Snow lay deep in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about
ten o’clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in
clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were
fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. “There will be good
sleighing,” said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith’s
saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist
stumbling along in the kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. “Snow
will bring the people into town on Saturday,” said the druggist. The
two men stopped and discussed their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on
a light overcoat and no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot
with the toe of the right. “Snow will be good for the wheat,” observed
the druggist sagely.
Young George Willard, who had nothing to do, was glad because he did
not feel like working that day. The weekly paper had been printed and
taken to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow began to fall
on Thursday. At eight o’clock, after the morning train had passed, he
put a pair of skates in his pocket and went up to Waterworks Pond but
did not go skating. Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine
Creek he went until he came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a
fire against the side of a log and sat down at the end of the log to
think. When the snow began to fall and the wind to blow he hurried
about getting fuel for the fire.
The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his
school teacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a
book she wanted him to read and had been alone with her for an hour.
For the fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with great
earnestness and he could not make out what she meant by her talk. He
began to believe she must be in love with him and the thought was both
pleasing and annoying.
Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on the fire. Looking
about to be sure he was alone he talked aloud pretending he was in the
presence of the woman, “Oh, you’re just letting on, you know you are,”
he declared. “I am going to find out about you. You wait and see.”
The young man got up and went back along the path toward town leaving
the fire blazing in the wood. As he went through the streets the skates
clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he
built a fire in the stove and lay down on top of the bed. He began to
have lustful thoughts and pulling down the shade of the window closed
his eyes and turned his face to the wall. He took a pillow into his
arms and embraced it thinking first of the school teacher, who by her
words had stirred something within him, and later of Helen White, the
slim daughter of the town banker, with whom he had been for a long time
half in love.
By nine o’clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the
weather had become bitter cold. It was difficult to walk about. The
stores were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses. The
evening train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in
its arrival. By ten o’clock all but four of the eighteen hundred
citizens of the town were in bed.
Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake. He was lame and
carried a heavy stick. On dark nights he carried a lantern. Between
nine and ten o’clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he
stumbled through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then he
went into alleyways and tried the back doors. Finding all tight he
hurried around the corner to the New Willard House and beat on the
door. Through the rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove.
“You go to bed. I’ll keep the stove going,” he said to the boy who
slept on a cot in the hotel office.
Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his shoes. When the boy
had gone to sleep he began to think of his own affairs. He intended to
paint his house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost
of paint and labor. That led him into other calculations. The night
watchman was sixty years old and wanted to retire. He had been a
soldier in the Civil War and drew a small pension. He hoped to find
some new method of making a living and aspired to become a professional
breeder of ferrets. Already he had four of the strangely shaped savage
little creatures, that are used by sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits,
in the cellar of his house. “Now I have one male and three females,” he
mused. “If I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve or fifteen. In
another year I shall be able to begin advertising ferrets for sale in
the sporting papers.”
The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank.
He did not sleep. By years of practice he had trained himself to sit
for hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the
morning he was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.
With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only
three people were awake in Winesburg. George Willard was in the office
of the _Eagle_ pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but
in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood.
In the bell tower of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis
Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a revelation
from God, and Kate Swift, the school teacher, was leaving her house for
a walk in the storm.
It was past ten o’clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was
unpremeditated. It was as though the man and the boy, by thinking of
her, had driven her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth Swift
had gone to the county seat concerning some business in connection with
mortgages in which she had money invested and would not be back until
the next day. By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room
of the house sat the daughter reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to
her feet and, snatching a cloak from a rack by the front door, ran out
of the house.
At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty
woman. Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with
blotches that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the winter
streets she was lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square,
and her features were as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal
in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening.
During the afternoon the school teacher had been to see Doctor Welling
concerning her health. The doctor had scolded her and had declared she
was in danger of losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to
be abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous.
The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and
would not have turned back had she remembered. She was very cold but
after walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she
went to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales
set in the ground before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along
Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winters’ barn and turning east followed a
street of low frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker
Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead’s chicken farm to
Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had
driven her out of doors passed and then returned again.
