Chapter: THE THINKER

The house in which Seth Richmond of Winesburg lived
with his mother had been at one time the show place of
the town, but when young Seth lived there its glory had
become somewhat dimmed. The huge brick house which
Banker White had built on Buckeye Street had
overshadowed it. The Richmond place was in a little
valley far out at the end of Main Street. Farmers
coming into town by a dusty road from the south passed
by a grove of walnut trees, skirted the Fair Ground
with its high board fence covered with advertisements,
and trotted their horses down through the valley past
the Richmond place into town. As much of the country
north and south of Winesburg was devoted to fruit and
berry raising, Seth saw wagon-loads of berry
pickers--boys, girls, and women--going to the fields in
the morning and returning covered with dust in the
evening. The chattering crowd, with their rude jokes
cried out from wagon to wagon, sometimes irritated him
sharply. He regretted that he also could not laugh
boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and make of
himself a figure in the endless stream of moving,
giggling activity that went up and down the road.

The Richmond house was built of limestone, and,
although it was said in the village to have become run
down, had in reality grown more beautiful with every
passing year. Already time had begun a little to color
the stone, lending a golden richness to its surface and
in the evening or on dark days touching the shaded
places beneath the eaves with wavering patches of
browns and blacks.

The house had been built by Seth's grandfather, a stone
quarryman, and it, together with the stone quarries on
Lake Erie eighteen miles to the north, had been left to
his son, Clarence Richmond, Seth's father. Clarence
Richmond, a quiet passionate man extraordinarily
admired by his neighbors, had been killed in a street
fight with the editor of a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio.
The fight concerned the publication of Clarence
Richmond's name coupled with that of a woman school
teacher, and as the dead man had begun the row by
firing upon the editor, the effort to punish the slayer
was unsuccessful. After the quarryman's death it was
found that much of the money left to him had been
squandered in speculation and in insecure investments
made through the influence of friends.

Left with but a small income, Virginia Richmond had
settled down to a retired life in the village and to
the raising of her son. Although she had been deeply
moved by the death of the husband and father, she did
not at all believe the stories concerning him that ran
about after his death. To her mind, the sensitive,
boyish man whom all had instinctively loved, was but an
unfortunate, a being too fine for everyday life.
"You'll be hearing all sorts of stories, but you are
not to believe what you hear," she said to her son. "He
was a good man, full of tenderness for everyone, and
should not have tried to be a man of affairs. No matter
how much I were to plan and dream of your future, I
could not imagine anything better for you than that you
turn out as good a man as your father."

Several years after the death of her husband, Virginia
Richmond had become alarmed at the growing demands upon
her income and had set herself to the task of
increasing it. She had learned stenography and through
the influence of her husband's friends got the position
of court stenographer at the county seat. There she
went by train each morning during the sessions of the
court, and when no court sat, spent her days working
among the rosebushes in her garden. She was a tall,
straight figure of a woman with a plain face and a
great mass of brown hair.

In the relationship between Seth Richmond and his
mother, there was a quality that even at eighteen had
begun to color all of his traffic with men. An almost
unhealthy respect for the youth kept the mother for the
most part silent in his presence. When she did speak
sharply to him he had only to look steadily into her
eyes to see dawning there the puzzled look he had
already noticed in the eyes of others when he looked at
them.

The truth was that the son thought with remarkable
clearness and the mother did not. She expected from all
people certain conventional reactions to life. A boy
was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and
looked at the floor. When you had scolded enough he
wept and all was forgiven. After the weeping and when
he had gone to bed, you crept into his room and kissed
him.

Virginia Richmond could not understand why her son did
not do these things. After the severest reprimand, he
did not tremble and look at the floor but instead
looked steadily at her, causing uneasy doubts to invade
her mind. As for creeping into his room--after Seth
had passed his fifteenth year, she would have been half
afraid to do anything of the kind.

Once when he was a boy of sixteen, Seth in company with
two other boys ran away from home. The three boys
climbed into the open door of an empty freight car and
rode some forty miles to a town where a fair was being
held. One of the boys had a bottle filled with a
combination of whiskey and blackberry wine, and the
three sat with legs dangling out of the car door
drinking from the bottle. Seth's two companions sang
and waved their hands to idlers about the stations of
the towns through which the train passed. They planned
raids upon the baskets of farmers who had come with
their families to the fair. "We will live like kings
and won't have to spend a penny to see the fair and
horse races," they declared boastfully.

