DOCTOR PARCIVAL was a large man with a drooping
mouth covered by a yellow mustache. He always
wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of
which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth were black and
irregular and there was something strange about his
eyes. The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down
and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of
the eye were a window shade and someone stood
inside the doctor's head playing with the cord.
Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George
Willard. It began when George had been working
for a year on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor's own
making.
In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and
editor of the Eagle, went over to Tom Willy's saloon.
Along an alleyway he went and slipping in at the
back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made
of a combination of sloe gin and soda water. Will
Henderson was a sensualist and had reached the
age of forty-five. He imagined the gin renewed the
youth in him. Like most sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and for an hour he lingered about
gossiping with Tom Willy. The saloon keeper was a
short, broad-shouldered man with peculiarly marked
hands. That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints with red the faces of men and women
had touched with red Tom Willy's fingers and the
backs of his hands. As he stood by the bar talking
to Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together.
As he grew more and more excited the red of his
fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had
been dipped in blood that had dried and faded.
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."
Mother