There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate
Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and
stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long
while something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of
the children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a
time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.
With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and
down in the schoolroom and talked very rapidly. It did not seem to
matter what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children
of Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning
the life of the dead writer. The stories were told with the air of one
who had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of
his private life. The children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles
Lamb must be someone who had once lived in Winesburg.
On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto
Cellini. That time they laughed. What a bragging, blustering, brave,
lovable fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she
invented anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a
room above Cellini’s lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys
guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that
he became dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him.
Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.
On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snow-covered
streets, a crisis had come into the life of the school teacher.
Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been
very adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in
the schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought
within her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events
transpired in her mind. The people of the town thought of her as a
confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own way
thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make
and mar their own lives. In reality she was the most eagerly passionate
soul among them, and more than once, in the five years since she had
come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school
teacher, had been compelled to go out of the house and walk half
through the night fighting out some battle raging within. Once on a
night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when she came
home had a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift. “I am glad you’re not a
man,” said the mother sharply. “More than once I’ve waited for your
father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I’ve
had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to
see the worst side of him reproduced in you.”
Kate Swift’s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In
something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized
the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the
summer she had gone to the _Eagle_ office and finding the boy
unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the
two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school teacher tried to bring
home to the mind of the boy some conception of the difficulties he
would have to face as a writer. “You will have to know life,” she
declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of
George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look
into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace.
“If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,”
she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing
until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want
to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of
what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of
words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about,
not what they say.”
On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend
Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of the church waiting to look at
her body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a
book. It was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy.
He had the book under his arm and was preparing to depart. Again Kate
Swift talked with great earnestness. Night was coming on and the light
in the room grew dim. As he turned to go she spoke his name softly and
with an impulsive movement took hold of his hand. Because the reporter
was rapidly becoming a man something of his man’s appeal, combined with
the winsomeness of the boy, stirred the heart of the lonely woman. A
passionate desire to have him understand the import of life, to learn
to interpret it truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward,
her lips brushed his cheek. At the same moment he for the first time
became aware of the marked beauty of her features. They were both
embarrassed, and to relieve her feeling she became harsh and
domineering. “What’s the use? It will be ten years before you begin to
understand what I mean when I talk to you,” she cried passionately.
On the night of the storm and while the minister sat in the church
waiting for her, Kate Swift went to the office of the _Winesburg
Eagle_, intending to have another talk with the boy. After the long
walk in the snow she was cold, lonely, and tired. As she came through
Main Street she saw the light from the printshop window shining on the
snow and on an impulse opened the door and went in. For an hour she sat
by the stove in the office talking of life. She talked with passionate
earnestness. The impulse that had driven her out into the snow poured
itself out into talk. She became inspired as she sometimes did in the
presence of the children in school. A great eagerness to open the door
of life to the boy, who had been her pupil and who she thought might
possess a talent for the understanding of life, had possession of her.
So strong was her passion that it became something physical. Again her
hands took hold of his shoulders and she turned him about. In the dim
light her eyes blazed. She arose and laughed, not sharply as was
customary with her, but in a queer, hesitating way. “I must be going,”
she said. “In a moment, if I stay, I’ll be wanting to kiss you.”
In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked
to the door. She was a teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked
at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had
a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took
possession of her. In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a
boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man.
The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the
warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went
out of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited.
When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body
fall heavily against him. For George Willard the confusion was
immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of the woman
tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists
began to beat on his face. When the school teacher had run away and
left him alone, he walked up and down the office swearing furiously.
It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded
himself. When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad.
Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman
George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God
bearing a message of truth.
George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the
printshop went home. Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in
his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room.
The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When
he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.
George Willard rolled about in the bed on which he had lain in the
afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The
words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in
his ears. His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to
the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand what had happened.
He could not make it out. Over and over he turned the matter in his
mind. Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another
day to come. At four o’clock he pulled the covers up about his neck and
tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a
hand and with it groped about in the darkness. “I have missed
something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me,”
he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the
last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.