THE HOUSE in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg
lived with his mother had been at one time the show
place of the town, but when young Seth lived there
its glory had become somewhat dimmed. The huge
brick house which Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had overshadowed it. The Richmond
place was in a little valley far out at the end of Main
Street. Farmers coming into town by a dusty road
from the south passed by a grove of walnut trees,
skirted the Fair Ground with its high board fence
covered with advertisements, and trotted their horses
down through the valley past the Richmond place
into town. As much of the country north and south
of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and berry raising,
Seth saw wagon-loads of berry pickers--boys, girls,
and women--going to the fields in the morning and
returning covered with dust in the evening. The
chattering crowd, with their rude jokes cried out
from wagon to wagon, sometimes irritated him
sharply. He regretted that he also could not laugh
boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and make of
himself a figure in the endless stream of moving,
giggling activity that went up and down the road.
The Richmond house was built of limestone, and,
although it was said in the village to have become
run down, had in reality grown more beautiful with
every passing year. Already time had begun a little
to color the stone, lending a golden richness to its
surface and in the evening or on dark days touching
the shaded places beneath the eaves with wavering
patches of browns and blacks.
The house had been built by Seth's grandfather,
a stone quarryman, and it, together with the stone
quarries on Lake Erie eighteen miles to the north,
had been left to his son, Clarence Richmond, Seth's
father. Clarence Richmond, a quiet passionate man
extraordinarily admired by his neighbors, had been
killed in a street fight with the editor of a newspaper
in Toledo, Ohio. The fight concerned the publication
of Clarence Richmond's name coupled with that of
a woman school teacher, and as the dead man had
begun the row by firing upon the editor, the effort
to punish the slayer was unsuccessful. After the
quarryman's death it was found that much of the
money left to him had been squandered in speculation and in insecure investments made through the
influence of friends.
Left with but a small income, Virginia Richmond
had settled down to a retired life in the village and
to the raising of her son. Although she had been
deeply moved by the death of the husband and father, she did not at all believe the stories concerning
him that ran about after his death. To her mind,
the sensitive, boyish man whom all had instinctively
loved, was but an unfortunate, a being too fine for
everyday life. "You'll be hearing all sorts of stories,
but you are not to believe what you hear," she said
to her son. "He was a good man, full of tenderness
for everyone, and should not have tried to be a man
of affairs. No matter how much I were to plan and
dream of your future, I could not imagine anything
better for you than that you turn out as good a man
as your father."
Several years after the death of her husband, Virginia Richmond had become alarmed at the growing
demands upon her income and had set herself to
the task of increasing it. She had learned stenography and through the influence of her husband's
friends got the position of court stenographer at the
county seat. There she went by train each morning
during the sessions of the court, and when no court
sat, spent her days working among the rosebushes
in her garden. She was a tall, straight figure of a
woman with a plain face and a great mass of brown
hair.
In the relationship between Seth Richmond and
his mother, there was a quality that even at eighteen
had begun to color all of his traffic with men. An
almost unhealthy respect for the youth kept the
mother for the most part silent in his presence.
When she did speak sharply to him he had only to
look steadily into her eyes to see dawning there the
puzzled look he had already noticed in the eyes of
others when he looked at them.
The truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the mother did not. She expected
from all people certain conventional reactions to life.
A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and looked at the floor. When you had scolded
enough he wept and all was forgiven. After the
weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept
into his room and kissed him.
Virginia Richmond could not understand why her
son did not do these things. After the severest reprimand, he did not tremble and look at the floor but
instead looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts
to invade her mind. As for creeping into his room--
after Seth had passed his fifteenth year, she would
have been half afraid to do anything of the kind.
Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with two other boys ran away from home. The
three boys climbed into the open door of an empty
freight car and rode some forty miles to a town
where a fair was being held. One of the boys had
a bottle filled with a combination of whiskey and
blackberry wine, and the three sat with legs dangling out of the car door drinking from the bottle.
