e young man grew
afraid and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of
a building and laughed so heartily that another man
stopped and laughed with her. The two went away
together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his
room trembling and vexed.

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York
faced Washington Square and was long and narrow like a
hallway. It is important to get that fixed in your
mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room
almost more than it is the story of a man.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch's
friends. There was nothing particularly striking about
them except that they were artists of the kind that
talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout
all of the known history of the world they have
gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are
passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it.
They think it matters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and
talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm near
Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a corner and for the
most part said nothing. How his big blue childlike eyes
stared about! On the walls were pictures he had made,
crude things, half finished. His friends talked of
these. Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and
talked with their heads rocking from side to side.
Words were said about line and values and composition,
lots of words, such as are always being said.

Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how. He was
too excited to talk coherently. When he tried he
sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded strange
and squeaky to him. That made him stop talking. He knew
what he wanted to say, but he knew also that he could
never by any possibility say it. When a picture he had
painted was under discussion, he wanted to burst out
with something like this: "You don't get the point," he
wanted to explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist
of the things you see and say words about. There is
something else, something you don't see at all,
something you aren't intended to see. Look at this one
over here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that you
might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning of
everything. There is a clump of elders there such as
used to grow beside the road before our house back in
Winesburg, Ohio, a