Chapter: THE PHILOSOPHER

Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth
covered by a yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty
white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a
number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies.
His teeth were black and irregular and there was
something strange about his eyes. The lid of the left
eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was
exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window
shade and someone stood inside the doctor's head
playing with the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George
Willard. It began when George had been working for a
year on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship
was entirely a matter of the doctor's own making.

In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor
of the Eagle, went over to Tom Willy's saloon. Along an
alleyway he went and slipping in at the back door of
the saloon began drinking a drink made of a combination
of sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a
sensualist and had reached the age of forty-five. He
imagined the gin renewed the youth in him. Like most
sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and for an
hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy. The
saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with
peculiarly marked hands. That flaming kind of birthmark
that sometimes paints with red the faces of men and
women had touched with red Tom Willy's fingers and the
backs of his hands. As he stood by the bar talking to
Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together. As he grew
more and more excited the red of his fingers deepened.
It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood
that had dried and faded.

As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red
hands and talking of women, his assistant, George
Willard, sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle and
listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.

Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will
Henderson had disappeared. One might have supposed that
the doctor had been watching from his office window and
had seen the editor going along the alleyway. Coming in
at the front door and finding himself a chair, he
lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs began
to talk. He seemed intent upon convincing the boy of
the advisability of adopting a line of conduct that he
was himself unable to define.

"If you have your eyes open you will see that although
I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients," he
began. "There is a reason for that. It is not an
accident and it is not because I do not know as much of
medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The
reason, you see, does not appear on the surface. It
lies in fact in my character, which has, if you think
about it, many strange turns. Why I want to talk to you
of the matter I don't know. I might keep still and get
more credit in your eyes. I have a desire to make you
admire me, that's a fact. I don't know why. That's why
I talk. It's very amusing, eh?"

Sometimes the doctor launched into long tales
concerning himself. To the boy the tales were very real
and full of meaning. He began to admire the fat
unclean-looking man and, in the afternoon when Will
Henderson had gone, looked forward with keen interest
to the doctor's coming.

Doctor Parcival had been in Winesburg about five years.
He came from Chicago and when he arrived was drunk and
got into a fight with Albert Longworth, the baggageman.
The fight concerned a trunk and ended by the doctor's
being escorted to the village lockup. When he was
released he rented a room above a shoe-repairing shop
at the lower end of Main Street and put out the sign
that announced himself as a doctor. Although he had but
few patients and these of the poorer sort who were
unable to pay, he seemed to have plenty of money for
his needs. He slept in the office that was unspeakably
dirty and dined at Biff Carter's lunch room in a small
frame building opposite the railroad station. In the
summer the lunch room was filled with flies and Biff
Carter's white apron was more dirty than his floor.
Doctor Parcival did not mind. Into the lunch room he
stalked and deposited twenty cents upon the counter.
"Feed me what you wish for that," he said laughing.
"Use up food that you wouldn't otherwise sell. It makes
no difference to me. I am a man of distinction, you
see. Why should I concern myself with what I eat."

The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard
began nowhere and ended nowhere. Sometimes the boy
thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies.
And then again he was convinced that they contained the
very essence of truth.

"I was a reporter like you here," Doctor Parcival
began. "It was in a town in Iowa--or was it in
Illinois? I don't remember and anyway it makes no
difference. Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity
and don't want to be very definite. Have you ever
thought it strange that I have money for my needs
although I do nothing? I may have stolen a great sum of
money or been involved in a murder before I came here.
There is food for thought in that, eh? If you were a
really smart newspaper reporter you would look me up.
In Chicago there was a Doctor Cronin who was murdered.
Have you heard of that? Some men murdered him and put
him in a trunk. In the early morning they hauled the
trunk across the city. It sat on the back of an express
wagon and they were on the seat as unconcerned as
anything. Along they went through quiet streets where
everyone was asleep. The sun was just coming up over
the lake. Funny, eh--just to think of them smoking
pipes and chattering as they drove along as unconcerned
as I am now. Perhaps I was one of those men. That would
be a strange turn of things, now wouldn't it, eh?"
Again Doctor Parcival began his tale: "Well, anyway
there I was, a reporter on a paper just as you are
here, running about and getting little items to print.
My mother was poor. She took in washing. Her dream was
to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying
with that end in view.

