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As
Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red hands and talking of
women, his assistant, George Willard, sat in the office of the Winesburg
Eagle and listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.
Doctor
Parcival appeared immediately after Will Henderson had disappeared.
One might have supposed that the doctor had been watching from his
office window and had seen the editor going along the alleyway.
Coming in at the front door and finding himself a chair, he lighted
one of the stogies and crossing his legs began to talk.
He seemed intent upon convincing the boy of the advisability of
adopting a line of conduct that he was himself unable to define.
"If
you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a doctor I
have mighty few patients," he began.
"There is a reason for that.
It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much of
medicine as anyone here. I do
not want patients. The reason,
you see, does not appear on the surface.
It lies in fact in my character, which has, if you think about it,
many strange turns. Why I want
to talk to you of the matter I don't know.
I might keep still and get more credit in your eyes.
I have a desire to make you admire me, that's a fact. I don't know
why. That's why I talk. It's very amusing, eh?"
Sometimes
the doctor launched into long tales concerning himself.
To the boy the tales were very real and full of meaning.
He began to admire the fat unclean-looking man and, in the afternoon
when Will Henderson had gone, looked forward with keen interest to the
doctor's coming.
Doctor
Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years. He came from Chicago and when he arrived was drunk and got
into a fight with Albert Longworth, the baggageman.
The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the doctor's being escorted
to the village lockup. When he
was released he rented a room above a shoe-repairing shop at the lower end
of Main Street and put out the sign that announced himself as a doctor.
Although he had but few patients and these of the poorer sort who
were unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money for his needs.
He slept in the office that was unspeakably dirty and dined at Biff
Carter's lunch room in a small frame building opposite the railroad station.
In the summer the lunch room was filled with flies and Biff Carter's
white apron was more dirty than his floor. Doctor Parcival did not mind.
Into the lunch room he stalked and deposited twenty cents upon the
counter. "Feed me what you
wish for that," he said laughing.
"Use up food that you wouldn't otherwise sell.
It makes no difference to me. I
am a man of distinction, you see. Why
should I concern myself with what I eat."
The
tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended
nowhere. Sometimes the boy
thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies.
And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence
of truth.
"I
was a reporter like you here," Doctor Parcival began.
"It was in a town in Iowa--or was it in Illinois? I don't
remember and anyway it makes no difference.
Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity and don't want to be very
definite. Have you ever thought
it strange that I have money for my needs although I do nothing? I may have
stolen a great sum of money or been involved in a murder before I came here.
There is food for thought in that, eh? If you were a really smart
newspaper reporter you would look me up.
In Chicago there was a Doctor Cronin who was murdered.
Have you heard of that? Some men murdered him and put him in a trunk.
In the early morning they hauled the trunk across the city.
It sat on the back of an express wagon and they were on the seat as
unconcerned as anything. Along
they went through quiet streets where everyone was asleep.
The sun was just coming up over the lake.
Funny, eh--just to think of them smoking pipes and chattering as they
drove along as unconcerned as I am now. Perhaps
I was one of those men. That
would be a strange turn of things, now wouldn't it, eh?" Again Doctor
Parcival began his tale: "Well, anyway there I was, a reporter on a
paper just as you are here, running about and getting little items to print.
My mother was poor. She took in washing.
Her dream was to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying
with that end in view.
"My
father had been insane for a number of years. He was in an asylum over at
Dayton, Ohio. There you see I
have let it slip out! All of this took place in Ohio, right here in Ohio.
There is a clew if you ever get the notion of looking me up.
"I
was going to tell you of my brother. That's
the object of all this. That's
what I'm getting at. My brother
was a railroad painter and had a job on the Big Four.
You know that road runs through Ohio here.
With other men he lived in a box car and away they went from town to
town painting the railroad property-switches, crossing gates, bridges, and
stations.
"The
Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color. How I hated that color! My brother was always covered with
it. On pay days he used to get
drunk and come home wearing his paint-covered clothes and bringing his money
with him. He did not give it to
mother but laid it in a pile on our kitchen table.
"About
the house he went in the clothes covered with the nasty orange colored
paint. I can see the picture.
My mother, who was small and had red, sad-looking eyes, would come
into the house from a little shed at the back. That's
where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing people's dirty clothes.
In she would come and stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her
apron that was covered with soap-suds.
"'Don't
touch it! Don't you dare touch that money,' my brother roared, and then he
himself took five or ten dollars and went tramping off to the saloons.
When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more.
He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he
had spent it all, a little at a time. Then
he went back to his job with the painting crew on the railroad.
After he had gone things began to arrive at our house, groceries and
such things. Sometimes there
would be a dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.
