ADVENTURE
ALICE HINDMAN, a woman of twenty-seven when
George Willard was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney's Dry Goods
Store and lived with her mother, who had married
a second husband.
Alice's step-father was a carriage painter, and
given to drink. His story is an odd one. It will be
worth telling some day.
At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat
slight. Her head was large and overshadowed her
body. Her shoulders were a little stooped and her hair
and eyes brown. She was very quiet but beneath a
placid exterior a continual ferment went on.
When she was a girl of sixteen and before she
began to work in the store, Alice had an affair with
a young man. The young man, named Ned Currie,
was older than Alice. He, like George Willard, was
employed on the Winesburg Eagle and for a long time
he went to see Alice almost every evening. Together
the two walked under the trees through the streets
of the town and talked of what they would do with
their lives. Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned
Currie took her into his arms and kissed her. He
became excited and said things he did not intend to
say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life, also
grew excited. She also talked. The outer crust of her
life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was
tom away and she gave herself over to the emotions
of love. When, late in the fall of her sixteenth year,
Ned Currie went away to Cleveland where he hoped
to get a place on a city newspaper and rise in the
world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling
voice she told him what was in her mind. "I will
work and you can work," she said. "I do not want
to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your making progress. Don't marry me now.
We will get along without that and we can be together. Even though we live in the same house no
one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no attention to us."
Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and
abandon of his sweetheart and was also deeply
touched. He had wanted the girl to become his mistress but changed his mind. He wanted to protect
and care for her. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said sharply; "you may be sure I'll
let you do no such thing. As soon as I get a good
job I'll come back. For the present you'll have to
stay here. It's the only thing we can do."
On the evening before he left Winesburg to take
up his new life in the city, Ned Currie went to call
on Alice. They walked about through the streets for
an hour and then got a rig from Wesley Moyer's
livery and went for a drive in the country. The moon
came up and they found themselves unable to talk.
In his sadness the young man forgot the resolutions
he had made regarding his conduct with the girl.
They got out of the buggy at a place where a long
meadow ran down to the bank of Wine Creek and
there in the dim light became lovers. When at midnight they returned to town they were both glad. It
did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and
beauty of the thing that had happened. "Now we
will have to stick to each other, whatever happens
we will have to do that," Ned Currie said as he left
the girl at her father's door.
The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a Cleveland paper and went west to
Chicago. For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice
almost every day. Then he was caught up by the
life of the city; he began to make friends and found
new interests in life. In Chicago he boarded at a
house where there were several women. One of
them attracted his attention and he forgot Alice in
Winesburg. At the end of a year he had stopped
writing letters, and only once in a long time, when
he was lonely or when he went into one of the city
parks and saw the moon shining on the grass as it
had shone that night on the meadow by Wine
Creek, did he think of her at all.
In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew
to be a woman. When she was twenty-two years old
her father, who owned a harness repair shop, died
suddenly. The harness maker was an old soldier,
and after a few months his wife received a widow's
pension. She used the first money she got to buy a
loom and became a weaver of carpets, and Alice got
a place in Winney's store. For a number of years
nothing could have induced her to believe that Ned
Currie would not in the end return to her.
She was glad to be employed because the daily
round of toil in the store made the time of waiting
seem less long and uninteresting. She began to save
money, thinking that when she had saved two or
three hundred dollars she would follow her lover to
the city and try if her presence would not win back
his affections.
Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight in the field, but felt that she
could never marry another man. To her the thought
of giving to another what she still felt could belong
only to Ned seemed monstrous. When other young
men tried to attract her attention she would have
nothing to do with them. "I am his wife and shall
remain his wife whether he comes back or not," she
whispered to herself, and for all of her willingness
to support herself could not have understood the
growing modern idea of a woman's owning herself
and giving and taking for her own ends in life.
Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in
the morning until six at night and on three evenings
a week went back to the store to stay from seven
until nine. As time passed and she became more
and more lonely she began to practice the devices
common to lonely people. When at night she went
upstairs into her own room she knelt on the floor
to pray and in her prayers whispered things she
wanted to say to her lover. She became attached to
inanimate objects, and because it was her own,
could not bare to have anyone touch the furniture
of her room. The trick of saving money, begun for
a purpose, was carried on after the scheme of going
to the city to find Ned Currie had been given up. It
became a fixed habit, and when she needed new
clothes she did not get them. Sometimes on rainy
afternoons in the store she got out her bank book
and, letting it lie open before her, spent hours
dreaming impossible dreams of saving money enough
so that the interest would support both herself and
her future husband.
"Ned always liked to travel about," she thought.
"I'll give him the chance. Some day when we are
married and I can save both his money and my own,
we will be rich. Then we can travel together all over
the world."
In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and
months into years as Alice waited and dreamed of
her lover's return. Her employer, a grey old man
with false teeth and a thin grey mustache that
drooped down over his mouth, was not given to
conversation, and sometimes, on rainy days and in
the winter when a storm raged in Main Street, long
hours passed when no customers came in. Alice arranged and rearranged the stock. She stood near the
front window where she could look down the deserted street and thought of the evenings when she
had walked with Ned Currie and of what he had
said. "We will have to stick to each other now." The
words echoed and re-echoed through the mind of
the maturing woman. Tears came into her eyes.
