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I tell you there is something rotten about them. I was married, sure. My wife was dead before she married me, she was a foul thing come out of a woman more foul. She was a thing sent to make life unbearable to me. I was a fool, do you

man became purple with rage. “Don’t have fool notions in your head,” he commanded. “My wife, she is dead; yes, surely. I tell you, all women are dead, my mother, your mother, that tall dark woman who works in the millinery store and with whom I saw you walking about yesterday – all of them, they are all dead

‘No it aint all right,’ the editor said. ‘But it don’t look like I can help myself. By Jupiter,’ he said ‘even if I could help myself, the novelty will be almost worth it. It will be the first time in my life I ever paid money for copy I had already promised beforehand I won’t print.’

‘Have already promised beforehand you will not print,’ Stevens said. And during the remainder of that hot and now windless afternoon, while officials from the city hall, and justices of the peace and bailiffs come fifteen and twenty miles from.’

the ends of the country, mounted the stairs to the empty office and called his name and cooled their heels a while and then went away and returned and sat again, fuming, Stevens passed from store to store and office to office about the square-merchant and clerk, proprietor and employee, doctor, dentist, lawyer, and barber – with his set and rapid speech: ‘It’s to bring a dead nigger home. It’s for Miss Worsham. Never mind about a paper to sign: just give me a dollar. Or half a dollar then. Or a quarter then

Wash Williams spat forth a succession of vile oaths. “Yes, she is dead,” he agreed. “She is dead as all women are dead. She is a living-dead thing, walking in the sight of men and making the earth foul by her presence.” Staring into the boy’s eyes, the

see, as you are now, and so I married this woman. I would like to see men a little begin to understand women. They are sent to prevent men making the world worth while. It is a trick in Nature. Ugh! They are creeping, crawling, squirming things, they with their soft hands and blue eyes

Wash Williams once had a wife. When he was still a young man he married a woman at Dayton, Ohio. The woman was tall and slender and had blue eyes and yellow hair. Wash was himself a comely youth. He loved the woman with

Negroes, men and women too, watching quietly, the Negro undertaker’s men lifted the grey-and-silver casket from the train and carried it to the hearse and snatched the wreaths and floral symbols of man’s ultimate and inevitable end briskly out and slid the casket in and flung the flowers back and clapped-to the door

He once told the story to George Willard and the telling of the tale came about in this way:

George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer of women’s hats who worked in a millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh.

The young man was not in love with the woman, who, in fact, had a suitor who worked as bartender in Ed Griffith’s saloon, but as they walked about under the trees they occasionally embraced. The night and their own thoughts had aroused something in them.

And on the next bright hot day but one of the hearse and the two cars were waiting when the southbound train came in. There were more than a dozen cars, but it was not until the train came in that Stevens and the editor began to notice the number of people, Negroes and whites both. Then, with the idle white men and youths and small boys and probably half a hundred

a love as absorbing as the hatred he later felt for all women.

In all of Winesburg there was but one person who knew the story of the thing that had made ugly the person and the character of Wash Williams

The young man looked at the hideous, leering face staring about the hotel dining room and was consumed with curiosity. Something he saw lurking in the staring eyes told him that the man who had nothing to say to others

it slowed into the square, crossing it, circling the Confederate monument and the courthouse while the merchants and clerks and barbers and professional men who had given Stevens the dollars and half-dollars and quarters and the ones who had not, watched quietly from doors and upstairs windows, swinging then into the street which at the edge of town would become the country road leading to the destination seventeen miles away, already picking up speed again and followed still by the two cars

Then, with Miss Worsham and the old Negress in Stevens’s car with the driver he had hired and himself and the editor in the editor’s, they followed the hearse as it swung into the long hill up from the station, going fast in a whining lower gear until it reached the crest, going pretty fast still but with an unctuous, an almost bishoplike purr until

. the railroad they went and sat on a pile of decaying railroad ties beside the tracks. It was then that the operator told the young reporter his story of hate.

Perhaps a dozen times George Willard and the strange, shapeless man who lived at his father’s hotel had been on the point of talking

As they were returning to Main Street they passed the little lawn beside the railroad station and saw Wash Williams apparently asleep on the grass beneath a tree. On the next evening the operator and George Willard walked out together. Down

had nevertheless something to say to him. On the pile of railroad ties on the summer evening, he waited expectantly. When the operator remained silent and seemed to have changed his mind about talking, he tried to make conversation

When Wash walked through the streets such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him. The superintendent who had supervision over the telegraph operators on the railroad that went through Winesburg felt that way. He

Stevens said. Yes, he thought. It doesn’t matter to her now. Since it had to be and she couldn’t stop it, and now that it’s all over and done and finished, she doesn’t care how he died. She just wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car. ‘Come on’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to town. I haven’t seen my desk in two days.’

