George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the rather odd friendship between the two, it was he who was forever courting and the younger boy who was being courted. The paper on which George worked had one policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as possible of the inhabitants of the village. Like an excited dog, George Willard ran here and there, noting on his pad of paper who had gone on business to the county seat or had returned from a visit to a neighboring village. All day he wrote little facts upon the pad. “A. P. Wringlet has received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new barn on his place on the Valley Road.”
The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given him a place of distinction in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked continually of the matter. “It’s the easiest of all lives to live,” he declared, becoming excited and boastful. “Here and there you go and there is no one to boss you. Though you are in India or in the South Seas in a boat, you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my name up and then see what fun I shall have.”
In George Willard’s room, which had a window looking down into an alleyway and one that looked across railroad tracks to Biff Carter’s Lunch Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and looked at the floor. George Willard who had been sitting for an hour idly playing with a lead pencil, greeted him effusively. “I’ve been trying to write a love story,” he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he began walking up and down the room. “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to fall in love. I’ve been sitting here and thinking it over and I’m going to do it.”
As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went to a window and turning his back to his friend leaned out. “I know who I’m going to fall in love with,” he said sharply. “It’s Helen White. She is the only girl in town with any ‘get-up’ to her.” Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked towards his visitor. “Look here,” he said. “You know Helen White better than I do. I want you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking to her and say that I’m in love with her. See what she says to that. See how she takes it, and then you come and tell me.”
Seth Richmond arose and went towards the door. The words of his comrade irritated him unbearably. “Well, goodbye,” he said briefly.
George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the darkness trying to look into Seth’s face. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do? You stay here and let’s talk,” he urged.
A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the men of the town who were, he thought, perpetually talking of nothing, and most of all, against his own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. “Aw, speak to her yourself,” he burst forth and then going quickly through the door, slammed it sharply in his friend’s face. “I’m going to find Helen White and talk to her, but not about him,” he muttered.
Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door of the hotel muttering with wrath. Crossing a little dusty street and climbing a low iron railing, he went to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George Willard he thought a profound fool, and he wished that he had said so more vigorously. Although his acquaintanceship with Helen White, the banker’s daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the subject of his thoughts and he felt that she was something private and personal to himself. “The busy fool with his love stories,” he muttered, staring back over his shoulder at George Willard’s room, “why does he never tire of his eternal talking.”
It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the station platform men and boys loaded the boxes of red, fragrant berries into two express cars that stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although in the west a storm threatened, and no street lamps were lighted. In the dim light the figures of the men standing upon the express truck and pitching the boxes in at the doors of the cars were but dimly discernible. Upon the iron railing that protected the station lawn sat other men. Pipes were lighted. Village jokes went back and forth. Away in the distance a train whistled and the men loading the boxes into the cars worked with renewed activity.
Seth arose from his place on the grass and went silently past the men perched upon the railing and into Main Street. He had come to a resolution. “I’ll get out of here,” he told himself. “What good am I here? I’m going to some city and go to work. I’ll tell mother about it to-morrow.”
Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past Wacker’s Cigar Store and the Town Hall, and into Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the thought that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. In the heavy shadows of a big tree before Dr. Welling’s house, he stopped and stood watching half-witted Turk Smollet, who was pushing a wheelbarrow in the road. The old man with his absurdly boyish mind had a dozen long boards on the wheelbarrow, and as he hurried along the road, balanced the load with extreme nicety. “Easy there, Turk! Steady now, old boy!” the old man shouted to himself, and laughed so that the load of boards rocked dangerously.
Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood chopper whose peculiarities added so much of color to the life of the village. He knew that when Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of a whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old man was going far out of his way in order to pass through Main Street and exhibit his skill in wheeling the boards. “If George Willard were here, he’d have something to say,” thought Seth. “George belongs to this town. He’d shout at Turk and Turk would shout at him. They’d both be secretly pleased by what they had said. It’s different with me. I don’t belong. I’ll not make a fuss about it, but I’m going to get out of here.”
Seth stumbled forward through the half darkness, feeling himself an outcast in his own town. He began to pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity. “I’m made to go to work. I may be able to make a place for myself by steady working, and I might as well be at it,” he decided.
Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the darkness by the front door. On the door hung a heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced into the village by Helen White’s mother, who had also organized a woman’s club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. Its heavy clatter sounded like a report from distant guns. “How awkward and foolish I am,” he thought. “If Mrs. White comes to the door, I don’t know what to say.”
It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth standing at the edge of the porch. Blushing with pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the door softly. “I’m going to get out of town. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’m going to get out of here and go to work. I think I’ll go to Columbus,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll get into the State University down there. Anyway, I’m going. I’ll tell mother to-night.” He hesitated and looked doubtfully about. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to walk with me?”
Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the wooden lamp post, lighted the village lights so that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play, disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm of night flies.
Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had been a half expressed intimacy between him and the maiden who now for the first time walked beside him. For a time she had been beset with a madness for writing notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found them concealed
in his books at school and one had been given him by a child met in the street, while several had been delivered through the village post office.
The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and had reflected a mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth had not answered them, although he had been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil upon the stationery of the banker’s wife. Putting them into the pocket of his coat, he went through the street or stood by the fence in the school yard with something burning at his side. He thought it fine that he should be thus selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in town.
Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark building faced the street. The building had once been a factory for the making of barrel staves but was now vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a house a man and woman talked of their childhood, their voices coming clearly across to the half-embarrassed youth and maiden. There was the sound of scraping chairs and the man and woman came down the gravel path to a wooden gate. Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed the woman. “For old times’ sake,” he said and, turning, walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.
“That’s Belle Turner,” whispered Helen, and put her hand boldly into Seth’s hand. “I didn’t know she had a fellow. I thought she was too old for that.” Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a strange, dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind came a desire to tell her something he had been determined not to tell. “George Willard’s in love with you,” he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice was low and quiet. “He’s writing a story, and he wants to be in love. He wants to know how it feels. He wanted me to tell you and see what you said.”
Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to the garden surrounding the old Richmond place and going through a gap in the hedge sat on a wooden bench beneath a bush.
On the street as he walked beside the girl new and daring thoughts had come into Seth Richmond’s mind. He began to regret his decision to get out of town. “It would be something new and altogether delightful to remain and walk often through the streets with Helen White,” he thought. In imagination he saw himself putting his arm about her waist and feeling her arms clasped tightly about his neck. One of those odd combinations of events and places made him connect the idea of love-making with this girl and a spot he had visited some days before. He had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer who lived on a hillside beyond the Fair Ground and had returned by a path through a field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer’s house Seth had stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming noise had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home of a swarm of bees.
And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him in the long grass. He stood in a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in the field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with tiny purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds the bees were gathered in armies, singing as they worked.
Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the weeds beneath the tree. Beside him, in the scene built in his fancy, lay Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept him from kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished. Instead, he lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening to the army of bees that sang the sustained masterful song of labor above his head.
On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily. Releasing the hand of the girl, he thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. A desire to impress the mind of his companion with the importance of the resolution he had made came over him and he nodded his head toward the house. “Mother’ll make a fuss, I suppose,” he whispered. “She hasn’t thought at all about what I’m going to do in life. She thinks I’m going to stay on here forever just being a boy.”
Seth’s voice became charged with boyish earnestness. “You see, I’ve got to strike out. I’ve got to get to work. It’s what I’m good for.”
Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a feeling of admiration swept over her. “This is as it should be,” she thought. “This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man.” Certain vague desires that had been invading her body were swept away and she sat up very straight on the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning lit up the eastern sky. The garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her might have become the background for strange and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite definite and limited in its outlines.
“What will you do up there?” she whispered.
Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see her face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. A feeling of impatience with the town that had been in his mind returned, and he tried to tell her of it. “Everyone talks and talks,” he began. “I’m sick of it. I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t know. I guess I don’t care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That’s all I’ve got in my mind.”
Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did not want to bring the meeting to an end but could not think of anything more to say. “It’s the last time we’ll see each other,” he whispered.
A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand upon Seth’s shoulder, she started to draw his face down towards her own upturned face. The act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never be realized. “I think I’d better be going along,” she said, letting her hand fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her. “Don’t you go with me; I want to be alone,” she said. “You go and talk with your mother. You’d better do that now.”
Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl turned and ran away through the hedge. A desire to run after her came to him, but he only stood staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come. Walking slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow of a large tree and looked at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily sewing. The feeling of loneliness that had visited him earlier in the evening returned and colored his thoughts of the adventure through which he had just passed. “Huh!” he exclaimed, turning and staring in the direction taken by Helen White. “That’s how things’ll turn out. She’ll be like the rest. I suppose she’ll begin now to look at me in a funny way.” He looked at the ground and pondered this thought. “She’ll be embarrassed and feel strange when I’m around,” he whispered to himself. “That’s how it’ll be. That’s how everything’ll turn out. When it comes to loving some one, it won’t never be me. It’ll be some one else—some fool—some one who talks a lot—some one like that George Willard.”
Tandy
* * *
UNTIL she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother’s relatives.
A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see. He was a tall, red-haired young man who was almost always drunk. Sometimes he sat in a chair before the New Willard House with Tom Hard, the father. As Tom talked, declaring there could be no God, the stranger smiled and winked at the bystanders. He and Tom became friends and were much together.
The stranger was the son of a rich merchant of Cleveland and had come to Winesburg on a mission. H
e wanted to cure himself of the habit of drink, and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living in a rural community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the appetite that was destroying him.
His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than ever. But he did succeed in doing something. He gave a name rich with meaning to Tom Hard’s daughter.
One evening when he was recovering from a long debauch the stranger came reeling along the main street of the town. Tom Hard sat in a chair before the New Willard House with his daughter, then a child of five, on his knees. Beside him on the board sidewalk sat young George Willard. The stranger dropped into a chair beside them. His body shook and when he tried to talk his voice trembled.
It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the railroad that ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked. The stranger began to babble and made a prophecy concerning the child that lay in the arms of the agnostic.
“I came here to quit drinking,” he said, and tears began to run down his cheeks. He did not look at Tom Hard, but leaned forward and stared into the darkness as though seeing a vision. “I ran away to the country to be cured, but I am not cured. There is a reason.” He turned to look at the child who sat up very straight on her father’s knee and returned the look.
The stranger touched Tom Hard on the arm. “Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted,” he said. “There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 11