Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick lips. She was
tall and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and
wished she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She
worked in the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during the
day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the
daughter of Henry Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of
Winesburg, and lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was
no grass beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from
its fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that
sometimes persisted all through the night.
When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his
power over her. The bookkeeper’s life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a
closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age.
At night when he returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the streets. He had
invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The trousers to his
street suit were placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the boards with a
damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining room door. If they
were moved during the day he was speechless with anger and did not
recover his equilibrium for a week.
The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter.
She, he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of her mother
and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a
handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud
she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers
and then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.
Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard. Secretly she loved another man, but her love affair, about
which no one knew, caused her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed
Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith’s Saloon, and went about with the
young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings. She did not think
that her station in life would permit her to be seen in the company of
the bartender and walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very insistent in her
nature. She felt that she could keep the younger man within bounds.
About Ed Handby she was somewhat uncertain.
Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith’s saloon. His fists were large
and his eyes unusually small, but his voice, as though striving to
conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.
At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle
in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought in eight thousand dollars,
which Ed spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began
an orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home
town with awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving
carriages through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose
wardrobes cost him hundreds of dollars. One night at a resort called
Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a hotel and later
went about smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the
joy of hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at
the resort with their sweethearts.
The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface
amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in
her company. On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley
Moyer’s livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction that she
was the woman his nature demanded and that he must get her settled upon
him and he told her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry
and to begin trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but so
simple was his nature that he found it difficult to explain his
intentions. His body ached with physical longing and with his body he
expressed himself. Taking the milliner into his arms and holding her
tightly in spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became
helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her out of the
buggy. “When I get hold of you again I’ll not let you go. You can’t
play with me,” he declared as he turned to drive away. Then, jumping
out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands. “I’ll
keep you for good the next time,” he said. “You might as well make up
your mind to that. It’s you and me for it and I’m going to have you
before I get through.”
One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was
in Ed Handby’s mind the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter,
went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck’s
pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher.
Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent,
but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys
and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He
said that women should look out for themselves, that the fellow who
went out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As he
talked he looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five
minutes and then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the
barber’s trade in Cal Prouse’s shop and already began to consider
himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing,
drinking, and going about with women. He began to tell of a night when
he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher’s son held a cigar in the side of his mouth
and as he talked spat on the floor. “The women in the place couldn’t
embarrass me although they tried hard enough,” he boasted. “One of the
girls in the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon as she
began to talk I went and sat in her lap. Everyone in the room laughed
when I kissed her. I taught her to let me alone.”
George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the
town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the
wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely.
Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do, George
went out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets
filled with frame houses.
Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he
began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street
imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that
jingled as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector,
passing before a long line of men who stood at attention. He began to
examine the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and
began to scold. “Your pack is not in order,” he said sharply. “How many
times will I have to speak of this matter? Everything must be in order
here. We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be
done without order.”
Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. “There is a law for armies and for men
too,” he muttered, lost in reflection. “The law begins with little
things and spreads out until it covers everything. In every little
thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their
clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that
law. I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that
swings through the night like a star. In my little way I must begin to
learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”
George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his
body began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had
just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For
the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been
talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and
when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. “To come out
of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and think things like that,” he
whispered. “It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the
boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been
thinking down here.”
In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not
yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on
the railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar
for the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small
cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more
comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.
With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked
into such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly
lighted and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay
about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy.
For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading
of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world
towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he
stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place
that had been a part of some former existence. On an impulse he turned
out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds
in which lived the cows and pigs.
For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange
new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure
in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor
little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys
mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the
women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens,
the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the
stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children
crying—all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness,
oddly detached and apart from all life.
The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had
to be driven away with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a vacant lot and
throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big
and remade by the simple experience through which he had been passing
and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them
into the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say
words overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over
on his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of
meaning. “Death,” he muttered, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.”
George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the
sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that all of the people in the
little street must be brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had
the courage to call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.
“If there were only a woman here I would take hold of her hand and we
would run until we were both tired out,” he thought. “That would make
me feel better.” With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out
of the street and went toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He
thought she would understand his mood and that he could achieve in her
presence a position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past
when he had been with her and had kissed her lips he had come away
filled with anger at himself. He had felt like one being used for some
obscure purpose and had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had
suddenly become too big to be used.
When George got to Belle Carpenter’s house there had already been a
visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and calling
Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask
the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she came
and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen.
“You stay away from that kid,” he growled, thinking of George Willard,
and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. “If I catch
you together I will break your bones and his too,” he added. The
bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself
because of his failure.
When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly
upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed
Handby cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house
of a neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head
in his hands. She was made happy by the sight, and when George Willard
came to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her
hat. She thought that, as she walked through the streets with young
Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer.
For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under
the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words.
