The house in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg lived with his mother had
been at one time the show place of the town, but when young Seth lived
there its glory had become somewhat dimmed. The huge brick house which
Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had overshadowed it. The
Richmond place was in a little valley far out at the end of Main
Street. Farmers coming into town by a dusty road from the south passed
by a grove of walnut trees, skirted the Fair Ground with its high board
fence covered with advertisements, and trotted their horses down
through the valley past the Richmond place into town. As much of the
country north and south of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and berry
raising, Seth saw wagon-loads of berry pickers—boys, girls, and
women—going to the fields in the morning and returning covered with
dust in the evening. The chattering crowd, with their rude jokes cried
out from wagon to wagon, sometimes irritated him sharply. He regretted
that he also could not laugh boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and
make of himself a figure in the endless stream of moving, giggling
activity that went up and down the road.
The Richmond house was built of limestone, and, although it was said in
the village to have become run down, had in reality grown more
beautiful with every passing year. Already time had begun a little to
color the stone, lending a golden richness to its surface and in the
evening or on dark days touching the shaded places beneath the eaves
with wavering patches of browns and blacks.
The house had been built by Seth’s grandfather, a stone quarryman, and
it, together with the stone quarries on Lake Erie eighteen miles to the
north, had been left to his son, Clarence Richmond, Seth’s father.
Clarence Richmond, a quiet passionate man extraordinarily admired by
his neighbors, had been killed in a street fight with the editor of a
newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. The fight concerned the publication of
Clarence Richmond’s name coupled with that of a woman school teacher,
and as the dead man had begun the row by firing upon the editor, the
effort to punish the slayer was unsuccessful. After the quarryman’s
death it was found that much of the money left to him had been
squandered in speculation and in insecure investments made through the
influence of friends.
Left with but a small income, Virginia Richmond had settled down to a
retired life in the village and to the raising of her son. Although she
had been deeply moved by the death of the husband and father, she did
not at all believe the stories concerning him that ran about after his
death. To her mind, the sensitive, boyish man whom all had
instinctively loved, was but an unfortunate, a being too fine for
everyday life. “You’ll be hearing all sorts of stories, but you are not
to believe what you hear,” she said to her son. “He was a good man,
full of tenderness for everyone, and should not have tried to be a man
of affairs. No matter how much I were to plan and dream of your future,
I could not imagine anything better for you than that you turn out as
good a man as your father.”
Several years after the death of her husband, Virginia Richmond had
become alarmed at the growing demands upon her income and had set
herself to the task of increasing it. She had learned stenography and
through the influence of her husband’s friends got the position of
court stenographer at the county seat. There she went by train each
morning during the sessions of the court, and when no court sat, spent
her days working among the rosebushes in her garden. She was a tall,
straight figure of a woman with a plain face and a great mass of brown
hair.
In the relationship between Seth Richmond and his mother, there was a
quality that even at eighteen had begun to color all of his traffic
with men. An almost unhealthy respect for the youth kept the mother for
the most part silent in his presence. When she did speak sharply to him
he had only to look steadily into her eyes to see dawning there the
puzzled look he had already noticed in the eyes of others when he
looked at them.
The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the
mother did not. She expected from all people certain conventional
reactions to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled
and looked at the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all
was forgiven. After the weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept
into his room and kissed him.
Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did not do these
things. After the severest reprimand, he did not tremble and look at
the floor but instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to
invade her mind. As for creeping into his room—after Seth had passed
his fifteenth year, she would have been half afraid to do anything of
the kind.
Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys
ran away from home. The three boys climbed into the open door of an
empty freight car and rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was
being held. One of the boys had a bottle filled with a combination of
whiskey and blackberry wine, and the three sat with legs dangling out
of the car door drinking from the bottle. Seth’s two companions sang
and waved their hands to idlers about the stations of the towns through
which the train passed. They planned raids upon the baskets of farmers
who had come with their families to the fair. “We will live like kings
and won’t have to spend a penny to see the fair and horse races,” they
declared boastfully.
After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down
the floor of her home filled with vague alarms. Although on the next
day she discovered, through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on
what adventure the boys had gone, she could not quiet herself. All
through the night she lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling
herself that Seth, like his father, would come to a sudden and violent
end. So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the
weight of her wrath that, although she would not allow the marshal to
interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and paper and wrote
down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon
him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going about the garden and
saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part.
And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a little weary and
with coal soot in his ears and about his eyes, she again found herself
unable to reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail
by the kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her. “I wanted to
turn back within an hour after we had started,” he explained. “I didn’t
know what to do. I knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if
I didn’t go on I would be ashamed of myself. I went through with the
thing for my own good. It was uncomfortable, sleeping on wet straw, and
two drunken Negroes came and slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket
out of a farmer’s wagon I couldn’t help thinking of his children going
all day without food. I was sick of the whole affair, but I was
determined to stick it out until the other boys were ready to come
back.”
“I’m glad you did stick it out,” replied the mother, half resentfully,
and kissing him upon the forehead pretended to busy herself with the
work about the house.
On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New Willard House to
visit his friend, George Willard. It had rained during the afternoon,
but as he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and
a golden glow lit up the west. Going around a corner, he turned in at
the door of the hotel and began to climb the stairway leading up to his
friend’s room. In the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men
were engaged in a discussion of politics.
On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices of the men
below. They were excited and talked rapidly. Tom Willard was berating
the traveling men. “I am a Democrat but your talk makes me sick,” he
said. “You don’t understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are
friends. It is impossible perhaps for your mind to grasp that. If
anyone tells you that a friendship can be deeper and bigger and more
worth while than dollars and cents, or even more worth while than state
politics, you snicker and laugh.”
The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a tall,
grey-mustached man who worked for a wholesale grocery house. “Do you
think that I’ve lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark
Hanna?” he demanded. “Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money and
nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and
don’t you forget it.”
The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the rest of the
discussion, but went on up the stairway and into the little dark hall.
Something in the voices of the men talking in the hotel office started
a chain of thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to think
that loneliness was a part of his character, something that would
always stay with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by a window
that looked into an alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner
Groff, the town baker. His tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and down the
alleyway. In his shop someone called the baker, who pretended not to
hear. The baker had an empty milk bottle in his hand and an angry
sullen look in his eyes.
In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the “deep one.” “He’s like his
father,” men said as he went through the streets. “He’ll break out some
of these days. You wait and see.”
The talk of the town and the respect with which men and boys
instinctively greeted him, as all men greet silent people, had affected
Seth Richmond’s outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys, was
deeper than boys are given credit for being, but he was not what the
men of the town, and even his mother, thought him to be. No great
underlying purpose lay back of his habitual silence, and he had no
definite plan for his life. When the boys with whom he associated were
noisy and quarrelsome, he stood quietly at one side. With calm eyes he
watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn’t
particularly interested in what was going on, and sometimes wondered if
he would ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as he stood
in the half-darkness by the window watching the baker, he wished that
he himself might become thoroughly stirred by something, even by the
fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted. “It would be
better for me if I could become excited and wrangle about politics like
windy old Tom Willard,” he thought, as he left the window and went
again along the hallway to the room occupied by his friend, George
Willard.
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 had 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 toward 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 toward the door. The words of his comrade
irritated him unbearably. “Well, good-bye,” 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
tomorrow.”
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 Doctor 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 women’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 won’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 tonight.” 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 toward 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 someone, it won’t never be me. It’ll
be someone else—some fool—someone who talks a lot—someone like that
George Willard.”