SNOW LAY DEEP in the streets of Winesburg. It had
begun to snow about ten o'clock in the morning and
a wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds
along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led
into town were fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. "There will be good sleighing," said
Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith's
saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester
West the druggist stumbling along in the kind of
heavy overshoes called arctics. "Snow will bring the
people into town on Saturday," said the druggist.
The two men stopped and discussed their affairs.
Will Henderson, who had on a light overcoat and
no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot with
the toe of the right. "Snow will be good for the
wheat," observed the druggist sagely.
Young George Willard, who had nothing to do,
was glad because he did not feel like working that
day. The weekly paper had been printed and taken
to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow
began to fall on Thursday. At eight o'clock, after the
morning train had passed, he put a pair of skates in
his pocket and went up to Waterworks Pond but did
not go skating. Past the pond and along a path that
followed Wine Creek he went until he came to a
grove of beech trees. There he built a fire against
the side of a log and sat down at the end of the log
to think. When the snow began to fall and the wind
to blow he hurried about getting fuel for the fire.
The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift,
who had once been his school teacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a book
she wanted him to read and had been alone with
her for an hour. For the fourth or fifth time the
woman had talked to him with great earnestness
and he could not make out what she meant by her
talk. He began to believe she must be in love with
him and the thought was both pleasing and annoying.
Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks
on the fire. Looking about to be sure he was alone
he talked aloud pretending he was in the presence
of the woman, "Oh,, you're just letting on, you
know you are," he declared. "I am going to find out
about you. You wait and see."
The young man got up and went back along the
path toward town leaving the fire blazing in the
wood. As he went through the streets the skates
clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New
Willard House he built a fire in the stove and lay
down on top of the bed. He began to have lustful
thoughts and pulling down the shade of the window
closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. He
took a pillow into his arms and embraced it thinking
first of the school teacher, who by her words had
stirred something within him, and later of Helen
White, the slim daughter of the town banker, with
whom he had been for a long time half in love.
By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in
the streets and the weather had become bitter cold.
It was difficult to walk about. The stores were dark
and the people had crawled away to their houses.
The evening train from Cleveland was very late but
nobody was interested in its arrival. By ten o'clock
all but four of the eighteen hundred citizens of the
town were in bed.
Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially
awake. He was lame and carried a heavy stick. On
dark nights he carried a lantern. Between nine and
ten o'clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main
Street he stumbled through the drifts trying the
doors of the stores. Then he went into alleyways
and tried the back doors. Finding all tight he hurried
around the corner to the New Willard House and
beat on the door. Through the rest of the night he
intended to stay by the stove. "You go to bed. I'll
keep the stove going," he said to the boy who slept
on a cot in the hotel office.
Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off
his shoes. When the boy had gone to sleep he began
to think of his own affairs. He intended to paint his
house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating
the cost of paint and labor. That led him into other
calculations. The night watchman was sixty years
old and wanted to retire. He had been a soldier in
the Civil War and drew a small pension. He hoped
to find some new method of making a living and
aspired to become a professional breeder of ferrets.
Already he had four of the strangely shaped savage
little creatures, that are used by sportsmen in the
pursuit of rabbits, in the cellar of his house. "Now
I have one male and three females," he mused. "If
I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve or fifteen.
In another year I shall be able to begin advertising
ferrets for sale in the sporting papers."
The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his
mind became a blank. He did not sleep. By years of
practice he had trained himself to sit for hours
through the long nights neither asleep nor awake.
In the morning he was almost as refreshed as
though he had slept.
With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair
behind the stove only three people were awake in
Winesburg. George Willard was in the office of the
Eagle pretending to be at work on the writing of a
story but in reality continuing the mood of the
morning by the fire in the wood. In the bell tower
of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis
Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a revelation from God, and Kate Swift, the
school teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in
the storm.
It was past ten o'clock when Kate Swift set out
and the walk was unpremeditated. It was as though
the man and the boy, by thinking of her, had driven
her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth
Swift had gone to the county seat concerning some
business in connection with mortgages in which she
had money invested and would not be back until
the next day. By a huge stove, called a base burner,
in the living room of the house sat the daughter
reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to her feet
and, snatching a cloak from a rack by the front door,
ran out of the house.
At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in
Winesburg as a pretty woman. Her complexion was
not good and her face was covered with blotches
that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the
winter streets she was lovely. Her back was straight,
her shoulders square, and her features were as the
features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden
in the dim light of a summer evening.
During the afternoon the school teacher had been
to see Doctor Welling concerning her health. The
doctor had scolded her and had declared she was in
danger of losing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate
Swift to be abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps
dangerous.
The woman in the streets did not remember the
words of the doctor and would not have turned back
had she remembered. She was very cold but after
walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold.
First she went to the end of her own street and then
across a pair of hay scales set in the ground before
a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along Trunion
Pike she went to Ned Winters' barn and turning east
followed a street of low frame houses that led over
Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road that ran down
a shallow valley past Ike Smead's chicken farm to
Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had driven her out of doors passed
and then returned again.
There was something biting and forbidding in the
character of Kate Swift. Everyone felt it. In the
schoolroom she was silent, cold, and stern, and yet
in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a
long while something seemed to have come over
her and she was happy. All of the children in the
schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a
time they did not work but sat back in their chairs
and looked at her.
