prompt:
Chapter: THE TEACHER

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 light 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 he 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.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: To recognize fully the ironies in "The Strength of God," we must also read "The Teacher." This helps us to understand why Kate Swift threw herself weeping on her bed as Reverend Hartman watched, We see too that the climax of the two stories really occurred simultaneously and this overlapping time sequence is one more link in the chain that binds Winesburg into a unified work of art. Kate Swift is a warm, exciting woman of thirty. She has lived an adventurous life, traveling abroad before returning to Winesburg to live with her mother, five years before the action of the story. The town's citizens "thought her lacking in all the human feelings that did so much to make and mar their own lives." Yet Anderson tells us, "In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them." The truth is that Kate Swift needs love, but her attempts to find it are always repulsed or misunderstood. Thus she is like some of the other sensitive grotesques who find their dreams destroyed by a repressive, uncaring society. Kate finds some fulfillment, however, as a teacher. Her students like her, and we see her eagerness to "open the door of life" for George Willard, a former pupil. She recognizes in George an unusual talent and she tries to warn him, "If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words . . . 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." Like Wing Biddlebaum, Kate, in her eagerness, touches George physically taking hold of his hand, kissing his cheek, even letting her body lean heavily against him. There is no question that Kate's interest in George's talent is genuine, but she is also a passionate, unsatisfied woman. Her frustration makes her act ambiguously, so it is no wonder that George thinks that she is in love with him. His response to Kate Swift's needs reminds us of his response to Louise Trunnion in "Nobody Knows." Kate, like Louise, failed to communicate successfully with George, but at least the events of the evening -- Kate's overtures and Reverend Hartman's announcement about his vision -- lead George to ponder the complexity of human motives. As he falls asleep that night, he thinks, "I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me." Setting plays an important part in the effectiveness of "The Teacher." The story opens with a description of the deep snow and frozen mud roads. On this cold winter morning, George goes off to the woods, then returns to his room at the New Willard House, where he lies down with his window shade pulled. The emphasis is on his aloneness. We are told that by ten o'clock that evening all but four of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were in bed. One of these four is Hop Higgins, the night watchman, who makes his rounds, then settles down to drowse by the stove in the New Willard House. That leaves three persons awake -- Kate Swift, Reverend Hartman, and George Willard. Each is, for a time, in a separate room, a fact that again emphasizes man's alienation. Hartman's loneliness is driving him to sit in his cold bell-tower waiting for a glimpse of Kate Swift. Kate's loneliness drives her out into the cold streets for a long walk, despite the fact that her health is already poor. Anderson emphasizes the coldness, snow, and darkness in order to create, metaphorically, the world's harshness. Various characters build fires or seek out fires -- just as they try, from time to time, to establish a warm relationship with other humans -- but attempts are generally futile. The world remains a cold, dark, grim and lonely place of habitation.


prompt:
Chapter: LONELINESS

He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a
farm on a side road leading off Trunion Pike, east of
Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits. The
farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of
the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the
road before the house a flock of chickens, accompanied
by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived
in the house with his mother in those days and when he
was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High
School. Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling
youth inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of
the road when he came into town and sometimes read a
book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make
him realize where he was so that he would turn out of
the beaten track and let them pass.

When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York
City and was a city man for fifteen years. He studied
French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a
faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind he planned
to go to Paris and to finish his art education among
the masters there, but that never turned out.

Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could
draw well enough and he had many odd delicate thoughts
hidden away in his brain that might have expressed
themselves through the brush of a painter, but he was
always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly
development. He never grew up and of course he couldn't
understand people and he couldn't make people
understand him. The child in him kept bumping against
things, against actualities like money and sex and
opinions. Once he was hit by a street car and thrown
against an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of
the many things that kept things from turning out for
Enoch Robinson.

In New York City, when he first went there to live and
before he became confused and disconcerted by the facts
of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men.
He got into a group of other young artists, both men
and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to
visit him in his room. Once he got drunk and was taken
to a police station where a police magistrate
frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an
affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk
before his lodging house. The woman and Enoch walked
together three blocks and then the young man grew
afraid and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of
a building and laughed so heartily that another man
stopped and laughed with her. The two went away
together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his
room trembling and vexed.

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York
faced Washington Square and was long and narrow like a
hallway. It is important to get that fixed in your
mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room
almost more than it is the story of a man.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch's
friends. There was nothing particularly striking about
them except that they were artists of the kind that
talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout
all of the known history of the world they have
gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are
passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it.
They think it matters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and
talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm near
Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a corner and for the
most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike eyes
stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made,
crude things, half finished. His friends talked of
these. Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and
talked with their heads rocking from side to side.
Words were said about line and values and composition,
lots of words, such as are always being said.

Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how. He was
too excited to talk coherently. When he tried he
sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded strange
and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He knew
what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could
never by any possibility say it. When a picture he had
painted was under discussion, he wanted to burst out
with something like this: "You don't get the point," he
wanted to explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist
of the things you see and say words about. There is
something else, something you don't see at all,
something you aren't intended to see. Look at this one
over here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that you
might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning of
everything. There is a clump of elders there such as
used to grow beside the road before our house back in
Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders there is
something hidden. It is a woman, that's what it is. She
has been thrown from a horse and the horse has run away
out of sight. Do you not see how the old man who drives
a cart looks anxiously about? That is Thad Grayback who
has a farm up the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg
to be ground into meal at Comstock's mill. He knows
there is something in the elders, something hidden
away, and yet he doesn't quite know.

"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a woman
and, oh, she is lovely! She is hurt and is suffering
but she makes no sound. Don't you see how it is? She
lies quite still, white and still, and the beauty comes
out from her and spreads over everything. It is in the
sky back there and all around everywhere. I didn't try
to paint the woman, of course. She is too beautiful to
be painted. How dull to talk of composition and such
things! Why do you not look at the sky and then run
away as I used to do when I was a boy back there in
Winesburg, Ohio?"

