Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere
boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney’s Dry
Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married a second
husband.
Alice’s step-father was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His
story is an odd one. It will be worth telling some day.
At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat slight. Her head was large
and overshadowed her body. Her shoulders were a little stooped and her
hair and eyes brown. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a
continual ferment went on.
When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the
store, Alice had an affair with a young man. The young man, named Ned
Currie, was older than Alice. He, like George Willard, was employed on
the _Winesburg Eagle_ and for a long time he went to see Alice almost
every evening. Together the two walked under the trees through the
streets of the town and talked of what they would do with their lives.
Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her into his arms
and kissed her. He became excited and said things he did not intend to
say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come
into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The
outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was
torn away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late
in the fall of her sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland
where he hoped to get a place on a city newspaper and rise in the
world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling voice she told him
what was in her mind. “I will work and you can work,” she said. “I do
not want to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your
making progress. Don’t marry me now. We will get along without that and
we can be together. Even though we live in the same house no one will
say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no
attention to us.”
Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his
sweetheart and was also deeply touched. He had wanted the girl to
become his mistress but changed his mind. He wanted to protect and care
for her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said sharply;
“you may be sure I’ll let you do no such thing. As soon as I get a good
job I’ll come back. For the present you’ll have to stay here. It’s the
only thing we can do.”
On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his new life in the
city, Ned Currie went to call on Alice. They walked about through the
streets for an hour and then got a rig from Wesley Moyer’s livery and
went for a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found
themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the young man forgot the
resolutions he had made regarding his conduct with the girl.
They got out of the buggy at a place where a long meadow ran down to
the bank of Wine Creek and there in the dim light became lovers. When
at midnight they returned to town they were both glad. It did not seem
to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out
the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened. “Now we will have
to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that,” Ned
Currie said as he left the girl at her father’s door.
The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a
Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago. For a time he was lonely and
wrote to Alice almost every day. Then he was caught up by the life of
the city; he began to make friends and found new interests in life. In
Chicago he boarded at a house where there were several women. One of
them attracted his attention and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the
end of a year he had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long
time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of the city parks and
saw the moon shining on the grass as it had shone that night on the
meadow by Wine Creek, did he think of her at all.
In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a woman. When she
was twenty-two years old her father, who owned a harness repair shop,
died suddenly. The harness maker was an old soldier, and after a few
months his wife received a widow’s pension. She used the first money
she got to buy a loom and became a weaver of carpets, and Alice got a
place in Winney’s store. For a number of years nothing could have
induced her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end return to
her.
She was glad to be employed because the daily round of toil in the
store made the time of waiting seem less long and uninteresting. She
began to save money, thinking that when she had saved two or three
hundred dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try if her
presence would not win back his affections.
Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight
in the field, but felt that she could never marry another man. To her
the thought of giving to another what she still felt could belong only
to Ned seemed monstrous. When other young men tried to attract her
attention she would have nothing to do with them. “I am his wife and
shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not,” she whispered to
herself, and for all of her willingness to support herself could not
have understood the growing modern idea of a woman’s owning herself and
giving and taking for her own ends in life.
Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the morning until six
at night and on three evenings a week went back to the store to stay
from seven until nine. As time passed and she became more and more
lonely she began to practice the devices common to lonely people. When
at night she went upstairs into her own room she knelt on the floor to
pray and in her prayers whispered things she wanted to say to her
lover. She became attached to inanimate objects, and because it was her
own, could not bare to have anyone touch the furniture of her room. The
trick of saving money, begun for a purpose, was carried on after the
scheme of going to the city to find Ned Currie had been given up. It
became a fixed habit, and when she needed new clothes she did not get
them. Sometimes on rainy afternoons in the store she got out her bank
book and, letting it lie open before her, spent hours dreaming
impossible dreams of saving money enough so that the interest would
support both herself and her future husband.
“Ned always liked to travel about,” she thought. “I’ll give him the
chance. Some day when we are married and I can save both his money and
my own, we will be rich. Then we can travel together all over the
world.”
In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months into years as
Alice waited and dreamed of her lover’s return. Her employer, a grey
old man with false teeth and a thin grey mustache that drooped down
over his mouth, was not given to conversation, and sometimes, on rainy
days and in the winter when a storm raged in Main Street, long hours
passed when no customers came in. Alice arranged and rearranged the
stock. She stood near the front window where she could look down the
deserted street and thought of the evenings when she had walked with
Ned Currie and of what he had said. “We will have to stick to each
other now.” The words echoed and re-echoed through the mind of the
maturing woman. Tears came into her eyes. Sometimes when her employer
had gone out and she was alone in the store she put her head on the
counter and wept. “Oh, Ned, I am waiting,” she whispered over and over,
and all the time the creeping fear that he would never come back grew
stronger within her.