He pitied them. “Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or another?” he asked.

In Winesburg no attention was paid to Wash Williams and his hatred to his fellows. Once Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, complained to the

had put Wash into the obscure office at Winesburg to avoid discharging him, and he meant to keep him there. When he received the letter of complaint from the banker’s wife, he tore it up and laughed unpleasantly. For some reason he thought of his own wife as he tore up the letter

And by Jupiter, if I had and if she had known what we know even, I believe she would have said yes. But I didn’t say it. I just said, “Why, you couldn’t read it, Aunty.” And she said, “Miss Belle will show me where to look and I can look at hit. You put hit in de paper. All of hit.”’

‘Oh,’

telegraph company, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and smelled abominably, but nothing came of her complaint. Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent

Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed Griffith’s saloon, and after drinking unbelievable quantities of beer staggered off to his room in the New Willard House and to his bed for the night.

Wash

and in spite of his degradement to the obscure office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.

Wash Williams did not associate with the men of the town in which he lived. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with them,” he said, looking with bleary eyes at the men who walked along the station platform past the telegraph office

I go too fast. Not everything about Wash was unclean. He took care of his hands. His fingers were fat, but there was something sensitive and shapely in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument in the telegraph office. In his youth Wash Williams had been called the best telegraph operator in the state,

human coherence and solidity smouldered.

‘He’ll be home the day after tomorrow, Aunt Mollie,’ he said. The old Negress didn’t even look at him; she never had looked at him.

‘He dead,’ she said. ‘Pharaoh got him.’

‘Oh yes, Lord,’ Worsham said. ‘Pharaoh got him.’

‘Done sold my Benjamin,’ the old Negress said. ‘Sold him in Egypt.’ She began to sway faintly back and forth in the chair

She held a reed-stemmed clay pipe but she was not smoking it, the ash dead and white in the stained bowl; and actually looking at her for the first time, Stevens thought: Good lord, she’s not as big as a ten-year-old child. Then he sat too, so that the four of them – himself, Miss Worsham, the old Negress and her brother – made a circle about the brick hearth on which the ancient symbol of

Williams was a man of courage. A thing had happened to him that made him hate life, and he hated it whole-heartedly, with the abandon of a poet. First of all, he hated women. “Bitches,” he called them. His feeling toward men was somewhat different

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true

like the old Wash sitting on the grass in the station yard on a summer evening after he has closed his office for the night.”

Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled

Had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village of Winesburg, Ohio, there would have been for you no mystery in regard to the beast in his cage. “It is like Wash Williams,” you would have said. “As he sits in the corner there, the beast is exactly

spare bedroom with its unmistakable faint odour of old maidens. They were all there, as Worsham had said – his wife, a tremendous light-coloured woman in a bright turban leaning in the door, Miss Worsham erect again on a hard straight chair, the old Negress sitting in the only rocking-chair beside the hearth on which even tonight a few ashes smouldered faintly

So Stevens crossed the lamplit hall (he knew that the entire house was still lighted with oil lamps and there was no running water in it) and preceded the Negro up the clean, paintless stairs beside the faded wall-paper, and followed the old Negro along the hall and into the clean,

monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint was resembles

People moved about laughing and talking. The young reporter felt ill and weak. In imagination, he also became old and shapeless. “I didn’t get her mother killed,” said Wash Williams,

staring up and down the street. “I struck her once with a chair and then the neighbours came in and took it away. She screamed so loud you see. I won’t ever have a chance to kill her now. She died of a fever a month after that happened.”

First I heard voices at the door that led into a little hallway and then it opened softly. The girl was ashamed and stood perfectly still staring at the floor. The mother didn’t come into the room. When she had pushed

Only, how under the sun she could have got to town from those seventeen miles. She may even have walked. ‘So it seems I didn’t mean what I said I hoped,’ he said aloud, mounting the outside stairs again, out of the hazy and now windless sunglare, and entered his office. He stopped. Then he said,

‘Good morning, Miss Worsham.

Five minutes later Stevens was crossing again the empty square in which noon’s hot suspension was that much nearer. He had thought that he was going home to his boarding-house for the noon meal, but he found that he was not. ‘Besides, I didn’t lock my office door,’ he thought.

the girl in through the door she stood in the hallway waiting, hoping we would – well, you see – waiting.”

George Willard and the telegraph operator came into the main street of Winesburg. The lights from the store windows lay bright and shining on the sidewalks

“Her mother sent for me,” he said. “She wrote me a letter and asked me to come to their house at Dayton. When I got there it was evening about this time.”