That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled
to say to the guests who came into his room when he was
a young fellow in New York City, but he always ended by
saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his own mind. He
was afraid the things he felt were not getting
expressed in the pictures he painted. In a half
indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room
and presently got into the habit of locking the door.
He began to think that enough people had visited him,
that he did not need people any more. With quick
imagination he began to invent his own people to whom
he could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living people.
His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men
and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words.
It was as though everyone Enoch Robinson had ever seen
had left with him some essence of himself, something he
could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something
that understood all about such things as the wounded
woman behind the elders in the pictures.

The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete
egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not want
friends for the quite simple reason that no child wants
friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own
mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he
could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you
see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always
self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure,
and even have opinions of their own, but always he
talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among
the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king
he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in
the city of New York.

Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get
lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-bone
people with his hands. Days passed when his room seemed
empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his
mind. At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him
awake. He married a girl who sat in a chair next to his
own in the art school and went to live in an apartment
house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the woman
he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where
illustrations are made for advertisements.

That began another phase of Enoch's life. He began to
play at a new game. For a while he was very proud of
himself in the role of producing citizen of the world.
He dismissed the essence of things and played with
realities. In the fall he voted at an election and he
had a newspaper thrown on his porch each morning. When
in the evening he came home from work he got off a
streetcar and walked sedately along behind some
business man, striving to look very substantial and
important. As a payer of taxes he thought he should
post himself on how things are run. "I'm getting to be
of some moment, a real part of things, of the state and
the city and all that," he told himself with an amusing
miniature air of dignity. Once, coming home from
Philadelphia, he had a discussion with a man met on a
train. Enoch talked about the advisability of the
government's owning and operating the railroads and the
man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that such a
move on the part of the government would be a good
thing, and he grew quite excited as he talked. Later he
remembered his own words with pleasure. "I gave him
something to think about, that fellow," he muttered to
himself as he climbed the stairs to his Brooklyn
apartment.

To be sure, Enoch's marriage did not turn out. He
himself brought it to an end. He began to feel choked
and walled in by the life in the apartment, and to feel
toward his wife and even toward his children as he had
felt concerning the friends who once came to visit him.
He began to tell little lies about business engagements
that would give him freedom to walk alone in the street
at night and, the chance offering, he secretly
re-rented the room facing Washington Square. Then Mrs.
Al Robinson died on the farm near Winesburg, and he got
eight thousand dollars from the bank that acted as
trustee of her estate. That took Enoch out of the world
of men altogether. He gave the money to his wife and
told her he could not live in the apartment any more.
She cried and was angry and threatened, but he only
stared at her and went his own way. In reality the wife
did not care much. She thought Enoch slightly insane
and was a little afraid of him. When it was quite sure
that he would never come back, she took the two
children and went to a village in Connecticut where she
had lived as a girl. In the end she married a man who
bought and sold real estate and was contented enough.

And so Enoch Robinson stayed in the New York room among
the people of his fancy, playing with them, talking to
them, happy as a child is happy. They were an odd lot,
Enoch's people. They were made, I suppose, out of real
people he had seen and who had for some obscure reason
made an appeal to him. There was a woman with a sword
in her hand, an old man with a long white beard who
went about followed by a dog, a young girl whose
stockings were always coming down and hanging over her
shoe tops. There must have been two dozen of the shadow
people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch Robinson,
who lived in the room with him.

And Enoch was happy. Into the room he went and locked
the door. With an absurd air of importance he talked
aloud, giving instructions, making comments on life. He
was happy and satisfied to go on making his living in
the advertising place until something happened. Of
course something did happen. That is why he went back
to live in Winesburg and why we know about him. The
thing that happened was a woman. It would be that way.
He was too happy. Something had to come into his world.
Something had to drive him out of the New York room to
live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure,
bobbing up and down on the streets of an Ohio town at
evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of
Wesley Moyer's livery barn.

About the thing that happened. Enoch told George
Willard about it one night. He wanted to talk to
someone, and he chose the young newspaper reporter
because the two happened to be thrown together at a
time when the younger man was in a mood to understand.

Youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a
growing boy in a village at the year's end, opened the
lips of the old man. The sadness was in the heart of
George Willard and was without meaning, but it appealed
to Enoch Robinson.

It rained on the evening when the two met and talked, a
drizzly wet October rain. The fruition of the year had
come and the night should have been fine with a moon in
the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the
air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little
puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main
Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair
Ground water dripped from the black trees. Beneath the
trees wet leaves were pasted against tree roots that
protruded from the ground. In gardens back of houses in
Winesburg dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on
the ground. Men who had finished the evening meal and
who had planned to go uptown to talk the evening away
with other men at the back of some store changed their
minds. George Willard tramped about in the rain and was
glad that it rained. He felt that way. He was like
Enoch Robinson on the evenings when the old man came
down out of his room and wandered alone in the streets.
He was like that only that George Willard had become a
tall young man and did not think it manly to weep and
carry on. For a month his mother had been very ill and
that had something to do with his sadness, but not
much. He thought about himself and to the young that
always brings sadness.

Enoch Robinson and George Willard met beneath a wooden
awning that extended out over the sidewalk before
Voight's wagon shop on Maumee Street just off the main
street of Winesburg. They went together from there
through the rain-washed streets to the older man's room
on the third floor of the Heffner Block. The young
reporter went willingly enough. Enoch Robinson asked
him to go after the two had talked for ten minutes. The
boy was a little afraid but had never been more curious
in his life. A hundred times he had heard the old man
spoken of as a little off his head and he thought
himself rather brave and manly to go at all. From the
very beginning, in the street in the rain, the old man
talked in a queer way, trying to tell the story of the
room in Washington Square and of his life in the room.
"You'll understand if you try hard enough," he said
conclusively. "I have looked at you when you went past
me on the street and I think you can understand. It
isn't hard. All you have to do is to believe what I
say, just listen and believe, that's all there is to
it."

