Winesburg, Ohio | Page 9

but that had produced only a dense crop of
yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which
went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The
berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A
boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag
after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The
feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across
the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish
voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling into
your eyes," commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose
ner- vous little hands fiddled about the bare white fore- head as though
arranging a mass of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of
doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the
town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of
Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son
of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had
formed some- thing like a friendship. George Willard was the re- porter
on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out
along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's house. Now as the old man
walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about,
he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening
with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he
went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail
fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he
stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the

road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the
porch on his own house.
In the presence of George Willard, Wing Bid- dlebaum, who for twenty
years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his
shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look
at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the
light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rick- ety
front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been
low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened.
With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook by the
fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into
words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long
years of silence.
Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive
fingers, forever active, for- ever striving to conceal themselves in his
pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of
his machinery of expression.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless
activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had
given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it.
The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away
and looked with amaze- ment at the quiet inexpressive hands of other
men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy
teams on country roads.
When he talked to George Willard, Wing Bid- dlebaum closed his fists
and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action
made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the
two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board
of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with re- newed
ease.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself.
Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities
in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had

attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing
Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of
strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the
source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an al- ready
grotesque and elusive individuality. Wines- burg was proud of the
hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of
Banker White's new stone house and Wesley Moyer's bay stallion,
Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in
Cleveland.
As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the
hands. At times an almost over- whelming curiosity