Wash Williams’ voice rose to half scream. “I sat in the parlor of that house two hours. Her

‘I came about Mollie,’ she said. ‘Mollie Beauchamp. She said that you-‘

He told her while she watched him, erect on the hard chair where the old Negress had sat, the rusty umbrella leaning against her knee. On her lap, beneath her folded hands, lay an old-fashioned beaded reticule almost as big as a suitcase. ‘He is to be executed tonight.’

He had known her too all his life. She lived alone in the decaying house her father had left her, where she gave lessons in china-painting and, with the help of Hamp Worsham, descendant of one of her father’s slaves, and his wife, raised chickens and vegetables for market.

mother took me in there and left me. Their house was stylish. They were what is called respectable people. There were plush chairs and a couch in the room. I was trembling all over. I hated the men I thought had wronged her

I was sick of being alone and wanted her back. The longer I waited the more raw and tender I became. I thought that if she came in and just touched me with her hand I would perhaps faint away. I ached to forgive and forget.”

Wash Williams stopped

and stood staring at George Willard. The boy’s body shook as from a chill. Again the man’s voice became soft and low. “She came into the room naked,” he went on. “Her mother did that. While I sat there she was taking the girl’s clothes off, perhaps coaxing her to do it..

I just sent her home to her mother and said nothing. There was nothing to say. I had four hundred dollars in the bank and I gave her that. I didn’t ask her reasons. I didn’t say anything. When she had gone I cried like a silly boy. Pretty soon I had a chance

to sell the house and I sent that money to her.”

Wash Williams and George Willard arose from the pile of railroad ties and walked along the tracks towards town. The operator finished his tale quickly, breathlessly

For a moment there was a catch in the voice of the man talking in the darkness. “I loved her,” he said. “I don’t claim not to be a fool. I love her yet . There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along the black ground to her feet and groveled before her. I kissed

her shoes and the ankles above her shoes. When the hem of her garment touched my face I trembled. When after two years of that life I found she had managed to acquire three other lovers who came regularly to our house when I was away at work, I didn’t want to touch them or her

‘I telephoned,’ Stevens said. ‘I talked to the Warden at Joliet, and to the District Attorney in Chicago. He had a fair trial, a good lawyer – of that sort. He had money. He was in a business called numbers, that people like him make money in.’ She watched him, erect and motionless. ‘He is a murderer, Miss Worsham.

He shot that policeman in the back. A bad son of a bad father. He admitted, confessed it afterward.’

‘I know,’ she said. Then he realised that she was not looking at him, not seeing him at least. ‘It’s terrible.’

‘So is murder terrible,’ Stevens said. ‘It’s better this way.’ Then she was looking at him again

‘A box?’ Again she was looking at him with that expression curious and detached, as though he were a child. ‘He is her grandson, Mr. Stevens. When she took him to raise, she gave him my father’s name – Samuel Worsham. Not just a box, Mr. Stevens.

of the worms I uncovered. Late in April came the planting. In the little paths among the seed beds she stood holding a paper bag in her hand. The bag was filled with seeds. A few at a time she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the warm, soft ground.”

On his marriage day, because of his ability, he was promoted to a position as dispatcher at an increased salary and sent to an office at Columbus, Ohio. There he settled down with his young wife and began buying a house on the installment plan.

The young telegraph operator was madly in love. With a kind of religious fervor he had managed to go through the pitfalls of his youth and to remain virginal until after his marriage. He made George Willard a picture of his life in the house of Columbus, Ohio, with the young wife

“In the garden back to our house we planted vegetables,” he said, “You know, pears and corn and such things. We went to Columbus in early March and as soon as the days became long I went to work in the garden. With a spade I turned up the black ground while she ran about laughing and pretending to be afraid

I understand that can be done by paying so much a month.’

‘Not just a box,’ Stevens said. He said it in exactly the same tone in which he had said He must come home. ‘Mr. Edmonds will want to help, I know. And I understand that old Luke Beauchamp had some money in the bank. And if you will permit me-’

I just sent her home to her mother and said nothing. There was nothing to say. I had four hundred dollars in the bank and I gave her that. I didn’t ask her reasons. I didn’t say anything. When she had gone I cried like a silly boy. Pretty soon I had a chance

to sell the house and I sent that money to her.”

Wash Williams and George Willard arose from the pile of railroad ties and walked along the tracks towards town. The operator finished his tale quickly, breathlessly

On the same hot, bright July morning the same hot bright wind which shook the mulberry leaves just outside Gavin Stevens’s window blew into the office too, contriving a semblance of coolness from what was merely motion. It fluttered among the country – attorney business on the desk and blue in the wild shock

“What happened to me may next happen to you. I want to put you on your guard. Already you may be having dreams in your head. I want to destroy them.”