It was past eleven o'clock that evening when old Enoch,
talking to George Willard in the room in the Heffner
Block, came to the vital thing, the story of the woman
and of what drove him out of the city to live out his
life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot
by the window with his head in his hand and George
Willard was in a chair by a table. A kerosene lamp sat
on the table and the room, although almost bare of
furniture, was scrupulously clean. As the man talked
George Willard began to feel that he would like to get
out of the chair and sit on the cot also. He wanted to
put his arms about the little old man. In the half
darkness the man talked and the boy listened, filled
with sadness.

"She got to coming in there after there hadn't been
anyone in the room for years," said Enoch Robinson.
"She saw me in the hallway of the house and we got
acquainted. I don't know just what she did in her own
room. I never went there. I think she was a musician
and played a violin. Every now and then she came and
knocked at the door and I opened it. In she came and
sat down beside me, just sat and looked about and said
nothing. Anyway, she said nothing that mattered."

The old man arose from the cot and moved about the
room. The overcoat he wore was wet from the rain and
drops of water kept falling with a soft thump on the
floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard
got out of the chair and sat beside him.

"I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room
with me and she was too big for the room. I felt that
she was driving everything else away. We just talked of
little things, but I couldn't sit still. I wanted to
touch her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands
were so strong and her face was so good and she looked
at me all the time."

The trembling voice of the old man became silent and
his body shook as from a chill. "I was afraid," he
whispered. "I was terribly afraid. I didn't want to let
her come in when she knocked at the door but I couldn't
sit still. 'No, no,' I said to myself, but I got up and
opened the door just the same. She was so grown up, you
see. She was a woman. I thought she would be bigger
than I was there in that room."

Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike
blue eyes shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered.
"I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her," he
explained. "Then I began to tell her about my people,
about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to
keep quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn't. I
felt just as I did about opening the door. Sometimes I
ached to have her go away and never come back any
more."

The old man sprang to his feet and his voice shook with
excitement. "One night something happened. I became mad
to make her understand me and to know what a big thing
I was in that room. I wanted her to see how important I
was. I told her over and over. When she tried to go
away, I ran and locked the door. I followed her about.
I talked and talked and then all of a sudden things
went to smash. A look came into her eyes and I knew she
did understand. Maybe she had understood all the time.
I was furious. I couldn't stand it. I wanted her to
understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her
understand. I felt that then she would know everything,
that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see. That's
how it is. I don't know why."

The old man dropped into a chair by the lamp and the
boy listened, filled with awe. "Go away, boy," said the
man. "Don't stay here with me any more. I thought it
might be a good thing to tell you but it isn't. I don't
want to talk any more. Go away."

George Willard shook his head and a note of command
came into his voice. "Don't stop now. Tell me the rest
of it," he commanded sharply. "What happened? Tell me
the rest of the story."

Enoch Robinson sprang to his feet and ran to the window
that looked down into the deserted main street of
Winesburg. George Willard followed. By the window the
two stood, the tall awkward boy-man and the little
wrinkled man-boy. The childish, eager voice carried
forward the tale. "I swore at her," he explained. "I
said vile words. I ordered her to go away and not to
come back. Oh, I said terrible things. At first she
pretended not to understand but I kept at it. I
screamed and stamped on the floor. I made the house
ring with my curses. I didn't want ever to see her
again and I knew, after some of the things I said, that
I never would see her again."

The old man's voice broke and he shook his head.
"Things went to smash," he said quietly and sadly. "Out
she went through the door and all the life there had
been in the room followed her out. She took all of my
people away. They all went out through the door after
her. That's the way it was."

George Willard turned and went out of Enoch Robinson's
room. In the darkness by the window, as he went through
the door, he could hear the thin old voice whimpering
and complaining. "I'm alone, all alone here," said the
voice. "It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm
all alone."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Much of Enoch Robinson's story takes place in New York City, but "Loneliness" belongs in Winesburg, Ohio for two reasons. First, Enoch Robinson is, like most of the people of Winesburg, a lonely person. In his case, his loneliness is caused partly by his devotion to art. At twenty-one, he fled Winesburg hoping to find a place where he would fit in better, but he doesn't feel that he belongs in New York City either. As Anderson says, Enoch "couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him." Therefore Enoch has locked the door of his rented room and peopled his isolation with phantom creatures of his imagination; he is isolated by his art arid with his art; he is another lonely grotesque. Another reason that "Loneliness" belongs with this collection of stories is that Enoch, at thirty-six, returned to Winesburg, and the last part of his story is a long explanation to George Willard of his return. We learn that Enoch deserted his art after a time in the city. He married, became a voter and a working man; "he got a job in a place where illustrations are made for advertisements," says Anderson, making it sound like something despicable and demeaning. We are told, "Two children were born to the woman he married," as if Enoch weren't involved. And, indeed, he wasn't really. Enoch was playing a role and he began to feel choked and walled-in by his apartment. So Enoch left his wife and went back to his rented room. There, however, he met another woman who eventually left him and took all of his imaginary phantoms with her. So Enoch returned to Winesburg, frustrated and defeated. In this story, Anderson is apparently trying to show us what an artist is like. He describes Enoch as a "boy-man" because Anderson himself was apparently enough of a romantic and Platonist to think that a child is more sensitive and imaginative than an adult. The woman who drove Enoch back to Winesburg is described as being "too big for the room" and "so grown up." It was she, this personified adulthood, who took all of his "people" away. All that is left of Enoch is "a thin old voice" complaining, "It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone." One realizes if he reads this story carefully, its strength is in its subtlety and its suggestiveness. Take, for example, what seems to be an irrelevant detail-that Enoch was hit by a streetcar and was made lame. But is such a detail irrelevant, or is Anderson suggesting that industrialization and mechanization is likely to destroy the artist -- or at least maim him? Or consider the fact that Enoch's cheap rented room is "long and narrow like a hallway." Is Anderson suggesting that the room is impractical and uncomfortable, or is he intimating that the artist's world is a magic place that leads him to new worlds, a hall that has many doors to open. As one begins to speculate about Anderson's subtlety, he may remember Enoch's description of one of his paintings: "The picture you see doesn't consist of the things you see and say words about. There is something else, something you don't see at all," and as Enoch talks about this painting, one begins to realize that what he put in the picture is less important than what he left out. Anderson himself cultivated the art of leaving out. In this story we see young George Willard listening eagerly to Enoch Robinson, even urging the old man to continue his story. George's sympathy and interest at this point in the book contrasts with his fear of getting involved with Wing Biddlebaum. We realize that George is maturing, that he is beginning to follow Kate Swift's advice about finding out what people are thinking about. George is trying to prepare himself to be a writer.