"My father had been insane for a number of years. He
was in an asylum over at Dayton, Ohio. There you see I
have let it slip out! All of this took place in Ohio,
right here in Ohio. There is a clew if you ever get the
notion of looking me up.

"I was going to tell you of my brother. That's the
object of all this. That's what I'm getting at. My
brother was a railroad painter and had a job on the Big
Four. You know that road runs through Ohio here. With
other men he lived in a box car and away they went from
town to town painting the railroad property-switches,
crossing gates, bridges, and stations.

"The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color.
How I hated that color! My brother was always covered
with it. On pay days he used to get drunk and come home
wearing his paint-covered clothes and bringing his
money with him. He did not give it to mother but laid
it in a pile on our kitchen table.

"About the house he went in the clothes covered with
the nasty orange colored paint. I can see the picture.
My mother, who was small and had red, sad-looking eyes,
would come into the house from a little shed at the
back. That's where she spent her time over the washtub
scrubbing people's dirty clothes. In she would come and
stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her apron
that was covered with soap-suds.

"'Don't touch it! Don't you dare touch that money,' my
brother roared, and then he himself took five or ten
dollars and went tramping off to the saloons. When he
had spent what he had taken he came back for more. He
never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about
until he had spent it all, a little at a time. Then he
went back to his job with the painting crew on the
railroad. After he had gone things began to arrive at
our house, groceries and such things. Sometimes there
would be a dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.

"Strange, eh? My mother loved my brother much more than
she did me, although he never said a kind word to
either of us and always raved up and down threatening
us if we dared so much as touch the money that
sometimes lay on the table three days.

"We got along pretty well. I studied to be a minister
and prayed. I was a regular ass about saying prayers.
You should have heard me. When my father died I prayed
all night, just as I did sometimes when my brother was
in town drinking and going about buying the things for
us. In the evening after supper I knelt by the table
where the money lay and prayed for hours. When no one
was looking I stole a dollar or two and put it in my
pocket. That makes me laugh now but then it was
terrible. It was on my mind all the time. I got six
dollars a week from my job on the paper and always took
it straight home to mother. The few dollars I stole
from my brother's pile I spent on myself, you know, for
trifles, candy and cigarettes and such things.

"When my father died at the asylum over at Dayton, I
went over there. I borrowed some money from the man for
whom I worked and went on the train at night. It was
raining. In the asylum they treated me as though I were
a king.

"The men who had jobs in the asylum had found out I was
a newspaper reporter. That made them afraid. There had
been some negligence, some carelessness, you see, when
father was ill. They thought perhaps I would write it
up in the paper and make a fuss. I never intended to do
anything of the kind.

"Anyway, in I went to the room where my father lay dead
and blessed the dead body. I wonder what put that
notion into my head. Wouldn't my brother, the painter,
have laughed, though. There I stood over the dead body
and spread out my hands. The superintendent of the
asylum and some of his helpers came in and stood about
looking sheepish. It was very amusing. I spread out my
hands and said, 'Let peace brood over this carcass.'
That's what I said."

Jumping to his feet and breaking off the tale, Doctor
Parcival began to walk up and down in the office of the
Winesburg Eagle where George Willard sat listening. He
was awkward and, as the office was small, continually
knocked against things. "What a fool I am to be
talking," he said. "That is not my object in coming
here and forcing my acquaintanceship upon you. I have
something else in mind. You are a reporter just as I
was once and you have attracted my attention. You may
end by becoming just such another fool. I want to warn
you and keep on warning you. That's why I seek you
out."