After the disappearance of Seth, Virginia Richmond
walked up and down the floor of her home filled with
vague alarms. Although on the next day she discovered,
through an inquiry made by the town marshal, on what
adventure the boys had gone, she could not quiet
herself. All through the night she lay awake hearing
the clock tick and telling herself that Seth, like his
father, would come to a sudden and violent end. So
determined was she that the boy should this time feel
the weight of her wrath that, although she would not
allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she
got out a pencil and paper and wrote down a series of
sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon
him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going about
the garden and saying them aloud like an actor
memorizing his part.

And when, at the end of the week, Seth returned, a
little weary and with coal soot in his ears and about
his eyes, she again found herself unable to reprove
him. Walking into the house he hung his cap on a nail
by the kitchen door and stood looking steadily at her.
"I wanted to turn back within an hour after we had
started," he explained. "I didn't know what to do. I
knew you would be bothered, but I knew also that if I
didn't go on I would be ashamed of myself. I went
through with the thing for my own good. It was
uncomfortable, sleeping on wet straw, and two drunken
Negroes came and slept with us. When I stole a lunch
basket out of a farmer's wagon I couldn't help thinking
of his children going all day without food. I was sick
of the whole affair, but I was determined to stick it
out until the other boys were ready to come back."

"I'm glad you did stick it out," replied the mother,
half resentfully, and kissing him upon the forehead
pretended to busy herself with the work about the
house.

On a summer evening Seth Richmond went to the New
Willard House to visit his friend, George Willard. It
had rained during the afternoon, but as he walked
through Main Street, the sky had partially cleared and
a golden glow lit up the west. Going around a corner,
he turned in at the door of the hotel and began to
climb the stairway leading up to his friend's room. In
the hotel office the proprietor and two traveling men
were engaged in a discussion of politics.

On the stairway Seth stopped and listened to the voices
of the men below. They were excited and talked rapidly.
Tom Willard was berating the traveling men. "I am a
Democrat but your talk makes me sick," he said. "You
don't understand McKinley. McKinley and Mark Hanna are
friends. It is impossible perhaps for your mind to
grasp that. If anyone tells you that a friendship can
be deeper and bigger and more worth while than dollars
and cents, or even more worth while than state
politics, you snicker and laugh."

The landlord was interrupted by one of the guests, a
tall, grey-mustached man who worked for a wholesale
grocery house. "Do you think that I've lived in
Cleveland all these years without knowing Mark Hanna?"
he demanded. "Your talk is piffle. Hanna is after money
and nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has
McKinley bluffed and don't you forget it."

The young man on the stairs did not linger to hear the
rest of the discussion, but went on up the stairway and
into the little dark hall. Something in the voices of
the men talking in the hotel office started a chain of
thoughts in his mind. He was lonely and had begun to
think that loneliness was a part of his character,
something that would always stay with him. Stepping
into a side hall he stood by a window that looked into
an alleyway. At the back of his shop stood Abner Groff,
the town baker. His tiny bloodshot eyes looked up and
down the alleyway. In his shop someone called the
baker, who pretended not to hear. The baker had an
empty milk bottle in his hand and an angry sullen look
in his eyes.

In Winesburg, Seth Richmond was called the "deep one."
"He's like his father," men said as he went through the
streets. "He'll break out some of these days. You wait
and see."

The talk of the town and the respect with which men and
boys instinctively greeted him, as all men greet silent
people, had affected Seth Richmond's outlook on life
and on himself. He, like most boys, was deeper than
boys are given credit for being, but he was not what
the men of the town, and even his mother, thought him
to be. No great underlying purpose lay back of his
habitual silence, and he had no definite plan for his
life. When the boys with whom he associated were noisy
and quarrelsome, he stood quietly at one side. With
calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively figures
of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in
what was going on, and sometimes wondered if he would
ever be particularly interested in anything. Now, as he
stood in the half-darkness by the window watching the
baker, he wished that he himself might become
thoroughly stirred by something, even by the fits of
sullen anger for which Baker Groff was noted. "It would
be better for me if I could become excited and wrangle
about politics like windy old Tom Willard," he thought,
as he left the window and went again along the hallway
to the room occupied by his friend, George Willard.

George Willard was older than Seth Richmond, but in the
rather odd friendship between the two, it was he who
was forever courting and the younger boy who was being
courted. The paper on which George worked had one
policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as
many as possible of the inhabitants of the village.
Like an excited dog, George Willard ran here and there,
noting on his pad of paper who had gone on business to
the county seat or had returned from a visit to a
neighboring village. All day he wrote little facts upon
the pad. "A. P. Wringlet had received a shipment of
straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in
Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new
barn on his place on the Valley Road."