Seth's two companions sang and waved their hands
to idlers about the stations of the towns through
which the train passed. They planned raids upon
the baskets of farmers who had come with their families to the fair. "We will five like kings and won't
have to spend a penny to see the fair and horse
races," they declared boastfully.
After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond walked up and down the floor of her home
filled with vague alarms. Although on the next day
she discovered, through an inquiry made by the
town marshal, on what adventure the boys had
gone, she could not quiet herself. All through the
night she lay awake hearing the clock tick and telling
herself that Seth, like his father, would come to a
sudden and violent end. So determined was she that
the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath
that, although she would not allow the marshal to
interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil
and paper and wrote down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon him.
The reproofs she committed to memory, going about
the garden and saying them aloud like an actor
memorizing his part.
And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned,
a little weary and with coal soot in his ears and
about his eyes, she again found herself unable to
reprove him. Walking into the house he hung his
cap on a nail by the kitchen door and stood looking
steadily at her. "I wanted to turn back within an
hour after we had started," he explained. "I didn't
know what to do. I knew you would be bothered,
but I knew also that if I didn't go on I would be
ashamed of myself. I went through with the thing
for my own good. It was uncomfortable, sleeping
on wet straw, and two drunken Negroes came and
slept with us. When I stole a lunch basket out of a
farmer's wagon I couldn't help thinking of his children going all day without food. I was sick of the
whole affair, but I was determined to stick it out
until the other boys were ready to come back."
"I'm glad you did stick it out," replied the mother,
half resentfully, and kissing him upon the forehead
pretended to busy herself with the work about the
house.
On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to
the New Willard House to visit his friend, George
Willard. It had rained during the afternoon, but as
he walked through Main Street, the sky had partially
cleared and a golden glow lit up the west. Going
around a corner, he turned in at the door of the
hotel and began to climb the stairway leading up to
his friend's room. In the hotel office the proprietor
and two traveling men were engaged in a discussion
of politics.
On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the
voices of the men below. They were excited and
talked rapidly. Tom Willard was berating the traveling men. "I am a Democrat but your talk makes
me sick," he said. "You don't understand McKinley.
McKinley and Mark Hanna are friends. It is impossible perhaps for your mind to grasp that. If anyone
tells you that a friendship can be deeper and bigger
and more worth while than dollars and cents, or
even more worth while than state politics, you
snicker and laugh."
The landlord was interrupted by one of the
guests, a tall, grey-mustached man who worked for
a wholesale grocery house. "Do you think that I've
lived in Cleveland all these years without knowing
Mark Hanna?" he demanded. "Your talk is piffle.
Hanna is after money and nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and don't
you forget it."
The young man on the stairs did not linger to
hear the rest of the discussion, but went on up the
stairway and into the little dark hall. Something in
the voices of the men talking in the hotel office
started a chain of thoughts in his mind. He was
lonely and had begun to think that loneliness was a
part of his character, something that would always
stay with him. Stepping into a side hall he stood by
a window that looked into an alleyway. At the back
of his shop stood Abner Groff, the town baker. His
tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and down the alleyway. In his shop someone called the baker, who
pretended not to hear. The baker had an empty milk
bottle in his hand and an angry sullen look in his
eyes.
In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the
"deep one." "He's like his father," men said as he
went through the streets. "He'll break out some of
these days. You wait and see."
The talk of the town and the respect with which
men and boys instinctively greeted him, as all men
greet silent people, had affected Seth Richmond's
outlook on life and on himself. He, like most boys,
was deeper than boys are given credit for being, but
he was not what the men of the town, and even
his mother, thought him to be. No great underlying
purpose lay back of his habitual silence, and he had
no definite plan for his life. When the boys with
whom he associated were noisy and quarrelsome,
he stood quietly at one side. With calm eyes he
watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in what
was going on, and sometimes wondered if he would
ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as
he stood in the half-darkness by the window watching the baker, he wished that he himself might become thoroughly stirred by something, even by the
fits of sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted.
