MOTHER

Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and

her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but

forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure.

Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded

wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about,

doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of

fat traveling men. Her husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man

with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a black mustache

trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out of

his mind. The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly

through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. When he thought of

her he grew angry and swore. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on

the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. He thought of the

old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and

done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a

mere ghost of what a hotel should be. As he went spruce and

business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped

and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel

and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. “Damn such a

life, damn it!” he sputtered aimlessly.

Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been

the leading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. Some day, he

told himself, the tide of things political will turn in my favor and

the years of ineffectual service count big in the bestowal of rewards.

He dreamed of going to Congress and even of becoming governor. Once

when a younger member of the party arose at a political conference and

began to boast of his faithful service, Tom Willard grew white with

fury. “Shut up, you,” he roared, glaring about. “What do you know of

service? What are you but a boy? Look at what I’ve done here! I was a

Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the

old days they fairly hunted us with guns.”

Between Elizabeth and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed

bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In

the son’s presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he

hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into

his room and closing the door knelt by a little desk, made of a kitchen

table, that sat near a window. In the room by the desk she went through

a ceremony that was half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the

skies. In the boyish figure she yearned to see something half forgotten

that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned

that. “Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you,” she

cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her

eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. “If I am dead and see him

becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back,” she

declared. “I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will

pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that

may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us

both.” Pausing uncertainly, the woman stared about the boy’s room. “And

do not let him become smart and successful either,” she added vaguely.

The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a

formal thing without meaning. When she was ill and sat by the window in

her room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat

by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into

Main Street. By turning their heads they could see through another

window, along an alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and

into the back door of Abner Groff’s bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus

a picture of village life presented itself to them. At the back door of

his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or an empty milk bottle in

his hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker and a grey

cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. The boy and his

mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently

emerge followed by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The

baker’s eyes were small and red and his black hair and beard were

filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the

cat had disappeared, he hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even

some of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at the

back of Sinning’s Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched

behind barrels filled with torn paper and broken bottles above which

flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she was alone, and after

watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker,

Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept.

After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to

forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like

a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

In the evening when the son sat in the room with his mother, the

silence made them both feel awkward. Darkness came on and the evening

train came in at the station. In the street below feet tramped up and

down upon a board sidewalk. In the station yard, after the evening

train had gone, there was a heavy silence. Perhaps Skinner Leason, the

express agent, moved a truck the length of the station platform. Over

on Main Street sounded a man’s voice, laughing. The door of the express

office banged. George Willard arose and crossing the room fumbled for

the doorknob. Sometimes he knocked against a chair, making it scrape

along the floor. By the window sat the sick woman, perfectly still,

listless. Her long hands, white and bloodless, could be seen drooping

over the ends of the arms of the chair. “I think you had better be out

among the boys. You are too much indoors,” she said, striving to

relieve the embarrassment of the departure. “I thought I would take a

walk,” replied George Willard, who felt awkward and confused.

One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard

House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted

only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth

Willard had an adventure. She had been ill in bed for several days and

her son had not come to visit her. She was alarmed. The feeble blaze of

life that remained in her body was blown into a flame by her anxiety

and she crept out of bed, dressed and hurried along the hallway toward

her son’s room, shaking with exaggerated fears. As she went along she

steadied herself with her hand, slipped along the papered walls of the

hall and breathed with difficulty. The air whistled through her teeth.

As she hurried forward she thought how foolish she was. “He is

concerned with boyish affairs,” she told herself. “Perhaps he has now

begun to walk about in the evening with girls.”

Elizabeth Willard had a dread of being seen by guests in the hotel that

had once belonged to her father and the ownership of which still stood

recorded in her name in the county courthouse. The hotel was

continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought

of herself as also shabby. Her own room was in an obscure corner and

when she felt able to work she voluntarily worked among the beds,

preferring the labor that could be done when the guests were abroad

seeking trade among the merchants of Winesburg.

By the door of her son’s room the mother knelt upon the floor and

listened for some sound from within. When she heard the boy moving

about and talking in low tones a smile came to her lips. George Willard

had a habit of talking aloud to himself and to hear him doing so had

always given his mother a peculiar pleasure. The habit in him, she

felt, strengthened the secret bond that existed between them. A

thousand times she had whispered to herself of the matter. “He is

groping about, trying to find himself,” she thought. “He is not a dull

clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something

that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself.”

In the darkness in the hallway by the door the sick woman arose and

started again toward her own room. She was afraid that the door would

open and the boy come upon her. When she had reached a safe distance

and was about to turn a corner into a second hallway she stopped and

bracing herself with her hands waited, thinking to shake off a

trembling fit of weakness that had come upon her. The presence of the

boy in the room had made her happy. In her bed, during the long hours

alone, the little fears that had visited her had become giants. Now

they were all gone. “When I get back to my room I shall sleep,” she

murmured gratefully.

But Elizabeth Willard was not to return to her bed and to sleep. As she

stood trembling in the darkness the door of her son’s room opened and

the boy’s father, Tom Willard, stepped out. In the light that steamed

out at the door he stood with the knob in his hand and talked. What he

said infuriated the woman.

Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had always thought of himself

as a successful man, although nothing he had ever done had turned out

successfully. However, when he was out of sight of the New Willard

House and had no fear of coming upon his wife, he swaggered and began

to dramatize himself as one of the chief men of the town. He wanted his

son to succeed. He it was who had secured for the boy the position on

the _Winesburg Eagle_. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he

was advising concerning some course of conduct. “I tell you what,

George, you’ve got to wake up,” he said sharply. “Will Henderson has

spoken to me three times concerning the matter. He says you go along

for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky

girl. What ails you?” Tom Willard laughed good-naturedly. “Well, I

guess you’ll get over it,” he said. “I told Will that. You’re not a

fool and you’re not a woman. You’re Tom Willard’s son and you’ll wake

up. I’m not afraid. What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper

man had put the notion of becoming a writer into your mind that’s all

right. Only I guess you’ll have to wake up to do that too, eh?”

Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a flight of stairs

to the office. The woman in the darkness could hear him laughing and

talking with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by

dozing in a chair by the office door. She returned to the door of her

son’s room. The weakness had passed from her body as by a miracle and

she stepped boldly along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When

she heard the scraping of a chair and the sound of a pen scratching

upon paper, she again turned and went back along the hallway to her own

room.

A definite determination had come into the mind of the defeated wife of

the Winesburg hotel keeper. The determination was the result of long

years of quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. “Now,” she told

herself, “I will act. There is something threatening my boy and I will

ward it off.” The fact that the conversation between Tom Willard and

his son had been rather quiet and natural, as though an understanding

existed between them, maddened her. Although for years she had hated

her husband, her hatred had always before been a quite impersonal

thing. He had been merely a part of something else that she hated. Now,

and by the few words at the door, he had become the thing personified.

In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists and glared

about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a nail by the wall she took

out a long pair of sewing scissors and held them in her hand like a

dagger. “I will stab him,” she said aloud. “He has chosen to be the

voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him something

will snap within myself and I will die also. It will be a release for

all of us.”

In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had

borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been

what is called “stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with

traveling men guests at her father’s hotel, wearing loud clothes and

urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had

come. Once she startled the town by putting on men’s clothes and riding

a bicycle down Main Street.

In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much

confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in

two ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big

definite movement to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her

mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering

over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of

herself to all people. Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself

with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter to the

members of the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg and stopped

at her father’s hotel, she got nowhere. They did not seem to know what

she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed, they

only laughed. “It’s not like that,” they said. “It’s as dull and

uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.”

With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with

Tom Willard, it was quite different. Always they seemed to understand

and sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the

darkness under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought

that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of

an unexpressed something in them.

And then there was the second expression of her restlessness. When that

came she felt for a time released and happy. She did not blame the men

who walked with her and later she did not blame Tom Willard. It was

always the same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild

emotions, with peace and then sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she

put her hand upon the face of the man and had always the same thought.

Even though he were large and bearded she thought he had become

suddenly a little boy. She wondered why he did not sob also.

In her room, tucked away in a corner of the old Willard House,

Elizabeth Willard lighted a lamp and put it on a dressing table that

stood by the door. A thought had come into her mind and she went to a

closet and brought out a small square box and set it on the table. The

box contained material for make-up and had been left with other things

by a theatrical company that had once been stranded in Winesburg.

Elizabeth Willard had decided that she would be beautiful. Her hair was

still black and there was a great mass of it braided and coiled about

her head. The scene that was to take place in the office below began to

grow in her mind. No ghostly worn-out figure should confront Tom

Willard, but something quite unexpected and startling. Tall and with

dusky cheeks and hair that fell in a mass from her shoulders, a figure

should come striding down the stairway before the startled loungers in

the hotel office. The figure would be silent—it would be swift and

terrible. As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear,

coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the

long wicked scissors in her hand.

With a little broken sob in her throat, Elizabeth Willard blew out the

light that stood upon the table and stood weak and trembling in the

darkness. The strength that had been as a miracle in her body left and

she half reeled across the floor, clutching at the back of the chair in

which she had spent so many long days staring out over the tin roofs

into the main street of Winesburg. In the hallway there was the sound

of footsteps and George Willard came in at the door. Sitting in a chair

beside his mother he began to talk. “I’m going to get out of here,” he

said. “I don’t know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going

away.”

The woman in the chair waited and trembled. An impulse came to her. “I

suppose you had better wake up,” she said. “You think that? You will go

to the city and make money, eh? It will be better for you, you think,

to be a business man, to be brisk and smart and alive?” She waited and

trembled.

The son shook his head. “I suppose I can’t make you understand, but oh,

I wish I could,” he said earnestly. “I can’t even talk to father about

it. I don’t try. There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I

just want to go away and look at people and think.”

Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together. Again,

as on the other evenings, they were embarrassed. After a time the boy

tried again to talk. “I suppose it won’t be for a year or two but I’ve

been thinking about it,” he said, rising and going toward the door.

“Something father said makes it sure that I shall have to go away.” He

fumbled with the doorknob. In the room the silence became unbearable to

the woman. She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had

come from the lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become

impossible to her. “I think you had better go out among the boys. You

are too much indoors,” she said. “I thought I would go for a little

walk,” replied the son stepping awkwardly out of the room and closing

the door.