The idea that George Willard would some day become a
writer had given him a place of distinction in
Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked continually
of the matter, "It's the easiest of all lives to live,"
he declared, becoming excited and boastful. "Here and
there you go and there is no one to boss you. Though
you are in India or in the South Seas in a boat, you
have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my
name up and then see what fun I shall have."

In George Willard's room, which had a window looking
down into an alleyway and one that looked across
railroad tracks to Biff Carter's Lunch Room facing the
railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and
looked at the floor. George Willard, who had been
sitting for an hour idly playing with a lead pencil,
greeted him effusively. "I've been trying to write a
love story," he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting
a pipe he began walking up and down the room. "I know
what I'm going to do. I'm going to fall in love. I've
been sitting here and thinking it over and I'm going to
do it."

As though embarrassed by his declaration, George went
to a window and turning his back to his friend leaned
out. "I know who I'm going to fall in love with," he
said sharply. "It's Helen White. She is the only girl
in town with any 'get-up' to her."

Struck with a new idea, young Willard turned and walked
toward his visitor. "Look here," he said. "You know
Helen White better than I do. I want you to tell her
what I said. You just get to talking to her and say
that I'm in love with her. See what she says to that.
See how she takes it, and then you come and tell me."

Seth Richmond arose and went toward the door. The words
of his comrade irritated him unbearably. "Well,
good-bye," he said briefly.

George was amazed. Running forward he stood in the
darkness trying to look into Seth's face. "What's the
matter? What are you going to do? You stay here and
let's talk," he urged.

A wave of resentment directed against his friend, the
men of the town who were, he thought, perpetually
talking of nothing, and most of all, against his own
habit of silence, made Seth half desperate. "Aw, speak
to her yourself," he burst forth and then, going
quickly through the door, slammed it sharply in his
friend's face. "I'm going to find Helen White and talk
to her, but not about him," he muttered.

Seth went down the stairway and out at the front door
of the hotel muttering with wrath. Crossing a little
dusty street and climbing a low iron railing, he went
to sit upon the grass in the station yard. George
Willard he thought a profound fool, and he wished that
he had said so more vigorously. Although his
acquaintanceship with Helen White, the banker's
daughter, was outwardly but casual, she was often the
subject of his thoughts and he felt that she was
something private and personal to himself. "The busy
fool with his love stories," he muttered, staring back
over his shoulder at George Willard's room, "why does
he never tire of his eternal talking."

It was berry harvest time in Winesburg and upon the
station platform men and boys loaded the boxes of red,
fragrant berries into two express cars that stood upon
the siding. A June moon was in the sky, although in the
west a storm threatened, and no street lamps were
lighted. In the dim light the figures of the men
standing upon the express truck and pitching the boxes
in at the doors of the cars were but dimly discernible.
Upon the iron railing that protected the station lawn
sat other men. Pipes were lighted. Village jokes went
back and forth. Away in the distance a train whistled
and the men loading the boxes into the cars worked with
renewed activity.

Seth arose from his place on the grass and went
silently past the men perched upon the railing and into
Main Street. He had come to a resolution. "I'll get out
of here," he told himself. "What good am I here? I'm
going to some city and go to work. I'll tell mother
about it tomorrow."

Seth Richmond went slowly along Main Street, past
Wacker's Cigar Store and the Town Hall, and into
Buckeye Street. He was depressed by the thought that he
was not a part of the life in his own town, but the
depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of
himself as at fault. In the heavy shadows of a big tree
before Doctor Welling's house, he stopped and stood
watching half-witted Turk Smollet, who was pushing a
wheelbarrow in the road. The old man with his absurdly
boyish mind had a dozen long boards on the wheelbarrow,
and, as he hurried along the road, balanced the load
with extreme nicety. "Easy there, Turk! Steady now, old
boy!" the old man shouted to himself, and laughed so
that the load of boards rocked dangerously.

Seth knew Turk Smollet, the half dangerous old wood
chopper whose peculiarities added so much of color to
the life of the village. He knew that when Turk got
into Main Street he would become the center of a
whirlwind of cries and comments, that in truth the old
man was going far out of his way in order to pass
through Main Street and exhibit his skill in wheeling
the boards. "If George Willard were here, he'd have
something to say," thought Seth. "George belongs to
this town. He'd shout at Turk and Turk would shout at
him. They'd both be secretly pleased by what they had
said. It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not
make a fuss about it, but I'm going to get out of
here."

