The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy’s office, in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods store, was but dimly lighted. At the head of
the stairway hung a lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a
bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector, brown with rust and
covered with dust. The people who went up the stairway followed with
their feet the feet of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the
stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep hollows marked
the way.
At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought you to the
doctor’s door. To the left was a dark hallway filled with rubbish. Old
chairs, carpenter’s horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the
darkness waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of rubbish belonged
to the Paris Dry Goods Company. When a counter or a row of shelves in
the store became useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw
it on the pile.
Doctor Reefy’s office was as large as a barn. A stove with a round
paunch sat in the middle of the room. Around its base was piled
sawdust, held in place by heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door
stood a huge table that had once been a part of the furniture of
Herrick’s Clothing Store and that had been used for displaying
custom-made clothes. It was covered with books, bottles, and surgical
instruments. Near the edge of the table lay three or four apples left
by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy’s friend, and
who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as he came in at the door.
At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he
later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown
mustache. He was not a graceful man, as when he grew older, and was
much occupied with the problem of disposing of his hands and feet.
On summer afternoons, when she had been married many years and when her
son George was a boy of twelve or fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes
went up the worn steps to Doctor Reefy’s office. Already the woman’s
naturally tall figure had begun to droop and to drag itself listlessly
about. Ostensibly she went to see the doctor because of her health, but
on the half dozen occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of
the visits did not primarily concern her health. She and the doctor
talked of that but they talked most of her life, of their two lives and
of the ideas that had come to them as they lived their lives in
Winesburg.
In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other
and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were
also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the
circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the
same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same
impression on the memory of an onlooker. Later, and when he grew older
and married a young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours
spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many things he had been
unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a poet in his old age and
his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. “I had come to the time
in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and
prayed to them,” he said. “I did not say my prayers in words nor did I
kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon
when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days
were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew
about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she
worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the
office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to
find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot
be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and
women in all sorts of places.”
On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the
office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.
Sometimes the doctor made philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with
amusement. Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said or a
hint given that strangely illuminated the life of the speaker, a wish
became a desire, or a dream, half dead, flared suddenly into life. For
the most part the words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.
Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper’s wife talked a
little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down
the stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against
the dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing
to her body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by
the window of her room and when darkness had come on and a girl from
the hotel dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow
cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing
for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when
adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion
had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words
madly over and over: “You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!” The words,
she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved
in life.
In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper
began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and
forth. The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears.
“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black
night,” he had said. “You must not try to make love definite. It is the
divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it
and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long
hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from
passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”
Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had died when she
was but five years old. Her girlhood had been lived in the most
haphazard manner imaginable. Her father was a man who had wanted to be
let alone and the affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also
had lived and died a sick man. Every day he arose with a cheerful face,
but by ten o’clock in the morning all the joy had gone out of his
heart. When a guest complained of the fare in the hotel dining room or
one of the girls who made up the beds got married and went away, he
stamped on the floor and swore. At night when he went to bed he thought
of his daughter growing up among the stream of people that drifted in
and out of the hotel and was overcome with sadness. As the girl grew
older and began to walk out in the evening with men he wanted to talk
to her, but when he tried was not successful. He always forgot what he
wanted to say and spent the time complaining of his own affairs.
In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried to be a real
adventurer in life. At eighteen life had so gripped her that she was no
longer a virgin but, although she had a half dozen lovers before she
married Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure prompted
by desire alone. Like all the women in the world, she wanted a real
lover. Always there was something she sought blindly, passionately,
some hidden wonder in life. The tall beautiful girl with the swinging
stride who had walked under the trees with men was forever putting out
her hand into the darkness and trying to get hold of some other hand.
In all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom
she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true
word.
Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her father’s hotel,
because he was at hand and wanted to marry at the time when the
determination to marry came to her. For a while, like most young girls,
she thought marriage would change the face of life. If there was in her
mind a doubt of the outcome of the marriage with Tom she brushed it
aside. Her father was ill and near death at the time and she was
perplexed because of the meaningless outcome of an affair in which she
had just been involved. Other girls of her age in Winesburg were
marrying men she had always known, grocery clerks or young farmers. In
the evening they walked in Main Street with their husbands and when she
passed they smiled happily. She began to think that the fact of
marriage might be full of some hidden significance. Young wives with
whom she talked spoke softly and shyly. “It changes things to have a
man of your own,” they said.
On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with
her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had
not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and
advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He
abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk’s
defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When
she would not let him walk about he began to complain. “I’ve never been
let alone,” he said. “Although I’ve worked hard I’ve not made the hotel
pay. Even now I owe money at the bank. You’ll find that out when I’m
gone.”
The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness. Being unable
to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl’s head down beside
his own. “There’s a way out,” he whispered. “Don’t marry Tom Willard or
anyone else here in Winesburg. There is eight hundred dollars in a tin
box in my trunk. Take it and go away.”
Again the sick man’s voice became querulous. “You’ve got to promise,”
he declared. “If you won’t promise not to marry, give me your word that
you’ll never tell Tom about the money. It is mine and if I give it to
you I’ve the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is to make up
to you for my failure as a father. Some time it may prove to be a door,
a great open door to you. Come now, I tell you I’m about to die, give
me your promise.”
In Doctor Reefy’s office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at
forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor. By a
small desk near the window sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead
pencil that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a married
woman. She became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as
a lay figure to give point to her tale. “And then I was married and it
did not turn out at all,” she said bitterly. “As soon as I had gone
into it I began to be afraid. Perhaps I knew too much before and then
perhaps I found out too much during my first night with him. I don’t
remember.
“What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and tried to talk me
out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen. I thought of what
the girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.
It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went to sleep I
leaned out of the window and thought of the life I had led. I didn’t
want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me. I even
began to be afraid Tom would change his mind.”
The woman’s voice began to quiver with excitement. To Doctor Reefy, who
without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came
an odd illusion. He thought that as she talked the woman’s body was
changing, that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger. When he
could not shake off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist.
“It is good for both her body and her mind, this talking,” he muttered.
The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon
a few months after her marriage. Her voice became steadier. “In the
late afternoon I went for a drive alone,” she said. “I had a buggy and
a little grey pony I kept in Moyer’s Livery. Tom was painting and
repapering rooms in the hotel. He wanted money and I was trying to make
up my mind to tell him about the eight hundred dollars father had given
to me. I couldn’t decide to do it. I didn’t like him well enough. There
was always paint on his hands and face during those days and he smelled
of paint. He was trying to fix up the old hotel, and make it new and
smart.”
The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and made a quick
girlish movement with her hand as she told of the drive alone on the
spring afternoon. “It was cloudy and a storm threatened,” she said.
“Black clouds made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so
that the colors hurt my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a mile or more
and then turned into a side road. The little horse went quickly along
up hill and down. I was impatient. Thoughts came and I wanted to get
away from my thoughts. I began to beat the horse. The black clouds
settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to go at a terrible speed,
to drive on and on forever. I wanted to get out of town, out of my
clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I
almost killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not run any
more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into the darkness until I
fell and hurt my side. I wanted to run away from everything but I
wanted to run towards something too. Don’t you see, dear, how it was?”
Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the
office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone
walk before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that
intoxicated him. When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair
he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. “I cried
all the way home,” she said, as she tried to continue the story of her
wild ride, but he did not listen. “You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you
lovely dear!” he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the
tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had
been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the
body of the tired-out woman.
Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until
after her death. On the summer afternoon in the office when he was on
the point of becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident
brought his love-making quickly to an end. As the man and woman held
each other tightly heavy feet came tramping up the office stairs. The
two sprang to their feet and stood listening and trembling. The noise
on the stairs was made by a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Company.