"It would be better for me if I could become excited
and wrangle about politics like windy old Tom Willard," he thought, as he left the window and went
again along the hallway to the room occupied by his
friend, George Willard.
George Willard was older than Seth Richmond,
but in the rather odd friendship between the two, it
was he who was forever courting and the younger
boy who was being courted. The paper on which
George worked had one policy. It strove to mention
by name in each issue, as many as possible of the
inhabitants of the village. Like an excited dog,
George Willard ran here and there, noting on his
pad of paper who had gone on business to the
county seat or had returned from a visit to a neighboring village. All day he wrote little facts upon the
pad. "A. P. Wringlet had received a shipment of
straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in
Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a
new barn on his place on the Valley Road."
The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given him a place of distinction
in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked continually of the matter, "It's the easiest of all lives to
live," he declared, becoming excited and boastful.
"Here and there you go and there is no one to boss
you. Though you are in India or in the South Seas
in a boat, you have but to write and there you are.
Wait till I get my name up and then see what fun I
shall have."
In George Willard's room, which had a window
looking down into an alleyway and one that looked
across railroad tracks to Biff Carter's Lunch Room
facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a
chair and looked at the floor. George Willard, who
had been sitting for an hour idly playing with a lead
pencil, greeted him effusively. "I've been trying to
write a love story," he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he began walking up and
down the room. "I know what I'm going to do. I'm
going to fall in love. I've been sitting here and thinking it over and I'm going to do it."
As though embarrassed by his declaration, George
went to a window and turning his back to his friend
leaned out. "I know who I'm going to fall in love
with," he said sharply. "It's Helen White. She is the
only girl in town with any 'get-up' to her."
Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and
walked toward his visitor. "Look here," he said.
"You know Helen White better than I do. I want
you to tell her what I said. You just get to talking
to her and say that I'm in love with her. See what
she says to that. See how she takes it, and then you
come and tell me."
Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door.
The words of his comrade irritated him unbearably.
"Well, good-bye," he said briefly.
George was amazed. Running forward he stood
in the darkness trying to look into Seth's face.
"What's the matter? What are you going to do? You
stay here and let's talk," he urged.
A wave of resentment directed against his friend,
the men of the town who were, he thought, perpetually talking of nothing, and most of all, against his
own habit of silence, made Seth half desperate.
"Aw, speak to her yourself," he burst forth and
then, going quickly through the door, slammed it
sharply in his friend's face. "I'm going to find Helen
White and talk to her, but not about him," he
muttered.
Seth went down the stairway and out at the front
door of the hotel muttering with wrath. Crossing a
little dusty street and climbing a low iron railing, he
went to sit upon the grass in the station yard.
George Willard he thought a profound fool, and he
wished that he had said so more vigorously. Although his acquaintanceship with Helen White, the
banker's daughter, was outwardly but casual, she
was often the subject of his thoughts and he felt that
she was something private and personal to himself.
"The busy fool with his love stories," he muttered,
staring back over his shoulder at George Willard's
room, "why does he never tire of his eternal
talking."
It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon
the station platform men and boys loaded the boxes
of red, fragrant berries into two express cars that
stood upon the siding. A June moon was in the sky,
although in the west a storm threatened, and no
street lamps were lighted. In the dim light the figures of the men standing upon the express truck
and pitching the boxes in at the doors of the cars
were but dimly discernible. Upon the iron railing
that protected the station lawn sat other men. Pipes
were lighted. Village jokes went back and forth.
Away in the distance a train whistled and the men
loading the boxes into the cars worked with renewed activity.
Seth arose from his place on the grass and went
silently past the men perched upon the railing and
into Main Street. He had come to a resolution. "I'll
get out of here," he told himself. "What good am I
here? I'm going to some city and go to work. I'll tell
mother about it tomorrow."
Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street,
past Wacker's Cigar Store and the Town Hall, and
into Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the
thought that he was not a part of the life in his own
town, but the depression did not cut deeply as he
did not think of himself as at fault. In the heavy
shadows of a big tree before Doctor Welling's house,
he stopped and stood watching half-witted Turk
Smollet, who was pushing a wheelbarrow in the
road. The old man with his absurdly boyish mind
had a dozen long boards on the wheelbarrow, and,
as he hurried along the road, balanced the load with
extreme nicety. "Easy there, Turk! Steady now, old
boy!" the old man shouted to himself, and laughed
so that the load of boards rocked dangerously.
Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old
wood chopper whose peculiarities added so much
of color to the life of the village. He knew that when
Turk got into Main Street he would become the center of a whirlwind of cries and comments, that in
truth the old man was going far out of his way in
order to pass through Main Street and exhibit his
skill in wheeling the boards. "If George Willard were
here, he'd have something to say," thought Seth.
"George belongs to this town. He'd shout at Turk
and Turk would shout at him. They'd both be secretly pleased by what they had said. It's different
with me. I don't belong. I'll not make a fuss about
it, but I'm going to get out of here."
Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness,
feeling himself an outcast in his own town. He
began to pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity
of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was simply old beyond his years and
not at all a subject for self-pity. "I'm made to go to
work. I may be able to make a place for myself by
steady working, and I might as well be at it," he
decided.
Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood
in the darkness by the front door. On the door hung
a heavy brass knocker, an innovation introduced
into the village by Helen White's mother, who had
also organized a women's club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the knocker and let it fall. Its heavy
clatter sounded like a report from distant guns.
"How awkward and foolish I am," he thought. "If
Mrs. White comes to the door, I won't know what
to say."
It was Helen White who came to the door and
found Seth standing at the edge of the porch. Blushing with pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the
door softly. "I'm going to get out of town. I don't
know what I'll do, but I'm going to get out of here
and go to work. I think I'll go to Columbus," he
said. "Perhaps I'll get into the State University down
there. Anyway, I'm going. I'll tell mother tonight."
He hesitated and looked doubtfully about. "Perhaps
you wouldn't mind coming to walk with me?"
Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the
face of the moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward, the man stopped at the
street crossing and, putting the ladder against the
wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so that
their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the
lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by the
low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind
began to play, disturbing the sleeping birds so that
they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted
space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled
and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm of night
flies.
Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there
had been a half expressed intimacy between him
and the maiden who now for the first time walked
beside him. For a time she had been beset with a
madness for writing notes which she addressed to
Seth. He had found them concealed in his books at
school and one had been given him by a child met
in the street, while several had been delivered
through the village post office.
The notes had been written in a round, boyish
hand and had reflected a mind inflamed by novel
reading. Seth had not answered them, although he
had been moved and flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil upon the stationery of the
banker's wife. Putting them into the pocket of his
coat, he went through the street or stood by the
fence in the school yard with something burning at
his side. He thought it fine that he should be thus
selected as the favorite of the richest and most attractive girl in town.
Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a
low dark building faced the street. The building had
once been a factory for the making of barrel staves
but was now vacant. Across the street upon the
porch of a house a man and woman talked of their
childhood, their voices coming dearly across to the
half-embarrassed youth and maiden. There was the
sound of scraping chairs and the man and woman
came down the gravel path to a wooden gate. Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over and kissed
the woman. "For old times' sake," he said and,
turning, walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.
"That's Belle Turner," whispered Helen, and put
her hand boldly into Seth's hand. "I didn't know
she had a fellow. I thought she was too old for
that." Seth laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl
was warm and a strange, dizzy feeling crept over
him. Into his mind came a desire to tell her something he had been determined not to tell. "George
Willard's in love with you," he said, and in spite of
his agitation his voice was low and quiet. "He's writing a story, and he wants to be in love. He wants
to know how it feels. He wanted me to tell you and
see what you said."
Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They
came to the garden surrounding the old Richmond
place and going through a gap in the hedge sat on
a wooden bench beneath a bush.