Seth stumbled forward through the half-darkness,
feeling himself an outcast in his own town. He began to
pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity of his
thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he
was simply old beyond his years and not at all a
subject for self-pity. "I'm made to go to work. I may
be able to make a place for myself by steady working,
and I might as well be at it," he decided.

Seth went to the house of Banker White and stood in the
darkness by the front door. On the door hung a heavy
brass knocker, an innovation introduced into the
village by Helen White's mother, who had also organized
a women's club for the study of poetry. Seth raised the
knocker and let it fall. Its heavy clatter sounded like
a report from distant guns. "How awkward and foolish I
am," he thought. "If Mrs. White comes to the door, I
won't know what to say."

It was Helen White who came to the door and found Seth
standing at the edge of the porch. Blushing with
pleasure, she stepped forward, closing the door softly.
"I'm going to get out of town. I don't know what I'll
do, but I'm going to get out of here and go to work. I
think I'll go to Columbus," he said. "Perhaps I'll get
into the State University down there. Anyway, I'm
going. I'll tell mother tonight." He hesitated and
looked doubtfully about. "Perhaps you wouldn't mind
coming to walk with me?"

Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the
trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the
moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man
with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying
forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and,
putting the ladder against the wooden lamp-post,
lighted the village lights so that their way was half
lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the
deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In
the tops of the trees the wind began to play,
disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about
calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of
the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the
gathering swarm of night flies.

Since Seth had been a boy in knee trousers there had
been a half expressed intimacy between him and the
maiden who now for the first time walked beside him.
For a time she had been beset with a madness for
writing notes which she addressed to Seth. He had found
them concealed in his books at school and one had been
given him by a child met in the street, while several
had been delivered through the village post office.

The notes had been written in a round, boyish hand and
had reflected a mind inflamed by novel reading. Seth
had not answered them, although he had been moved and
flattered by some of the sentences scrawled in pencil
upon the stationery of the banker's wife. Putting them
into the pocket of his coat, he went through the street
or stood by the fence in the school yard with something
burning at his side. He thought it fine that he should
be thus selected as the favorite of the richest and
most attractive girl in town.

Helen and Seth stopped by a fence near where a low dark
building faced the street. The building had once been a
factory for the making of barrel staves but was now
vacant. Across the street upon the porch of a house a
man and woman talked of their childhood, their voices
coming dearly across to the half-embarrassed youth and
maiden. There was the sound of scraping chairs and the
man and woman came down the gravel path to a wooden
gate. Standing outside the gate, the man leaned over
and kissed the woman. "For old times' sake," he said
and, turning, walked rapidly away along the sidewalk.

"That's Belle Turner," whispered Helen, and put her
hand boldly into Seth's hand. "I didn't know she had a
fellow. I thought she was too old for that." Seth
laughed uneasily. The hand of the girl was warm and a
strange, dizzy feeling crept over him. Into his mind
came a desire to tell her something he had been
determined not to tell. "George Willard's in love with
you," he said, and in spite of his agitation his voice
was low and quiet. "He's writing a story, and he wants
to be in love. He wants to know how it feels. He wanted
me to tell you and see what you said."

Again Helen and Seth walked in silence. They came to
the garden surrounding the old Richmond place and going
through a gap in the hedge sat on a wooden bench
beneath a bush.

On the street as he walked beside the girl new and
daring thoughts had come into Seth Richmond's mind. He
began to regret his decision to get out of town. "It
would be something new and altogether delightful to
remain and walk often through the streets with Helen
White," he thought. In imagination he saw himself
putting his arm about her waist and feeling her arms
clasped tightly about his neck. One of those odd
combinations of events and places made him connect the
idea of love-making with this girl and a spot he had
visited some days before. He had gone on an errand to
the house of a farmer who lived on a hillside beyond
the Fair Ground and had returned by a path through a
field. At the foot of the hill below the farmer's house
Seth had stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked
about him. A soft humming noise had greeted his ears.
For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home
of a swarm of bees.

And then, looking down, Seth had seen the bees
everywhere all about him in the long grass. He stood in
a mass of weeds that grew waist-high in the field that
ran away from the hillside. The weeds were abloom with
tiny purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering
fragrance. Upon the weeds the bees were gathered in
armies, singing as they worked.