With a loud bang he threw an empty box on the pile of rubbish in the
hallway and then went heavily down the stairs. Elizabeth followed him
almost immediately. The thing that had come to life in her as she
talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was hysterical, as was also
Doctor Reefy, and did not want to continue the talk. Along the street
she went with the blood still singing in her body, but when she turned
out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of the New Willard House,
she began to tremble and her knees shook so that for a moment she
thought she would fall in the street.
The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for
death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She
personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired
youth running over hills, now a stern quiet man marked and scarred by
the business of living. In the darkness of her room she put out her
hand, thrusting it from under the covers of her bed, and she thought
that death like a living thing put out his hand to her. “Be patient,
lover,” she whispered. “Keep yourself young and beautiful and be
patient.”
On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon her and defeated
her plans for telling her son George of the eight hundred dollars
hidden away, she got out of bed and crept half across the room pleading
with death for another hour of life. “Wait, dear! The boy! The boy! The
boy!” she pleaded as she tried with all of her strength to fight off
the arms of the lover she had wanted so earnestly.
Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her son George became
eighteen, and the young man had but little sense of the meaning of her
death. Only time could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one afternoon the
doctor stopped him in the hallway and said a few words.
The young man went into his own room and closed the door. He had a
queer empty feeling in the region of his stomach. For a moment he sat
staring at the floor and then jumping up went for a walk. Along the
station platform he went, and around through residence streets past the
high-school building, thinking almost entirely of his own affairs. The
notion of death could not get hold of him and he was in fact a little
annoyed that his mother had died on that day. He had just received a
note from Helen White, the daughter of the town banker, in answer to
one from him. “Tonight I could have gone to see her and now it will
have to be put off,” he thought half angrily.
Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock. It had been cold
and rainy in the morning but in the afternoon the sun came out. Before
she died she lay paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and
with only her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six days she
struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say some few words in regard
to his future, and in her eyes there was an appeal so touching that all
who saw it kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for years.
Even Tom Willard, who had always half resented his wife, forgot his
resentment and the tears ran out of his eyes and lodged in his
mustache. The mustache had begun to turn grey and Tom colored it with
dye. There was oil in the preparation he used for the purpose and the
tears, catching in the mustache and being brushed away by his hand,
formed a fine mist-like vapor. In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked
like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter
weather.
George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother’s
death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes,
went along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was
a candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a
chair by the bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out
his hand as though to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it
back again. The air of the room was heavy with the presence of the two
self-conscious human beings, and the man hurried away.
The dead woman’s son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor. He
again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a
change in his life, that he would leave Winesburg. “I will go to some
city. Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper,” he thought, and then
his mind turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening
and again he was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented
his going to her.
In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to
have thoughts. His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother’s
mind had played with the thought of death. He closed his eyes and
imagined that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips.
His body trembled and his hands shook. And then something happened. The
boy sprang to his feet and stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of
the dead woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over
him so that he began to weep. A new notion came into his mind and he
turned and looked guiltily about as though afraid he would be observed.
George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the
body of his mother and look at her face. The thought that had come into
his mind gripped him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother
but someone else lay in the bed before him. The conviction was so real
that it was almost unbearable. The body under the sheets was long and
in death looked young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange
fancy, it was unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the body before him
was alive, that in another moment a lovely woman would spring out of
the bed and confront him, became so overpowering that he could not bear
the suspense. Again and again he put out his hand. Once he touched and
half lifted the white sheet that covered her, but his courage failed
and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and went out of the room. In the
hallway outside the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put
a hand against the wall to support himself. “That’s not my mother.
That’s not my mother in there,” he whispered to himself and again his
body shook with fright and uncertainty. When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who
had come to watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he put
his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head from side to
side, half blind with grief. “My mother is dead,” he said, and then
forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he
had just come. “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,” the boy, urged
by some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.
As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long
and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in
the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother’s bed.
Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the
plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband
was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. “I jammed
the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband,
unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that
after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her
lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.