Wash Williams began telling the story of his married life with the tall blond girl with blue eyes whom he had met when he was a young operator at Dayton, Ohio

The telegraph operator of Winesburg, sitting in the darkness on the railroad ties, had become a poet. Hatred had raised him to that elevation. “It is because I saw you kissing the lips of that Belle Carpenter that I tell you My story,” he said

of prematurely white hair of the man who set behind it – a thin, intelligent, unstable face, a rumpled linen suit from whose lapel a Phi Beta Kappa key dangled on a watch-chain – Gavin Stevens, Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard, Ph.D., Heidelberg, whose office was his hobby, although it made his living for him, and whose serious vocation was a twenty-two-year-old unfinished translation of the Old Testament back into classic Greek

The papers of that business had passed across the desk before going to the District Attorney five or six years ago – Butch Beauchamp, as the youth had been known during the single year he had spent in and out of the city jail: the old Negress’s daughter child,

orphaned of his mother at birth and deserted by his father, whom the grandmother had taken and raised, or tried to. Because at nineteen he had quit the country and come to town and spent a year in and out of jail for gambling and fighting, to come at last under serious indictment for breaking and entering a store

If you do not know Bogle’s Chop house and Family Restaurant it is your loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to whom

on and he leaned forward trying to see the face of the man who talked.When, in the gathering darkness, he could no longer see the purple, bloated face and the burning eyes, a curious fancy came to him. Wash Williams talked in low even tones that made his words seem the more terrible

The sight of a woman sickens me. Why I don’t kill every woman I see I don’t know.”

Half frightened and yet fascinated by the light burning in the eyes of the hideous old man, George Willard listened, afire with curiosity. Darkness came

waiters’ checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle’s, for there you get your money’s worth – in quantity, at least.

Bogle’s is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard of Brown- Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue

There are two rows of tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a castor-stand, containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic

check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you would better not venture. You are not Bogle’s friend; you are a fed, transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing of Gabriel’s dinner horn

And that’s who I am to find, save, Stevens thought. Because he did not for a moment doubt the old Negress’s instinct. If she had also been able to divine where the boy was and what his trouble was, he would not have been surprised, and it was only later that he

thought to be surprised at how quickly he did find where the boy was and what was wrong.

His first thought was to telephone Carothers Edmonds, on whose farm the old Negress’s husband had been a tenant for years. But then, according to her, Edmonds had already refused to have anything to do with it.

Also upon each table stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made ‘from the recipe of a nobleman in India.’

At the cashier’s desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your

. dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets

He rose and took his old fine worn panama and descended the outside stairs and crossed the empty square in the hot suspension of noon’s beginning, to the office of the county newspaper. The editor was in – an older man but with hair less white than Stevens’s, in a black string tie and an old-fashioned

Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she donned a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and joined the Easter parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so yourself

The Voice at Bogle’s was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the waitresses concerning food

and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was no more necessity for the other name at Bogle’s than there was for finger-bowls.

The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda? Please listen this name – Tildy – Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and too anxious to please to please

So take your change and go – to the devil if you like. There you have Bogle’s sentiments.

The needs of Bogle’s customers were supplied by two waitresses and a Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen

She was tall, beautiful, lively, gracious

boiled shirt and tremendously fat.

‘An old nigger woman named Mollie Beauchamp,’ Stevens said. ‘She and her husband live on the Edmond’s place. It’s her grandson. You remember him – Butch Beauchamp, about five or six years ago, who spent a year in town, mostly in jail, until they finally caught him breaking into Rouncewell’s store one night

The customers at Bogle’s were her slaves. Six tables full she could wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure. They who had finished eat ing ate more that they might continue in the light of

her smiles. Every man there – and they were mostly men – tried to make his impression upon her.

Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once. And every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a scatter-gun, in as many hearts

And all this while she would be performing astounding feats with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts, ham-and, sausage-and-the-wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron and

in the pan and straight up and on the side. With all this feasting and flirting and merry exchange of wit Bogle’s came mighty being a salon, with Aileen for its Madame Recamier

‘Fresh guy,’ explained Aileen, ‘last night as I was going home at Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I turned him down, cold, and he made a sneak, but followed me down to Eighteenth, and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good one, side of the face

Than he give me that eye. Does it look real awful, Til? I should hate that Mr. Nicholson should see it when he comes in for his tea and toast at ten.’

Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the twenty-four. What bliss it must have been to have had a man follow one and black one’s eye for love!