Seth imagined himself lying on a summer evening, buried
deep among the weeds beneath the tree. Beside him, in
the scene built in his fancy, lay Helen White, her hand
lying in his hand. A peculiar reluctance kept him from
kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that
if he wished. Instead, he lay perfectly still, looking
at her and listening to the army of bees that sang the
sustained masterful song of labor above his head.

On the bench in the garden Seth stirred uneasily.
Releasing the hand of the girl, he thrust his hands
into his trouser pockets. A desire to impress the mind
of his companion with the importance of the resolution
he had made came over him and he nodded his head toward
the house. "Mother'll make a fuss, I suppose," he
whispered. "She hasn't thought at all about what I'm
going to do in life. She thinks I'm going to stay on
here forever just being a boy."

Seth's voice became charged with boyish earnestness.
"You see, I've got to strike out. I've got to get to
work. It's what I'm good for."

Helen White was impressed. She nodded her head and a
feeling of admiration swept over her. "This is as it
should be," she thought. "This boy is not a boy at all,
but a strong, purposeful man." Certain vague desires
that had been invading her body were swept away and she
sat up very straight on the bench. The thunder
continued to rumble and flashes of heat lightning lit
up the eastern sky. The garden that had been so
mysterious and vast, a place that with Seth beside her
might have become the background for strange and
wonderful adventures, now seemed no more than an
ordinary Winesburg back yard, quite definite and
limited in its outlines.

"What will you do up there?" she whispered.

Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see
her face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely
more sensible and straightforward than George Willard,
and was glad he had come away from his friend. A
feeling of impatience with the town that had been in
his mind returned, and he tried to tell her of it.
"Everyone talks and talks," he began. "I'm sick of it.
I'll do something, get into some kind of work where
talk don't count. Maybe I'll just be a mechanic in a
shop. I don't know. I guess I don't care much. I just
want to work and keep quiet. That's all I've got in my
mind."

Seth arose from the bench and put out his hand. He did
not want to bring the meeting to an end but could not
think of anything more to say. "It's the last time
we'll see each other," he whispered.

A wave of sentiment swept over Helen. Putting her hand
upon Seth's shoulder, she started to draw his face down
toward her own upturned face. The act was one of pure
affection and cutting regret that some vague adventure
that had been present in the spirit of the night would
now never be realized. "I think I'd better be going
along," she said, letting her hand fall heavily to her
side. A thought came to her. "Don't you go with me; I
want to be alone," she said. "You go and talk with your
mother. You'd better do that now."

Seth hesitated and, as he stood waiting, the girl
turned and ran away through the hedge. A desire to run
after her came to him, but he only stood staring,
perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been
perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of the town
out of which she had come. Walking slowly toward the
house, he stopped in the shadow of a large tree and
looked at his mother sitting by a lighted window busily
sewing. The feeling of loneliness that had visited him
earlier in the evening returned and colored his
thoughts of the adventure through which he had just
passed. "Huh!" he exclaimed, turning and staring in the
direction taken by Helen White. "That's how things'll
turn out. She'll be like the rest. I suppose she'll
begin now to look at me in a funny way." He looked at
the ground and pondered this thought. "She'll be
embarrassed and feel strange when I'm around," he
whispered to himself. "That's how it'll be. That's how
everything'll turn out. When it comes to loving
someone, it won't never be me. It'll be someone
else--some fool--someone who talks a lot--someone like
that George Willard."

 Seth Richmond is a young boy who lives in Winesburg. His father, who died in a shootout with an editor of a magazine, a highly admired man in his times. His mother, Virginia had raised Seth up single handedly. However, she can never quite understand her son, who is too serious and quiet a boy to be treated in a normal way. Virginia finds it difficult to even reprimand her son, since he has the habit of looking straight into her eye, thus causing uneasy doubts to enter her mind. Seth's only friend is George Willard, with whom he has a somewhat comfortable relationship but one day, when George discloses to him his plan to fall in love with Helen White, Seth is dismayed and irked, since he himself has personal thoughts about her. As retaliation, Seth goes over to her house and invites her for a walk. Helen too has a soft corner for Seth and so agrees to walk with Seth. However Seth is so agitated that he inadvertently reveals George's message of love to Helen. He then speaks out his plans of going to work and leaving his hometown. When he claims that this meeting would be their last one, Helen is swept away by sentiments and kisses him. After she leaves, Seth is filled with a sense of loneliness and feels that only, men like George can win girls for themselves.