The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness
in the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering
along and swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter
realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had
changed. “You’ll find me different,” he declared, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and looking boldly into her eyes. “I don’t know why
but it is so. You’ve got to take me for a man or let me alone. That’s
how it is.”
Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street
and went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill.
The hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the Winesburg
Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and
among the bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now
stiff and frozen.
As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard’s heart began
to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided
that Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new
force that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at work upon
her and had led to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with
the sense of masculine power. Although he had been annoyed that as they
walked about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact
that she had accompanied him to this place took all his doubts away.
“It is different. Everything has become different,” he thought and
taking hold of her shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her,
his eyes shining with pride.
Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she
leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the
darkness. In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting.
Again, as in the alleyway, George Willard’s mind ran off into words
and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the words into the still
night. “Lust,” he whispered, “lust and night and women.”
George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on
the hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and
then grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and
was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the
hillside he had led the woman to one of the little open spaces among
the bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her. As in the vacant
lot, by the laborers’ houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for
the new power in himself and was waiting for the woman to speak when Ed
Handby appeared.
The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had
power within himself to accomplish his purpose without using his fists.
Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet, he held
him with one hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the
grass. Then with a quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger
man sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who
had risen to her feet. “You’re no good,” he said roughly. “I’ve half a
mind not to bother with you. I’d let you alone if I didn’t want you so
much.”
On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man
who had humiliated him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better
than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.
Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the
bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the
bushes. The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going
indefinitely but George Willard’s head struck the root of a tree and he
lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched
her away.
George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As
he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated
himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.
When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was
puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping to hear again the
voice outside himself that had so short a time before put new courage
into his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the street of
frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to
get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly
squalid and commonplace.
“QUEER”
From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that stuck like a burr
on the rear of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the
junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty window into the
printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_. Elmer was putting new shoelaces in
his shoes. They did not go in readily and he had to take the shoes off.
With the shoes in his hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel
of one of his stockings. Then looking quickly up he saw George Willard,
the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg, standing at the back door of
the _Eagle_ printshop and staring absentmindedly about. “Well, well,
what next!” exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand, jumping
to his feet and creeping away from the window.
A flush crept into Elmer Cowley’s face and his hands began to tremble.
In Cowley & Son’s store a Jewish traveling salesman stood by the
counter talking to his father. He imagined the reporter could hear what
was being said and the thought made him furious. With one of the shoes
still held in his hand he stood in a corner of the shed and stamped
with a stockinged foot upon the board floor.
Cowley & Son’s store did not face the main street of Winesburg. The
front was on Maumee Street and beyond it was Voight’s wagon shop and a
shed for the sheltering of farmers’ horses. Beside the store an
alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day drays and
delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up
and down. The store itself was indescribable. Will Henderson once said
of it that it sold everything and nothing. In the window facing Maumee
Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an apple barrel, to indicate
that orders for coal were taken, and beside the black mass of the coal
stood three combs of honey grown brown and dirty in their wooden
frames.
The honey had stood in the store window for six months. It was for sale
as were also the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof
paint, bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that
companioned the honey in its patient willingness to serve the public.
Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager
patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall
and lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen
partially covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat.
The coat had been purchased to serve as a wedding garment. Before he
became a merchant Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore
the Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons
when he came into town to trade. When he sold the farm to become a
merchant he wore the coat constantly. It had become brown with age and
was covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed
up and ready for the day in town.
As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not
been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family,
consisting of a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in
rooms above the store and it did not cost them much to live. His
troubles were not financial. His unhappiness as a merchant lay in the
fact that when a traveling man with wares to be sold came in at the
front door he was afraid. Behind the counter he stood shaking his head.
He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to buy and thus
lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he would not be
stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what could not be
sold.
In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard
standing and apparently listening at the back door of the _Eagle_
printshop, a situation had arisen that always stirred the son’s wrath.
The traveling man talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure
expressing uncertainty. “You see how quickly it is done,” said the
traveling man, who had for sale a small flat metal substitute for
collar buttons. With one hand he quickly unfastened a collar from his
shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed a flattering wheedling
tone. “I tell you what, men have come to the end of all this fooling
with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out of the change
that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town.
Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I’ll not visit any other
store. I’ll leave the field to you.”
The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on
Ebenezer’s breast. “It’s an opportunity and I want you to take it,” he
urged. “A friend of mine told me about you. ‘See that man Cowley,’ he
said. ‘He’s a live one.’”
The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book from his pocket he
began writing out the order. Still holding the shoe in his hand Elmer
Cowley went through the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass
showcase near the front door. He took a cheap revolver from the case
and began to wave it about. “You get out of here!” he shrieked. “We
don’t want any collar fasteners here.” An idea came to him. “Mind, I’m
not making any threat,” he added. “I don’t say I’ll shoot. Maybe I just
took this gun out of the case to look at it. But you better get out.
