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 d—s 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 p—try. 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