prompt:
Chapter: AN AWAKENING

Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick
lips. She was tall and strong. When black thoughts
visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man
and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in
the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during
the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of
the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter,
bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and
lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine
trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty
tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the
back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal
drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the
night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life
almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from
girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The
bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he
stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat
that had become shabby with age. At night when he
returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the
streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for
the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were
placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the
boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind
the dining room door. If they were moved during the day
he was speechless with anger and did not recover his
equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of
his daughter. She, he realized, knew the story of his
brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it.
One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of
soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the
mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the
pressing of trousers and then went back to her work
feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening
with George Willard. Secretly she loved another man,
but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused
her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby,
bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with
the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.
She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender and
walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very
insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep
the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was
somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man
of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's
saloon. His fists were large and his eyes unusually
small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the
power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm
from an uncle in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought
in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six
months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an
orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward
filled his home town with awe. Here and there he went
throwing the money about, driving carriages through the
streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping
mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of
dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he
got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a
hotel and later went about smashing windows and
breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing
the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend
the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the
surface amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in
spending but one evening in her company. On that
evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's
livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction
that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he
must get her settled upon him and he told her of his
desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin
trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but
so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to
explain his intentions. His body ached with physical
longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking
the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly in
spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became
helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her
out of the buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll
not let you go. You can't play with me," he declared as
he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the
buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands.
"I'll keep you for good the next time," he said. "You
might as well make up your mind to that. It's you and
me for it and I'm going to have you before I get
through."

One night in January when there was a new moon George
Willard, who was in Ed Handby's mind the only obstacle
to his getting Belle Carpenter, went for a walk. Early
that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's pool
room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town
butcher. Seth Richmond stood with his back against the
wall and remained silent, but George Willard talked.
The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they
talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein.
He said that women should look out for themselves, that
the fellow who went out with a girl was not responsible
for what happened. As he talked he looked about, eager
for attention. He held the floor for five minutes and
then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the
barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already began
to consider himself an authority in such matters as
baseball, horse racing, drinking, and going about with
women. He began to tell of a night when he with two men
from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side
of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor. "The
women in the place couldn't embarrass me although they
tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in
the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon
as she began to talk I went and sat in her lap.
Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I
taught her to let me alone."

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main
Street. For days the weather had been bitter cold with
a high wind blowing down on the town from Lake Erie,
eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind
had died away and a new moon made the night unusually
lovely. Without thinking where he was going or what he
wanted to do, George went out of Main Street and began
walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame
houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he
forgot his companions of the pool room. Because it was
dark and he was alone he began to talk aloud. In a
spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a
drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a
sword that jingled as he walked. As a soldier he
pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long
line of men who stood at attention. He began to examine
the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped
and began to scold. "Your pack is not in order," he
said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of
this matter? Everything must be in order here. We have
a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be
done without order."

Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled
along the board sidewalk saying more words. "There is a
law for armies and for men too," he muttered, lost in
reflection. "The law begins with little things and
spreads out until it covers everything. In every little
thing there must be order, in the place where men work,
in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be
orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into
touch with something orderly and big that swings
through the night like a star. In my little way I must
begin to learn something, to give and swing and work
with life, with the law."

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street
lamp and his body began to tremble. He had never before
thought such thoughts as had just come into his head
and he wondered where they had come from. For the
moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of
himself had been talking as he walked. He was amazed
and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on
again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of
Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that,"
he whispered. "It is better to be alone. If I talked
like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they
wouldn't understand what I've been thinking down here."

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago,
there was a section in which lived day laborers. As the
time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked
in the fields or were section hands on the railroads.
They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar
for the long day of toil. The houses in which they
lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs
with a garden at the back. The more comfortable among
them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George
Willard walked into such a street on the clear January
night. The street was dimly lighted and in places there
was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there
was something that excited his already aroused fancy.
For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments
to the reading of books and now some tale he had read
concerning life in old world towns of the middle ages
came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled
forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a
place that had been a part of some former existence. On
an impulse he turned out of the street and went into a
little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived
the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the
strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting
his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came
to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in the
clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The
poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke
from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear
air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap
calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the
footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off
to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs
barking and the children crying--all of these things
made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly
detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his
own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the
alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to be driven away
with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a
vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the
sky. He felt unutterably big and remade by the simple
experience through which he had been passing and in a
kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting
them into the darkness above his head and muttering
words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said
words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue
and saying them because they were brave words, full of
meaning. "Death," he muttered, "night, the sea, fear,
loveliness."