Yes sir, I’ll say that. You better grab up your things and get out.”
The young storekeeper’s voice rose to a scream and going behind the
counter he began to advance upon the two men. “We’re through being
fools here!” he cried. “We ain’t going to buy any more stuff until we
begin to sell. We ain’t going to keep on being queer and have folks
staring and listening. You get out of here!”
The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar fasteners off the
counter into a black leather bag, he ran. He was a small man and very
bow-legged and he ran awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door
and he stumbled and fell. “Crazy, that’s what he is—crazy!” he
sputtered as he arose from the sidewalk and hurried away.
In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other. Now that
the immediate object of his wrath had fled, the younger man was
embarrassed. “Well, I meant it. I think we’ve been queer long enough,”
he declared, going to the showcase and replacing the revolver. Sitting
on a barrel he pulled on and fastened the shoe he had been holding in
his hand. He was waiting for some word of understanding from his father
but when Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the wrath in
the son and the young man ran out of the store without replying.
Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant
looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he
had confronted the traveling man. “I’ll be starched,” he said softly.
“Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched!”
Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country road that
paralleled the railroad track. He did not know where he was going or
what he was going to do. In the shelter of a deep cut where the road,
after turning sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he stopped
and the passion that had been the cause of his outburst in the store
began to again find expression. “I will not be queer—one to be looked
at and listened to,” he declared aloud. “I’ll be like other people.
I’ll show that George Willard. He’ll find out. I’ll show him!”
The distraught young man stood in the middle of the road and glared
back at the town. He did not know the reporter George Willard and had
no special feeling concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering
the town news. The reporter had merely come, by his presence in the
office and in the printshop of the _Winesburg Eagle_, to stand for
something in the young merchant’s mind. He thought the boy who passed
and repassed Cowley & Son’s store and who stopped to talk to people in
the street must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him. George
Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented
in his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have
believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that
vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did
he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of
Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he not walk whistling
and laughing through Main Street? Might not one by striking his person
strike also the greater enemy—the thing that smiled and went its own
way—the judgment of Winesburg?
Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and
powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the downy beard that had begun to
grow upon his chin, were pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded
from between his lips and his eyes were blue with the colorless
blueness of the marbles called “aggies” that the boys of Winesburg
carried in their pockets. Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and
had made no friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life
without friends and he hated the thought.
Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with his hands
stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was cold with a raw wind, but
presently the sun began to shine and the road became soft and muddy.
The tops of the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to melt
and the mud clung to Elmer’s shoes. His feet became cold. When he had
gone several miles he turned off the road, crossed a field and entered
a wood. In the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which he sat
trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in mind.
For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then, arising and
creeping cautiously through a mass of underbrush, he went to a fence
and looked across fields to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds.
A smile came to his lips and he began making motions with his long arms
to a man who was husking corn in one of the fields.
In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned to the farm where
he had lived through boyhood and where there was another human being to
whom he felt he could explain himself. The man on the farm was a
half-witted old fellow named Mook. He had once been employed by
Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm when it was sold. The old
man lived in one of the unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and
puttered about all day in the fields.
Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith he believed in
the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and
when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and
even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He it was who had
put the expression regarding being “laundered” into the mouth of his
former employer. When excited or surprised by anything he smiled
vaguely and muttered: “I’ll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I’ll be
washed and ironed and starched.”
When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn and came into the
wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was neither surprised nor especially
interested in the sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also
were cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for the warmth
and apparently indifferent to what Elmer had to say.
Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking up and down and
waving his arms about. “You don’t understand what’s the matter with me
so of course you don’t care,” he declared. “With me it’s different.
Look how it has always been with me. Father is queer and mother was
queer, too. Even the clothes mother used to wear were not like other
people’s clothes, and look at that coat in which father goes about
there in town, thinking he’s dressed up, too. Why don’t he get a new
one? It wouldn’t cost much. I’ll tell you why. Father doesn’t know and
when mother was alive she didn’t know either. Mabel is different. She
knows but she won’t say anything. I will, though. I’m not going to be
stared at any longer. Why look here, Mook, father doesn’t know that his
store there in town is just a queer jumble, that he’ll never sell the
stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it. Sometimes he’s a little
worried that trade doesn’t come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and says trade will
come after a while. He isn’t worried. He’s queer. He doesn’t know
enough to be worried.”
The excited young man became more excited. “He don’t know but I know,”
he shouted, stopping to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of
the half-wit. “I know too well. I can’t stand it. When we lived out
here it was different. I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I
wasn’t always seeing people and thinking as I am now. In the evening,
there in town, I go to the post office or to the depot to see the train
come in, and no one says anything to me. Everyone stands around and
laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me. Then I feel so queer
that I can’t talk either. I go away. I don’t say anything. I can’t.”