With hands clasped behind her back the school
teacher walked up and down in the schoolroom and
talked very rapidly. It did not seem to matter what
subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the
children of Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning the life of the dead
writer. The stories were told with the air of one who
had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew
all the secrets of his private life. The children were
somewhat confused, thinking Charles Lamb must be
someone who had once lived in Winesburg.
On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto Cellini. That time they laughed.
What a bragging, blustering, brave, lovable fellow
she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she
invented anecdotes. There was one of a German
music teacher who had a room above Cellini's lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys guffaw.
Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed
so hard that he became dizzy and fell off his seat
and Kate Swift laughed with him. Then suddenly
she became again cold and stern.
On the winter night when she walked through
the deserted snow-covered streets, a crisis had come
into the life of the school teacher. Although no one
in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had
been very adventurous. It was still adventurous.
Day by day as she worked in the schoolroom or
walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought
within her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in her mind. The people of
the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid
and because she spoke sharply and went her own
way thought her lacking in all the human feeling
that did so much to make and mar their own lives.
In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul
among them, and more than once, in the five years
since she had come back from her travels to settle in
Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been
compelled to go out of the house and walk half
through the night fighting out some battle raging
within. Once on a night when it rained she had
stayed out six hours and when she came home had
a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift. "I am glad
you're not a man," said the mother sharply. "More
than once I've waited for your father to come home,
not knowing what new mess he had got into. I've
had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame
me if I do not want to see the worst side of him
reproduced in you."
***
Kate Swift's mind was ablaze with thoughts of
George Willard. In something he had written as a
school boy she thought she had recognized the
spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark.
One day in the summer she had gone to the Eagle
office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken
him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the
two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school
teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy
some conception of the difficulties he would have to
face as a writer. "You will have to know life," she
declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness.
She took hold of George Willard's shoulders and
turned him about so that she could look into his
eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about
to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you'll
have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It
would be better to give up the notion of writing
until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be
living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like
to make you understand the import of what you
think of attempting. You must not become a mere
peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know
what people are thinking about, not what they say."
On the evening before that stormy Thursday night
when the Reverend Curtis Hartman sat in the bell
tower of the church waiting to look at her body,
young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to
borrow a book. It was then the thing happened that
confused and puzzled the boy. He had the book
under his arm and was preparing to depart. Again
Kate Swift talked with great earnestness. Night was
coming on and the light in the room grew dim. As
he turned to go she spoke his name softly and with
an impulsive movement took hold of his hand. Because the reporter was rapidly becoming a man
something of his man's appeal, combined with the
winsomeness of the boy, stirred the heart of the
lonely woman. A passionate desire to have him understand the import of life, to learn to interpret it
truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward, her lips brushed his cheek. At the same moment he for the first time became aware of the
marked beauty of her features. They were both embarrassed, and to relieve her feeling she became
harsh and domineering. "What's the use? It will be
ten years before you begin to understand what I
mean when I talk to you," she cried passionately.
***
On the night of the storm and while the minister
sat in the church waiting for her, Kate Swift went to
the office of the Winesburg Eagle, intending to have
another talk with the boy. After the long walk in the
snow she was cold, lonely, and tired. As she came
through Main Street she saw the fight from the
printshop window shining on the snow and on an
impulse opened the door and went in. For an hour
she sat by the stove in the office talking of life. She
talked with passionate earnestness. The impulse that
had driven her out into the snow poured itself out
into talk. She became inspired as she sometimes did
in the presence of the children in school. A great
eagerness to open the door of life to the boy, who
had been her pupil and who she thought might possess a talent for the understanding of life, had possession of her. So strong was her passion that it
became something physical. Again her hands took
hold of his shoulders and she turned him about. In
the dim light her eyes blazed. She arose and
laughed, not sharply as was customary with her, but
in a queer, hesitating way. "I must be going," she
said. "In a moment, if I stay, I'll be wanting to kiss
you."
In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate
Swift turned and walked to the door. She was a
teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked
at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved
by a man, that had a thousand times before swept
like a storm over her body, took possession of her.
In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a
boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man.
The school teacher let George Willard take her into
his arms. In the warm little office the air became
suddenly heavy and the strength went out of her
body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she
waited. When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body fall heavily against
him. For George Willard the confusion was immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of
the woman tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists began to beat on his face.
When the school teacher had run away and left him
alone, he walked up and down the office swearing
furiously.
It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis
Hartman protruded himself. When he came in
George Willard thought the town had gone mad.
Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God bearing
a message of truth.
***
George blew out the lamp by the window and
locking the door of the printshop went home.
Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in
his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up
into his own room. The fire in the stove had gone
out and he undressed in the cold. When he got into
bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.
George Willard rolled about in the bed on which
had lain in the afternoon hugging the pillow and
thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The words of the
minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his ears. His eyes stared about the
room. The resentment, natural to the baffled male,
passed and he tried to understand what had happened. He could not make it out. Over and over he
turned the matter in his mind. Hours passed and he
began to think it must be time for another day to
come. At four o'clock he pulled the covers up about
his neck and tried to sleep. When he became drowsy
and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it
groped about in the darkness. "I have missed something. I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept
and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that
winter night to go to sleep.
The Strength of God