George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood
again on the sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that
all of the people in the little street must be brothers
and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to
call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.
"If there were only a woman here I would take hold of
her hand and we would run until we were both tired
out," he thought. "That would make me feel better."
With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out
of the street and went toward the house where Belle
Carpenter lived. He thought she would understand his
mood and that he could achieve in her presence a
position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the
past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips
he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had
felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and
had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had
suddenly become too big to be used.

When George got to Belle Carpenter's house there had
already been a visitor there before him. Ed Handby had
come to the door and calling Belle out of the house had
tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the woman to
come away with him and to be his wife, but when she
came and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance
and became sullen. "You stay away from that kid," he
growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not
knowing what else to say, turned to go away. "If I
catch you together I will break your bones and his
too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to
threaten, and was angry with himself because of his
failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran
hurriedly upstairs. From a window at the upper part of
the house she saw Ed Handby cross the street and sit
down on a horse block before the house of a neighbor.
In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his
head in his hands. She was made happy by the sight, and
when George Willard came to the door she greeted him
effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought
that, as she walked through the streets with young
Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make
him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter
walked about under the trees in the sweet night air.
George Willard was full of big words. The sense of
power that had come to him during the hour in the
darkness in the alleyway remained with him and he
talked boldly, swaggering along and swinging his arms
about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that
he was aware of his former weakness and that he had
changed. "You'll find me different," he declared,
thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking boldly
into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've
got to take me for a man or let me alone. That's how it
is."

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went
the woman and the boy. When George had finished talking
they turned down a side street and went across a bridge
into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The hill
began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the
Winesburg Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew dense
bushes and small trees and among the bushes were little
open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and
frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George
Willard's heart began to beat rapidly and his shoulders
straightened. Suddenly he decided that Belle Carpenter
was about to surrender herself to him. The new force
that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at
work upon her and had led to her conquest. The thought
made him half drunk with the sense of masculine power.
Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about
she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the
fact that she had accompanied him to this place took
all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has
become different," he thought and taking hold of her
shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his
eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her
upon the lips she leaned heavily against him and looked
over his shoulder into the darkness. In her whole
attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as
in the alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into
words and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the
words into the still night. "Lust," he whispered, "lust
and night and women."

George Willard did not understand what happened to him
that night on the hillside. Later, when he got to his
own room, he wanted to weep and then grew half insane
with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was
sure that all his life he would continue to hate her.
On the hillside he had led the woman to one of the
little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped to
his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the
laborers' houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude
for the new power in himself and was waiting for the
woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he
thought had tried to take his woman away. He knew that
beating was unnecessary, that he had power within
himself to accomplish his purpose without using his
fists. Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him
to his feet, he held him with one hand while he looked
at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a
quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man
sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the
woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're no good," he
said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you.
I'd let you alone if I didn't want you so much."

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard
stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think.
He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated
him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than
to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and
each time the bartender, catching him by the shoulder,
hurled him back into the bushes. The older man seemed
prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but
George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he
lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the
arm and marched her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through
the bushes. As he crept down the hillside his heart was
sick within him. He hated himself and he hated the fate
that had brought about his humiliation. When his mind
went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was
puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping
to hear again the voice outside himself that had so
short a time before put new courage into his heart.
When his way homeward led him again into the street of
frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to
run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood
that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: "An Awakening" is one of several of the Winesburg stories that deal with George Willard's experience with various women. We have read of George's evening with Louise Trunnion in "Nobody Knows"; later, we will read of the evening he; spends with Helen White in "Sophistication." In "An Awakening," we learn of his meeting with Belle Carpenter. This story might lead one to think that the latter part of Winesburg contains more hope than the first part. Belle Carpenter is a strong, successful young woman. As her name implies, she is an attractive flirt and a builder, one who successfully manipulates people and situations so that she gets what she wants. We learn that she has refused to let her petty, bookkeeping father dominate her life, and, in "An Awakening," we see her use George Willard to incite Ed Handby, the man she really loves. Although Belle is the catalyst for the action in this story, the conflict is between her two suitors. Ed Handby, a burly bartender, has large fists and a soft, quiet voice -- physically, he is powerful; verbally, he is impotent. Ed wants to marry Belie, but he can't seem to declare his intentions until Belle drives him to it by seeming to encourage George Willard's attentions. It is George, however, who experiences the awakening mentioned in the title. On a January night when George is taking a walk, he begins to play soldier, like a child. He imagines himself scolding his subordinates about not being orderly enough, then he drops that role and begins to reflect, "In every little thing there must be order . . . I myself must be orderly." At the end of "Nobody Knows," George had "stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as though for a voice." Now, in "An Awakening," he feels "some voice outside of himself had been talking." He finds himself in an area of Winesburg that seems like a little medieval village and as he pauses in an alleyway that smells of cow and pig manure, he has a sense of power such as he has never known before. His thoughts are egotistical and romantic and he thinks that he has experienced an awakening. Forgetting Kate Swift's advice about not being a mere peddler of words, George begins to whisper words without meaning, "Death, night, the sea, fear, loveliness." Hypnotized by his own words, he thinks that he is "too big to be used," and he rushes off to see Belle. He is mistaking his sense of spiritual power for sexual power. George's real awakening comes, however, a few hours later with Belle Carpenter, for he discovers that his words are less powerful than the hands of the inarticulate Ed, that Belle has been using him, and that Ed considers him too much a child to beat up, as he would do to a real competitor. George is thus left humiliated and full of hate; the village that had seemed so charming now looks "utterly squalid and commonplace." Here Anderson is again reiterating the contrast between appearance and reality and is suggesting again the danger of being fascinated by abstract words. But he shows one more step in the young reporter's education and preparation to leave Winesburg.


prompt:
Chapter: "QUEER"

From his seat on a box in the rough board shed that
stuck like a burr on the rear of Cowley & Son's store
in Winesburg, Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the
firm, could see through a dirty window into the
printshop of the Winesburg Eagle. Elmer was putting new
shoelaces in his shoes. They did not go in readily and
he had to take the shoes off. With the shoes in his
hand he sat looking at a large hole in the heel of one
of his stockings. Then looking quickly up he saw George
Willard, the only newspaper reporter in Winesburg,
standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and
staring absentmindedly about. "Well, well, what next!"
exclaimed the young man with the shoes in his hand,
jumping to his feet and creeping away from the window.

