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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 five 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 dearly 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."
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