"Strange,
eh? My mother loved my brother much more than she did me, although he never
said a kind word to either of us and always raved up and down threatening us
if we dared so much as touch the money that sometimes lay on the table three
days.
"We
got along pretty well. I
studied to be a minister and prayed. I
was a regular ass about saying prayers.
You should have heard me. When
my father died I prayed all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother
was in town drinking and going about buying the things for us.
In the evening after supper I knelt by the table where the money lay
and prayed for hours. When no
one was looking I stole a dollar or two and put it in my pocket.
That makes me laugh now but then it was terrible.
It was on my mind all the time.
I got six dollars a week from my job on the paper and always took it
straight home to mother. The
few dollars I stole from my brother's pile I spent on myself, you know, for
trifles, candy and cigarettes and such things.
"When
my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I went over there.
I borrowed some money from the man for whom I worked and went on the
train at night. It was raining.
In the asylum they treated me as though I were a king.
"The
men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was a newspaper reporter.
That made them afraid. There
had been some negligence, some carelessness, you see, when father was ill.
They thought perhaps I would write it up in the paper and make a
fuss. I never intended to do
anything of the kind.
"Anyway,
in I went to the room where my father lay dead and blessed the dead body.
I wonder what put that notion into my head.
Wouldn't my brother, the painter, have laughed, though.
There I stood over the dead body and spread out my hands.
The superintendent of the asylum and some of his helpers came in and
stood about looking sheepish. It
was very amusing. I spread out
my hands and said, 'Let peace brood over this carcass.' That's what I said.
"
Jumping
to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor Parcival began to walk up and
down in the office of the Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat
listening. He was awkward and,
as the office was small, continually knocked against things. "What a fool I am to be talking," he said.
"That is not my object in coming here and forcing my
acquaintanceship upon you. I
have something else in mind. You
are a reporter just as I was once and you have attracted my attention.
You may end by becoming just such another fool.
I want to warn you and keep on warning you.
That's why I seek you out."
Doctor
Parcival began talking of George Willard's attitude toward men.
It seemed to the boy that the man had but one object in view, to make
everyone seem despicable. "I want to fill you with hatred and contempt so that you
will be a superior being," he declared.
"Look at my brother. There
was a fellow, eh? He despised everyone, you see. You have no idea with what contempt he looked upon mother and
me. And was he not our
superior? You know he was. You
have not seen him and yet I have made you feel that.
I have given you a sense of it.
He is dead. Once when he
was drunk he lay down on the tracks and the car in which he lived with the
other painters ran over him."
One
day in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in Winesburg.
For a month George Willard had been going each morning to spend an
hour in the doctor's office. The visits came about through a desire on the part of the
doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book he was in the process of
writing. To write the book Doctor Parcival declared was the object of his
coming to Winesburg to live.
On
the morning in August before the coming of the boy, an incident had happened
in the doctor's office. There
had been an accident on Main Street. A team of horses had been frightened by
a train and had run away. A
little girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown from a buggy and
killed. On Main Street everyone had become excited and a cry for
doctors had gone up. All three
of the active practitioners of the town had come quickly but had found the
child dead. From the crowd
someone had run to the office of Doctor Parcival who had bluntly refused to
go down out of his office to the dead child.
The useless cruelty of his refusal had passed unnoticed.
Indeed, the man who had come up the stairway to summon him had
hurried away without hearing the refusal.
All
of this, Doctor Parcival did not know and when George Willard came to his
office he found the man shaking with terror.
"What I have done will arouse the people of this town," he
declared excitedly. "Do I
not know human nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word of my refusal
will be whispered about. Presently
men will get together in groups and talk of it.
They will come here. We
will quarrel and there will be talk of hanging.
Then they will come again bearing a rope in their hands."
Doctor
Parcival shook with fright. "I
have a presentiment," he declared emphatically. "It may be that what I am talking about will not occur
this morning. It may be put off
until tonight but I will be hanged. Everyone
will get excited. I will be
hanged to a lamp-post on Main Street."
Going
to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival looked timidly down the
stairway leading to the street. When
he returned the fright that had been in his eyes was beginning to be
replaced by doubt. Coming on tiptoe across the room he tapped George Willard
on the shoulder. "If not
now, sometime," he whispered, shaking his head. "In the end I will be crucified, uselessly
crucified."
Doctor
Parcival began to plead with George Willard.
"You must pay attention to me," he urged.
"If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book
that I may never get written. The
idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget
it. It is this--that everyone
in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
That's what I want to say. Don't
you forget that. Whatever
happens, don't you dare let yourself forget."
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