience to be had by going into
a fair ground that stands at  the edge of  a Middle  Western town on a night
after  the  annual  fair has been  held.  The sensation is one  never to  be
forgotten. On all  sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but  of living people.
Here, during  the day just passed,  have come the people pouring in from the
town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and  children  and all
the  people from  the hundreds of little  frame houses have  gathered within
these board walls. Young girls have laughed and  men with beards have talked
of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with
life. It has itched and squirmed  with life and now it is night and the life
has all gone away.  The silence is almost  terrifying. One conceals  oneself
standing  silently  beside  the trunk  of  a  tree  and  what there is  of a
reflective tendency  in  his nature is  intensified.  One  shudders  at  the
thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the
people of  the town are  his people, one  loves life so intensely that tears
come into the eyes.
     In  the darkness under the  roof of the grand-stand, George Willard sat
beside Helen White and felt very keenly his own insignificance in the scheme
of  existence. Now that he had come out  of town where  the  presence of the
people stirring  about,  busy  with  a multitude  of affairs,  had  been  so
irritating,  the irritation was all gone. The presence of Helen renewed  and
refreshed him. It was as though her woman's hand was assisting  him  to make
some minute readjustment of the  machinery of his life. He began to think of
the people  in  the town where  he had  always  lived  with  something  like
reverence. He had reverence for  Helen. He wanted to love and to be loved by
her, but he did not want at the moment to  be  confused by her womanhood. In
the darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand on
her shoulder. A wind began to blow and he shivered. With all his strength he
tried to hold and  to understand the mood that  had come  upon him. In  that
high place in the  darkness  the two oddly sensitive human atoms  held  each
other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought.  "I have
come to this lonely place  and here is this other," was the substance of the
thing felt.
     In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night  of
the late fall. Farm  horses jogged  away along lonely country  roads pulling
their portion of weary people. Clerks began to bring samples of goods in off
the  sidewalks and  lock the doors of stores. In the Opera House a crowd had
gathered  to see  a  show and further  down Main Street the  fiddlers, their
instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the  feet of youth flying over
a dance floor.
     In the  darkness in the  grand-stand  Helen  White and  George  Willard
remained silent. Now and  then  the spell that held them was broken and they
turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other's eyes. They kissed
but that impulse did not last. At the upper  end of  the Fair Ground  a half
dozen men worked over  horses  that had raced  during the afternoon. The men
had built a fire and were heating kettles of water. Only their legs could be
seen  as they passed  back  and forth in the  light. When the wind blew  the
little flames of the fire danced crazily about.
     George and  Helen arose and walked away  into  the darkness. They  went
along a  path past  a  field  of corn that had  not  yet been cut. The  wind
whispered among the dry corn blades. For a  moment during the walk back into
town the spell that held them was broken. When they had come to the crest of
Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again put his hands on the
girl's shoulders. She embraced him eagerly and  then again they drew quickly
back from  that  impulse.  They  stopped  kissing and  stood a little apart.
Mutual  respect grew big in them. They were both embarrassed  and to relieve
their embarrassment  dropped into the animalism of  youth. They  laughed and
began to pull and  haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by
the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl,
but excited little animals.
     It was so they went down the hill. In the darkness they played like two
splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward, Helen
tripped  George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with laughter,
he roiled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a moment  she stopped
in  the darkness. There  was no way of knowing  what  woman's thoughts  went
through  her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and  she came
up to the boy,  she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence.
For some  reason they could  not have explained they had both got from their
silent  evening together the thing needed. Man  or boy, woman or girl,  they
had for a moment taken hold of  the thing that  makes the mature life of men
and women in the modern world possible.

     DEPARTURE
     YOUNG  GEORGE  WILLARD  got out of  bed at four in  the morning. It was
April and  the young  tree  leaves  were just coming  out of their buds. The
trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple  and the  seeds are
winged.  When the wind blows they whirl crazily  about, filling the air  and
making a carpet underfoot.
     George came downstairs into  the  hotel office carrying a brown leather
bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o'clock he had been awake
thinking  of the journey he was  about to take and  wondering what  he would
find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel office lay on
a cot by the door. His mouth  was open and  he snored lustily.  George crept
past the cot and went out into the silent deserted main street. The east was
pink with  the dawn and long streaks of light climbed  into the  sky where a
few stars still shone.
     Beyond the  last house on  Trunion Pike in Winesburg there  is  a great
stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and
drive homeward at evening  along Trunion Pike in  light creaking  wagons. In
the  fields are planted berries and small  fruits. In the late afternoon  in
the hot  summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky
haze lies over the great flat basin  of land.  To  look  across  it  is like
looking  out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect
is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which
tiny human insects toil up and down.
     All through  his  boyhood and young manhood  George Willard had been in
the habit of walking on  Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great
open place on winter nights when it was covered with  snow and only the moon
looked down at him; he had been there in the fall  when bleak winds blew and
on summer evenings  when the air  vibrated with the song of  insects. On the
April morning he  wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He
did walk to where the road  dipped down by  a  little stream  two miles from
town and then turned and  walked silently  back again. When  he got  to Main
Street  clerks were sweeping  the  sidewalks  before  the stores. "Hey,  you
George. How does it feel to be going away?" they asked.
     The  westbound train  leaves  Winesburg  at  seven  forty-five  in  the
morning. Tom Little is conductor.  His train runs from Cleveland to where it
connects  with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New
York.  Tom  has  what in railroad  circles  is called  an  "easy run." Every
evening  he  returns to his family.  In  the fall  and spring  he spends his
Sundays fishing in  Lake Erie. He has a round red  face and small blue eyes.
He knows the  people in the towns along his railroad better than a city  man
knows the people who live in his apartment building.
     George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven
o'clock. Tom Willard carried his  bag. The  son  had  become taller than the
father.
     On  the station platform everyone shook the young man's hand. More than
a dozen people  waited about. Then they talked  of  their own affairs.  Even
Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of bed.
George was  embarrassed.  Gertrude Wilmot,  a tall  thin  woman of fifty who
worked in the  Winesburg post office,  came  along the station platform. She
had never before paid any attention to George. Now she  stopped and  put out
her hand. In two words she voiced what  everyone felt. "Good luck," she said
sharply and then turning went on her way.
     When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scampered
hurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street  hoping to have
a parting word with him, but he had found a seat and  did  not see her. When
the train started Tom Little punched  his ticket, grinned  and, although  he
knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no
comment.  Tom  had seen a thousand George Willards go  out of their towns to
the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him.  In the smoking car
there was a man who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky
Bay. He wanted to accept the invitation and talk over details.
     George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking,  then
took out his pocketbook and counted  his money. His mind was occupied with a
desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had said to him
conce