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.

 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.