Doctor Parcival began talking of George Willard's
attitude toward men. It seemed to the boy that the man
had but one object in view, to make everyone seem
despicable. "I want to fill you with hatred and
contempt so that you will be a superior being," he
declared. "Look at my brother. There was a fellow, eh?
He despised everyone, you see. You have no idea with
what contempt he looked upon mother and me. And was he
not our superior? You know he was. You have not seen
him and yet I have made you feel that. I have given you
a sense of it. He is dead. Once when he was drunk he
lay down on the tracks and the car in which he lived
with the other painters ran over him."

            *       *       *

One day in August Doctor Parcival had an adventure in
Winesburg. For a month George Willard had been going
each morning to spend an hour in the doctor's office.
The visits came about through a desire on the part of
the doctor to read to the boy from the pages of a book
he was in the process of writing. To write the book
Doctor Parcival declared was the object of his coming
to Winesburg to live.

On the morning in August before the coming of the boy,
an incident had happened in the doctor's office. There
had been an accident on Main Street. A team of horses
had been frightened by a train and had run away. A
little girl, the daughter of a farmer, had been thrown
from a buggy and killed.

On Main Street everyone had become excited and a cry
for doctors had gone up. All three of the active
practitioners of the town had come quickly but had
found the child dead. From the crowd someone had run to
the office of Doctor Parcival who had bluntly refused
to go down out of his office to the dead child. The
useless cruelty of his refusal had passed unnoticed.
Indeed, the man who had come up the stairway to summon
him had hurried away without hearing the refusal.

All of this, Doctor Parcival did not know and when
George Willard came to his office he found the man
shaking with terror. "What I have done will arouse the
people of this town," he declared excitedly. "Do I not
know human nature? Do I not know what will happen? Word
of my refusal will be whispered about. Presently men
will get together in groups and talk of it. They will
come here. We will quarrel and there will be talk of
hanging. Then they will come again bearing a rope in
their hands."

Doctor Parcival shook with fright. "I have a
presentiment," he declared emphatically. "It may be
that what I am talking about will not occur this
morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be
hanged. Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to
a lamp-post on Main Street."

Going to the door of his dirty office, Doctor Parcival
looked timidly down the stairway leading to the street.
When he returned the fright that had been in his eyes
was beginning to be replaced by doubt. Coming on tiptoe
across the room he tapped George Willard on the
shoulder. "If not now, sometime," he whispered, shaking
his head. "In the end I will be crucified, uselessly
crucified."

Doctor Parcival began to plead with George Willard.
"You must pay attention to me," he urged. "If something
happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that
I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so
simple that if you are not careful you will forget it.
It is this--that everyone in the world is Christ and
they are all crucified. That's what I want to say.
Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare
let yourself forget."

 George Willard is an assistant to Will Henderson, owner and editor of the 'Eagle'. In the afternoons Will Henderson goes over to Tom Willy's saloon for a drink. Immediately after the departure of Will Henderson, Doctor Parcival appears at George's office to talk to him. The Doctor usually launches into long tales mostly concerning himself. He claims that he too was once a reporter, like George. His brother was a railroad painter and would come home covered in a nasty orange color. On paydays, he would get drunk, lay all his money on the table, and shout at anybody who tried to touch the money. After he was gone, groceries and other things would begin arriving in the house. This was his way of showing that he cared for his family and didn't mind spending money on his family. Doctor Parcival spoke about George's attitude towards men and would goad him to feel hatred and contempt for others, in order to become a superior being and to substantiate his lectures he always gave the example of his own brother. One day, an accident took place outside the doctor's office a little girl had been thrown from a buggy and killed. Three practitioners had reached the spot but had found the child dead. Doctor Parcival too had been briefly summoned but had refused to come and help. And belatedly he felt anxious for his act and began to believe that he is going to be executed for his conduct. His fright was so great that he called George over and entreated him to complete the book he had been working on. The idea, which should be emphasized, is that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified, is what the doctor tried to convey.