The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. “I won’t stand it,” he
yelled, looking up at the bare branches of the trees. “I’m not made to
stand it.”
Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the fire, Elmer
turned and glared at him as he had glared back along the road at the
town of Winesburg. “Go on back to work,” he screamed. “What good does
it do me to talk to you?” A thought came to him and his voice dropped.
“I’m a coward too, eh?” he muttered. “Do you know why I came clear out
here afoot? I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could
tell. I hunted out another queer one, you see. I ran away, that’s what
I did. I couldn’t stand up to someone like that George Willard. I had
to come to you. I ought to tell him and I will.”
Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew about. “I will tell
him. I won’t be queer. I don’t care what they think. I won’t stand it.”
Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit sitting on the
log before the fire. Presently the old man arose and climbing over the
fence went back to his work in the corn. “I’ll be washed and ironed and
starched,” he declared. “Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed.” Mook
was interested. He went along a lane to a field where two cows stood
nibbling at a straw stack. “Elmer was here,” he said to the cows.
“Elmer is crazy. You better get behind the stack where he don’t see
you. He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will.”
At eight o’clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head in at the front
door of the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_ where George Willard sat
writing. His cap was pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined
look was on his face. “You come on outside with me,” he said, stepping
in and closing the door. He kept his hand on the knob as though
prepared to resist anyone else coming in. “You just come along outside.
I want to see you.”
George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main street of
Winesburg. The night was cold and George Willard had on a new overcoat
and looked very spruce and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the
overcoat pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had long
been wanting to make friends with the young merchant and find out what
was in his mind. Now he thought he saw a chance and was delighted. “I
wonder what he’s up to? Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of news for
the paper. It can’t be a fire because I haven’t heard the fire bell and
there isn’t anyone running,” he thought.
In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November evening, but few
citizens appeared and these hurried along bent on getting to the stove
at the back of some store. The windows of the stores were frosted and
the wind rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance to the
stairway leading to Doctor Welling’s office. Before Hern’s Grocery a
basket of apples and a rack filled with new brooms stood on the
sidewalk. Elmer Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard. He
tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down. His face worked
spasmodically. He seemed about to shout. “Oh, you go on back,” he
cried. “Don’t stay out here with me. I ain’t got anything to tell you.
I don’t want to see you at all.”
For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered through the
resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his
failure to declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the
sense of defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours
of futile sputtering at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and
his failure in the presence of the young reporter, he thought he could
see no hope of a future for himself.
And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness that surrounded him
he began to see a light. Going to the now darkened store, where Cowley
& Son had for over a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept
stealthily in and felt about in a barrel that stood by the stove at the
rear. In the barrel beneath shavings lay a tin box containing Cowley &
Son’s cash. Every evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel
when he closed the store and went upstairs to bed. “They wouldn’t never
think of a careless place like that,” he told himself, thinking of
robbers.
Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from the little roll
containing perhaps four hundred dollars, the cash left from the sale of
the farm. Then replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly
out at the front door and walked again in the streets.
The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his unhappiness was
very simple. “I will get out of here, run away from home,” he told
himself. He knew that a local freight train passed through Winesburg at
midnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at dawn. He would
steal a ride on the local and when he got to Cleveland would lose
himself in the crowds there. He would get work in some shop and become
friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he
could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make
friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had
for others.
The tall awkward young man, striding through the streets, laughed at
himself because he had been angry and had been half afraid of George
Willard. He decided he would have his talk with the young reporter
before he left town, that he would tell him about things, perhaps
challenge him, challenge all of Winesburg through him.
Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of the New Willard
House and pounded on the door. A sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the
office. He received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and bore
with pride the title of “night clerk.” Before the boy Elmer was bold,
insistent. “You ‘wake him up,” he commanded. “You tell him to come down
by the depot. I got to see him and I’m going away on the local. Tell
him to dress and come on down. I ain’t got much time.”
The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg and the trainsmen
were coupling cars, swinging lanterns and preparing to resume their
flight east. George Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new
overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with curiosity. “Well,
here I am. What do you want? You’ve got something to tell me, eh?” he
said.
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at
the train that had begun to groan and get under way. “Well, you see,”
he began, and then lost control of his tongue. “I’ll be washed and
ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half
incoherently.
Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train in the darkness
on the station platform. Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and
down before his eyes. Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket
he thrust them into George Willard’s hand. “Take them,” he cried. “I
don’t want them. Give them to father. I stole them.” With a snarl of
rage he turned and his long arms began to flay the air. Like one
struggling for release from hands that held him he struck out, hitting
George Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the mouth. The
young reporter rolled over on the platform half unconscious, stunned by
the terrific force of the blows. Springing aboard the passing train and
running over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car and
lying on his face looked back, trying to see the fallen man in the
darkness. Pride surged up in him. “I showed him,” he cried. “I guess I
showed him. I ain’t so queer. I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer.”