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