A flush crept into Elmer Cowley's face and his hands
began to tremble. In Cowley & Son's store a Jewish
traveling salesman stood by the counter talking to his
father. He imagined the reporter could hear what was
being said and the thought made him furious. With one
of the shoes still held in his hand he stood in a
corner of the shed and stamped with a stockinged foot
upon the board floor.

Cowley & Son's store did not face the main street of
Winesburg. The front was on Maumee Street and beyond it
was Voight's wagon shop and a shed for the sheltering
of farmers' horses. Beside the store an alleyway ran
behind the main street stores and all day drays and
delivery wagons, intent on bringing in and taking out
goods, passed up and down. The store itself was
indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it
sold everything and nothing. In the window facing
Maumee Street stood a chunk of coal as large as an
apple barrel, to indicate that orders for coal were
taken, and beside the black mass of the coal stood
three combs of honey grown brown and dirty in their
wooden frames.

The honey had stood in the store window for six months.
It was for sale as were also the coat hangers, patent
suspender buttons, cans of roof paint, bottles of
rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that
companioned the honey in its patient willingness to
serve the public.

Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store
listening to the eager patter of words that fell from
the lips of the traveling man, was tall and lean and
looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen
partially covered by a grey beard. He wore a long
Prince Albert coat. The coat had been purchased to
serve as a wedding garment. Before he became a merchant
Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore
the Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on
Saturday afternoons when he came into town to trade.
When he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the
coat constantly. It had become brown with age and was
covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always
felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.

As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life
and he had not been happily placed as a farmer. Still
he existed. His family, consisting of a daughter named
Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the
store and it did not cost them much to live. His
troubles were not financial. His unhappiness as a
merchant lay in the fact that when a traveling man with
wares to be sold came in at the front door he was
afraid. Behind the counter he stood shaking his head.
He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to
buy and thus lose the opportunity to sell again; second
that he would not be stubborn enough and would in a
moment of weakness buy what could not be sold.

In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw
George Willard standing and apparently listening at the
back door of the Eagle printshop, a situation had
arisen that always stirred the son's wrath. The
traveling man talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole
figure expressing uncertainty. "You see how quickly it
is done," said the traveling man, who had for sale a
small flat metal substitute for collar buttons. With
one hand he quickly unfastened a collar from his shirt
and then fastened it on again. He assumed a flattering
wheedling tone. "I tell you what, men have come to the
end of all this fooling with collar buttons and you are
the man to make money out of the change that is coming.
I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town.
Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I'll not visit
any other store. I'll leave the field to you."

The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped
with his finger on Ebenezer's breast. "It's an
opportunity and I want you to take it," he urged. "A
friend of mine told me about you. 'See that man
Cowley,' he said. 'He's a live one.'"

The traveling man paused and waited. Taking a book
from his pocket he began writing out the order. Still
holding the shoe in his hand Elmer Cowley went through
the store, past the two absorbed men, to a glass
showcase near the front door. He took a cheap revolver
from the case and began to wave it about. "You get out
of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar
fasteners here." An idea came to him. "Mind, I'm not
making any threat," he added. "I don't say I'll shoot.
Maybe I just took this gun out of the case to look at
it. But you better get out. Yes sir, I'll say that. You
better grab up your things and get out."

The young storekeeper's voice rose to a scream and
going behind the counter he began to advance upon the
two men. "We're through being fools here!" he cried.
"We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to
sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have
folks staring and listening. You get out of here!"

The traveling man left. Raking the samples of collar
fasteners off the counter into a black leather bag, he
ran. He was a small man and very bow-legged and he ran
awkwardly. The black bag caught against the door and he
stumbled and fell. "Crazy, that's what he is--crazy!"
he sputtered as he arose from the sidewalk and hurried
away.

In the store Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each
other. Now that the immediate object of his wrath had
fled, the younger man was embarrassed. "Well, I meant
it. I think we've been queer long enough," he declared,
going to the showcase and replacing the revolver.
Sitting on a barrel he pulled on and fastened the shoe
he had been holding in his hand. He was waiting for
some word of understanding from his father but when
Ebenezer spoke his words only served to reawaken the
wrath in the son and the young man ran out of the store
without replying. Scratching his grey beard with his
long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his son with
the same wavering uncertain stare with which he had
confronted the traveling man. "I'll be starched," he
said softly. "Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and
starched!"

Elmer Cowley went out of Winesburg and along a country
road that paralleled the railroad track. He did not
know where he was going or what he was going to do. In
the shelter of a deep cut where the road, after turning
sharply to the right, dipped under the tracks he
stopped and the passion that had been the cause of his
outburst in the store began to again find expression.
"I will not be queer--one to be looked at and listened
to," he declared aloud. "I'll be like other people.
I'll show that George Willard. He'll find out. I'll
show him!"

The distraught young man stood in the middle of the
road and glared back at the town. He did not know the
reporter George Willard and had no special feeling
concerning the tall boy who ran about town gathering
the town news. The reporter had merely come, by his
presence in the office and in the printshop of the
Winesburg Eagle, to stand for something in the young
merchant's mind. He thought the boy who passed and
repassed Cowley & Son's store and who stopped to talk
to people in the street must be thinking of him and
perhaps laughing at him. George Willard, he felt,
belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in
his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could
not have believed that George Willard had also his days
of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable
desires visited also his mind. Did he not represent
public opinion and had not the public opinion of
Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness? Did he
not walk whistling and laughing through Main Street?
Might not one by striking his person strike also the
greater enemy--the thing that smiled and went its own
way--the judgment of Winesburg?