On the street as he walked beside the girl new
and daring thoughts had come into Seth Richmond's
mind. He began to regret his decision to get out of
town. "It would be something new and altogether
delightful to remain and walk often through the
streets with Helen White," he thought. In imagination he saw himself putting his arm about her waist
and feeling her arms clasped tightly about his neck.
One of those odd combinations of events and places
made him connect the idea of love-making with this
girl and a spot he had visited some days before. He
had gone on an errand to the house of a farmer who
lived on a hillside beyond the Fair Ground and had
returned by a path through a field. At the foot of
the hill below the farmer's house Seth had stopped
beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A
soft humming noise had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home of
a swarm of bees.
And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees
everywhere all about him in the long grass. He
stood in a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in
the field that ran away from the hillside. The weeds
were abloom with tiny purple blossoms and gave
forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds
the bees were gathered in armies, singing as they
worked.
Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried deep among the weeds beneath the
tree. Beside him, in the scene built in his fancy, lay
Helen White, her hand lying in his hand. A peculiar
reluctance kept him from kissing her lips, but he felt
he might have done that if he wished. Instead, he
lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening to the
army of bees that sang the sustained masterful song
of labor above his head.
On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily.
Releasing the hand of the girl, he thrust his hands
into his trouser pockets. A desire to impress the
mind of his companion with the importance of the
resolution he had made came over him and he nodded his head toward the house. "Mother'll make a
fuss, I suppose," he whispered. "She hasn't thought
at all about what I'm going to do in life. She thinks
I'm going to stay on here forever just being a boy."
Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness. "You see, I've got to strike out. I've got to get
to work. It's what I'm good for."
Helen White was impressed. She nodded her
head and a feeling of admiration swept over her.
"This is as it should be," she thought. "This boy is
not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires that had been invading her body
were swept away and she sat up very straight on
the bench. The thunder continued to rumble and
flashes of heat lightning lit up the eastern sky. The
garden that had been so mysterious and vast, a
place that with Seth beside her might have become
the background for strange and wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite definite and limited in its
outlines.
"What will you do up there?" she whispered.
Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to
see her face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George
Willard, and was glad he had come away from his
friend. A feeling of impatience with the town that
had been in his mind returned, and he tried to tell
her of it. "Everyone talks and talks," he began. "I'm
sick of it. I'll do something, get into some kind of
work where talk don't count. Maybe I'll just be a
mechanic in a shop. I don't know. I guess I don't
care much. I just want to work and keep quiet.
That's all I've got in my mind."
Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand.
He did not want to bring the meeting to an end but
could not think of anything more to say. "It's the
last time we'll see each other," he whispered.
A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting
her hand upon Seth's shoulder, she started to draw
his face down toward her own upturned face. The
act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that
some vague adventure that had been present in the
spirit of the night would now never be realized. "I
think I'd better be going along," she said, letting her
hand fall heavily to her side. A thought came to her.
"Don't you go with me; I want to be alone," she
said. "You go and talk with your mother. You'd
better do that now."
Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl
turned and ran away through the hedge. A desire
to run after her came to him, but he only stood
staring, perplexed and puzzled by her action as he
had been perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of
the town out of which she had come. Walking
slowly toward the house, he stopped in the shadow
of a large tree and looked at his mother sitting by a
lighted window busily sewing. The feeling of loneliness that had visited him earlier in the evening returned and colored his thoughts of the adventure
through which he had just passed. "Huh!" he exclaimed, turning and staring in the direction taken
by Helen White. "That's how things'll turn out.
She'll be like the rest. I suppose she'll begin now to
look at me in a funny way." He looked at the
ground and pondered this thought. "She'll be embarrassed and feel strange when I'm around," he
whispered to himself. "That's how it'll be. That's
how everything'll turn out. When it comes to loving
someone, it won't never be me. It'll be someone
else--some fool--someone who talks a lot--someone like that George Willard."
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