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 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 black-
haired 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 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 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.
Drink