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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 fife 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
blackhaired youth running over hills, now a stem 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 highschool
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
mistlike 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 selfconscious 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 fife, 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.
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