In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days
of summer have come, the country about Winesburg is delightful. The
town lies in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields are
pleasant patches of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little
cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to sit on Sunday
afternoons. Through the trees they look out across the fields and see
farmers at work about the barns or people driving up and down on the
roads. In the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes, looking
like a toy thing in the distance.
For several years after Ned Currie went away Alice did not go into the
wood with the other young people on Sunday, but one day after he had
been gone for two or three years and when her loneliness seemed
unbearable, she put on her best dress and set out. Finding a little
sheltered place from which she could see the town and a long stretch of
the fields, she sat down. Fear of age and ineffectuality took
possession of her. She could not sit still, and arose. As she stood
looking out over the land something, perhaps the thought of never
ceasing life as it expresses itself in the flow of the seasons, fixed
her mind on the passing years. With a shiver of dread, she realized
that for her the beauty and freshness of youth had passed. For the
first time she felt that she had been cheated. She did not blame Ned
Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness swept over her. Dropping
to her knees, she tried to pray, but instead of prayers words of
protest came to her lips. “It is not going to come to me. I will never
find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?” she cried, and an odd sense
of relief came with this, her first bold attempt to face the fear that
had become a part of her everyday life.
In the year when Alice Hindman became twenty-five two things happened
to disturb the dull uneventfulness of her days. Her mother married Bush
Milton, the carriage painter of Winesburg, and she herself became a
member of the Winesburg Methodist Church. Alice joined the church
because she had become frightened by the loneliness of her position in
life. Her mother’s second marriage had emphasized her isolation. “I am
becoming old and queer. If Ned comes he will not want me. In the city
where he is living men are perpetually young. There is so much going on
that they do not have time to grow old,” she told herself with a grim
little smile, and went resolutely about the business of becoming
acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when the store had
closed she went to a prayer meeting in the basement of the church and
on Sunday evening attended a meeting of an organization called The
Epworth League.
When Will Hurley, a middle-aged man who clerked in a drug store and who
also belonged to the church, offered to walk home with her she did not
protest. “Of course I will not let him make a practice of being with
me, but if he comes to see me once in a long time there can be no harm
in that,” she told herself, still determined in her loyalty to Ned
Currie.
Without realizing what was happening, Alice was trying feebly at first,
but with growing determination, to get a new hold upon life. Beside the
drug clerk she walked in silence, but sometimes in the darkness as they
went stolidly along she put out her hand and touched softly the folds
of his coat. When he left her at the gate before her mother’s house she
did not go indoors, but stood for a moment by the door. She wanted to
call to the drug clerk, to ask him to sit with her in the darkness on
the porch before the house, but was afraid he would not understand. “It
is not him that I want,” she told herself; “I want to avoid being so
much alone. If I am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with
people.”
During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a passionate
restlessness took possession of Alice. She could not bear to be in the
company of the drug clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk
with her she sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and when,
weary from the long hours of standing behind the counter in the store,
she went home and crawled into bed, she could not sleep. With staring
eyes she looked into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child
awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep within her there
was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded
some definite answer from life.
Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her
breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the
darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling
beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a
refrain. “Why doesn’t something happen? Why am I left here alone?” she
muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer
depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned
Currie or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something
answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her.
And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure. It frightened
and confused her. She had come home from the store at nine and found
the house empty. Bush Milton had gone off to town and her mother to the
house of a neighbor. Alice went upstairs to her room and undressed in
the darkness. For a moment she stood by the window hearing the rain
beat against the glass and then a strange desire took possession of
her. Without stopping to think of what she intended to do, she ran
downstairs through the dark house and out into the rain. As she stood
on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her
body a mad desire to run naked through the streets took possession of
her.
She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect
on her body. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage.
She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human
and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled
homeward. Alice started to run. A wild, desperate mood took possession
of her. “What do I care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him,”
she thought; and then without stopping to consider the possible result
of her madness, called softly. “Wait!” she cried. “Don’t go away.
Whoever you are, you must wait.”
The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man
and somewhat deaf. Putting his hand to his mouth, he shouted. “What?
What say?” he called.
Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was so frightened at
the thought of what she had done that when the man had gone on his way
she did not dare get to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees
through the grass to the house. When she got to her own room she bolted
the door and drew her dressing table across the doorway. Her body shook
as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had difficulty
getting into her nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face
in the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. “What is the matter with me? I
will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and
turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face
bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in
Winesburg.