Sometimes when her employer had gone out and
she was alone in the store she put her head on the
counter and wept. "Oh, Ned, I am waiting," she
whispered over and over, and all the time the creeping fear that he would never come back grew
stronger within her.
In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days of summer have come, the
country about Winesburg is delightful. The town lies
in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields
are pleasant patches of woodlands. In the wooded
places are many little cloistered nooks, quiet places
where lovers go to sit on Sunday afternoons. Through
the trees they look out across the fields and see
farmers at work about the barns or people driving
up and down on the roads. In the town bells ring
and occasionally a train passes, looking like a toy
thing in the distance.
For several years after Ned Currie went away
Alice did not go into the wood with the other young
people on Sunday, but one day after he had been
gone for two or three years and when her loneliness
seemed unbearable, she put on her best dress and
set out. Finding a little sheltered place from which
she could see the town and a long stretch of the
fields, she sat down. Fear of age and ineffectuality
took possession of her. She could not sit still, and
arose. As she stood looking out over the land something, perhaps the thought of never ceasing life as
it expresses itself in the flow of the seasons, fixed
her mind on the passing years. With a shiver of
dread, she realized that for her the beauty and freshness of youth had passed. For the first time she felt
that she had been cheated. She did not blame Ned
Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness
swept over her. Dropping to her knees, she tried to
pray, but instead of prayers words of protest came
to her lips. "It is not going to come to me. I will
never find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?"
she cried, and an odd sense of relief came with this,
her first bold attempt to face the fear that had become a part of her everyday life.
In the year when Alice Hindman became twenty-
five two things happened to disturb the dull uneventfulness of her days. Her mother married Bush
Milton, the carriage painter of Winesburg, and she
herself became a member of the Winesburg Methodist Church. Alice joined the church because she had
become frightened by the loneliness of her position
in life. Her mother's second marriage had emphasized her isolation. "I am becoming old and queer.
If Ned comes he will not want me. In the city where
he is living men are perpetually young. There is so
much going on that they do not have time to grow
old," she told herself with a grim little smile, and
went resolutely about the business of becoming acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when
the store had closed she went to a prayer meeting in
the basement of the church and on Sunday evening
attended a meeting of an organization called The
Epworth League.
When Will Hurley, a middle-aged man who clerked
in a drug store and who also belonged to the church,
offered to walk home with her she did not protest.
"Of course I will not let him make a practice of being
with me, but if he comes to see me once in a long
time there can be no harm in that," she told herself,
still determined in her loyalty to Ned Currie.
Without realizing what was happening, Alice was
trying feebly at first, but with growing determination, to get a new hold upon life. Beside the drug
clerk she walked in silence, but sometimes in the
darkness as they went stolidly along she put out her
hand and touched softly the folds of his coat. When
he left her at the gate before her mother's house she
did not go indoors, but stood for a moment by the
door. She wanted to call to the drug clerk, to ask
him to sit with her in the darkness on the porch
before the house, but was afraid he would not understand. "It is not him that I want," she told herself; "I want to avoid being so much alone. If I am
not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with
people."
During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a
passionate restlessness took possession of Alice. She
could not bear to be in the company of the drug
clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk
with her she sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and when, weary from the long hours
of standing behind the counter in the store, she
went home and crawled into bed, she could not
sleep. With staring eyes she looked into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child awakened from
long sleep, played about the room. Deep within her
there was something that would not be cheated by
phantasies and that demanded some definite answer
from life.
Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it
tightly against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she
arranged a blanket so that in the darkness it looked
like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling
beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words
over and over, like a refrain. "Why doesn't something happen? Why am I left here alone?" she muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned
Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire
had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or
any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have
something answer the call that was growing louder
and louder within her.
And then one night when it rained Alice had an
adventure. It frightened and confused her. She had
come home from the store at nine and found the
house empty. Bush Milton had gone off to town and
her mother to the house of a neighbor. Alice went
upstairs to her room and undressed in the darkness.
For a moment she stood by the window hearing the
rain beat against the glass and then a strange desire
took possession of her. Without stopping to think
of what she intended to do, she ran downstairs
through the dark house and out into the rain. As
she stood on the little grass plot before the house
and felt the cold rain on her body a mad desire to
run naked through the streets took possession of
her.
She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body. Not for
years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She
wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some
other lonely human and embrace him. On the brick
sidewalk before the house a man stumbled homeward. Alice started to run. A wild, desperate mood
took possession of her. "What do I care who it is.
He is alone, and I will go to him," she thought; and
then without stopping to consider the possible result
of her madness, called softly. "Wait!" she cried.
"Don't go away. Whoever you are, you must wait."
The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man and somewhat deaf.
Putting his hand to his mouth, he shouted. "What?
What say?" he called.
Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling.
She was so frightened at the thought of what she
had done that when the man had gone on his way
she did not dare get to her feet, but crawled on
hands and knees through the grass to the house.
When she got to her own room she bolted the door
and drew her dressing table across the doorway.
Her body shook as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had difficulty getting into her nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face in
the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. "What is the
matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I
am not careful," she thought, and turning her face
to the wall, began trying to force herself to face
bravely the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg.
A Man of Ideas