Elmer Cowley was extraordinarily tall and his arms were
long and powerful. His hair, his eyebrows, and the
downy beard that had begun to grow upon his chin, were
pale almost to whiteness. His teeth protruded from
between his lips and his eyes were blue with the
colorless blueness of the marbles called "aggies" that
the boys of Winesburg carried in their pockets. Elmer
had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no
friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through
life without friends and he hated the thought.

Sullenly the tall young man tramped along the road with
his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. The day was
cold with a raw wind, but presently the sun began to
shine and the road became soft and muddy. The tops of
the ridges of frozen mud that formed the road began to
melt and the mud clung to Elmer's shoes. His feet
became cold. When he had gone several miles he turned
off the road, crossed a field and entered a wood. In
the wood he gathered sticks to build a fire, by which
he sat trying to warm himself, miserable in body and in
mind.

For two hours he sat on the log by the fire and then,
arising and creeping cautiously through a mass of
underbrush, he went to a fence and looked across fields
to a small farmhouse surrounded by low sheds. A smile
came to his lips and he began making motions with his
long arms to a man who was husking corn in one of the
fields.

In his hour of misery the young merchant had returned
to the farm where he had lived through boyhood and
where there was another human being to whom he felt he
could explain himself. The man on the farm was a
half-witted old fellow named Mook. He had once been
employed by Ebenezer Cowley and had stayed on the farm
when it was sold. The old man lived in one of the
unpainted sheds back of the farmhouse and puttered
about all day in the fields.

Mook the half-wit lived happily. With childlike faith
he believed in the intelligence of the animals that
lived in the sheds with him, and when he was lonely
held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and
even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard. He
it was who had put the expression regarding being
"laundered" into the mouth of his former employer. When
excited or surprised by anything he smiled vaguely and
muttered: "I'll be washed and ironed. Well, well, I'll
be washed and ironed and starched."

When the half-witted old man left his husking of corn
and came into the wood to meet Elmer Cowley, he was
neither surprised nor especially interested in the
sudden appearance of the young man. His feet also were
cold and he sat on the log by the fire, grateful for
the warmth and apparently indifferent to what Elmer had
to say.

Elmer talked earnestly and with great freedom, walking
up and down and waving his arms about. "You don't
understand what's the matter with me so of course you
don't care," he declared. "With me it's different. Look
how it has always been with me. Father is queer and
mother was queer, too. Even the clothes mother used to
wear were not like other people's clothes, and look at
that coat in which father goes about there in town,
thinking he's dressed up, too. Why don't he get a new
one? It wouldn't cost much. I'll tell you why. Father
doesn't know and when mother was alive she didn't know
either. Mabel is different. She knows but she won't say
anything. I will, though. I'm not going to be stared at
any longer. Why look here, Mook, father doesn't know
that his store there in town is just a queer jumble,
that he'll never sell the stuff he buys. He knows
nothing about it. Sometimes he's a little worried that
trade doesn't come and then he goes and buys something
else. In the evenings he sits by the fire upstairs and
says trade will come after a while. He isn't worried.
He's queer. He doesn't know enough to be worried."

The excited young man became more excited. "He don't
know but I know," he shouted, stopping to gaze down
into the dumb, unresponsive face of the half-wit. "I
know too well. I can't stand it. When we lived out here
it was different. I worked and at night I went to bed
and slept. I wasn't always seeing people and thinking
as I am now. In the evening, there in town, I go to the
post office or to the depot to see the train come in,
and no one says anything to me. Everyone stands around
and laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me.
Then I feel so queer that I can't talk either. I go
away. I don't say anything. I can't."

The fury of the young man became uncontrollable. "I
won't stand it," he yelled, looking up at the bare
branches of the trees. "I'm not made to stand it."

Maddened by the dull face of the man on the log by the
fire, Elmer turned and glared at him as he had glared
back along the road at the town of Winesburg. "Go on
back to work," he screamed. "What good does it do me to
talk to you?" A thought came to him and his voice
dropped. "I'm a coward too, eh?" he muttered. "Do you
know why I came clear out here afoot? I had to tell
someone and you were the only one I could tell. I
hunted out another queer one, you see. I ran away,
that's what I did. I couldn't stand up to someone like
that George Willard. I had to come to you. I ought to
tell him and I will."

Again his voice arose to a shout and his arms flew
about. "I will tell him. I won't be queer. I don't care
what they think. I won't stand it."

Elmer Cowley ran out of the woods leaving the half-wit
sitting on the log before the fire. Presently the old
man arose and climbing over the fence went back to his
work in the corn. "I'll be washed and ironed and
starched," he declared. "Well, well, I'll be washed and
ironed." Mook was interested. He went along a lane to a
field where two cows stood nibbling at a straw stack.
"Elmer was here," he said to the cows. "Elmer is crazy.
You better get behind the stack where he don't see you.
He'll hurt someone yet, Elmer will."

At eight o'clock that evening Elmer Cowley put his head
in at the front door of the office of the Winesburg
Eagle where George Willard sat writing. His cap was
pulled down over his eyes and a sullen determined look
was on his face. "You come on outside with me," he
said, stepping in and closing the door. He kept his
hand on the knob as though prepared to resist anyone
else coming in. "You just come along outside. I want to
see you."

George Willard and Elmer Cowley walked through the main
street of Winesburg. The night was cold and George
Willard had on a new overcoat and looked very spruce
and dressed up. He thrust his hands into the overcoat
pockets and looked inquiringly at his companion. He had
long been wanting to make friends with the young
merchant and find out what was in his mind. Now he
thought he saw a chance and was delighted. "I wonder
what he's up to? Perhaps he thinks he has a piece of
news for the paper. It can't be a fire because I
haven't heard the fire bell and there isn't anyone
running," he thought.

In the main street of Winesburg, on the cold November
evening, but few citizens appeared and these hurried
along bent on getting to the stove at the back of some
store. The windows of the stores were frosted and the
wind rattled the tin sign that hung over the entrance
to the stairway leading to Doctor Welling's office.
Before Hern's Grocery a basket of apples and a rack
filled with new brooms stood on the sidewalk. Elmer
Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard. He
tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down.
His face worked spasmodically. He seemed about to
shout. "Oh, you go on back," he cried. "Don't stay out
here with me. I ain't got anything to tell you. I don't
want to see you at all."

For three hours the distracted young merchant wandered
through the resident streets of Winesburg blind with
anger, brought on by his failure to declare his
determination not to be queer. Bitterly the sense of
defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After
the hours of futile sputtering at nothingness that had
occupied the afternoon and his failure in the presence
of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope
of a future for himself.

And then a new idea dawned for him. In the darkness
that surrounded him he began to see a light. Going to
the now darkened store, where Cowley & Son had for over
a year waited vainly for trade to come, he crept
stealthily in and felt about in a barrel that stood by
the stove at the rear. In the barrel beneath shavings
lay a tin box containing Cowley & Son's cash. Every
evening Ebenezer Cowley put the box in the barrel when
he closed the store and went upstairs to bed. "They
wouldn't never think of a careless place like that," he
told himself, thinking of robbers.

Elmer took twenty dollars, two ten-dollar bills, from
the little roll containing perhaps four hundred
dollars, the cash left from the sale of the farm. Then
replacing the box beneath the shavings he went quietly
out at the front door and walked again in the streets.

The idea that he thought might put an end to all of his
unhappiness was very simple. "I will get out of here,
run away from home," he told himself. He knew that a
local freight train passed through Winesburg at
midnight and went on to Cleveland, where it arrived at
dawn. He would steal a ride on the local and when he
got to Cleveland would lose himself in the crowds
there. He would get work in some shop and become
friends with the other workmen and would be
indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He
would no longer be queer and would make friends. Life
would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it
had for others.

The tall awkward young man, striding through the
streets, laughed at himself because he had been angry
and had been half afraid of George Willard. He decided
he would have his talk with the young reporter before
he left town, that he would tell him about things,
perhaps challenge him, challenge all of Winesburg
through him.

Aglow with new confidence Elmer went to the office of
the New Willard House and pounded on the door. A
sleep-eyed boy slept on a cot in the office. He
received no salary but was fed at the hotel table and
bore with pride the title of "night clerk." Before the
boy Elmer was bold, insistent. "You 'wake him up," he
commanded. "You tell him to come down by the depot. I
got to see him and I'm going away on the local. Tell
him to dress and come on down. I ain't got much time."

The midnight local had finished its work in Winesburg
and the trainsmen were coupling cars, swinging lanterns
and preparing to resume their flight east. George
Willard, rubbing his eyes and again wearing the new
overcoat, ran down to the station platform afire with
curiosity. "Well, here I am. What do you want? You've
got something to tell me, eh?" he said.

Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his
tongue and looked at the train that had begun to groan
and get under way. "Well, you see," he began, and then
lost control of his tongue. "I'll be washed and ironed.
I'll be washed and ironed and starched," he muttered
half incoherently.

Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside the groaning train
in the darkness on the station platform. Lights leaped
into the air and bobbed up and down before his eyes.
Taking the two ten-dollar bills from his pocket he
thrust them into George Willard's hand. "Take them," he
cried. "I don't want them. Give them to father. I stole
them." With a snarl of rage he turned and his long arms
began to flay the air. Like one struggling for release
from hands that held him he struck out, hitting George
Willard blow after blow on the breast, the neck, the
mouth. The young reporter rolled over on the platform
half unconscious, stunned by the terrific force of the
blows. Springing aboard the passing train and running
over the tops of cars, Elmer sprang down to a flat car
and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the
fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up in him. "I
showed him," he cried. "I guess I showed him. I ain't
so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't so queer."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Without a doubt, Elmer Cowley is queer, or different. Yet before his family sold their farm and moved into Winesburg, Elmer was evidently a fairly happy individual. He remembers, "I worked and at night I went to bed and slept. I wasn't always seeing people and thinking." In town, however, Elmer and his sister and his father are all considered queer, or at least Elmer thinks they are. Certainly the father is an unsuccessful shop-keeper and a shabbily dressed individual. This, in a society that values money-making and social conformity, is enough to make the family scorned by the people of Winesburg. So Elmer, though he has no specific deformity, is "condemned to go through life without friends." Elmer tries to be friendly with George Willard because he feels that the young reporter "typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town." Elmer can't believe that George also feels "vague hungers and secret unnamable desires," so he wants to convince George that he isn't queer. Instead, he talks to the half-wit Mook who doesn't understand him but comments in amazement, "I'll be washed and ironed and starched." This is, of course, what Elmer's bewildered father had said earlier in the day when Elmer had chased a salesman out of the shop. Ironically, it is all that Elmer himself can say when George, at Elmer's request, comes to the train station at midnight. Elmer had hoped that before leaving for Cleveland he could convince George, at least, that he wasn't queer, but again he can't say what he wants. Therefore, to George's complete surprise, Elmer "with a snarl of rage . . . turned and his long arms began to flay the air. Like one struggling for release from hands that held him he struck out, hitting George Willard blow after blow." The prime irony, of course, is Elmer's remark after this: "I showed him," he says as the train pulls out, "I guess I showed him I ain't so queer." George doesn't understand why Elmer acts as he does, but this is one more lesson that will teach the young reporter to feel compassion and empathy for the world's grotesques. Elmer's isolation can only be overcome by love and understanding, qualities which at this point George isn't capable of giving. Nevertheless, the future writer has stored another experience, another grotesque character, into his memory bag.