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In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the freckled skin, the bag-o’-meal figure had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her with his eyes when she went

were at their banquet boards. Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered lawn – the robe of Venus herself

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week someone took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman

to and fro in the restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of wit. None of them loudly ‘jollied’ her of mornings as they did Aileen, accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the company of envied swains.

Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine who must be coy when the Romans

whom she and Tildy had privately christened ‘The Hog’presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as ‘Freshy’, who rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth

The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and

otherwise-flavoured accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that Aileen’s pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and eggs.

And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive the flattery and the hommage

No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or invited her upon a voyage to mysterious distant ‘Parsifal’.

Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at her tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare; and then raised their voices in honeyed and

hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic

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

But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out – out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt noses hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red-

wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my pology, and beleive that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known that I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.’

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.’

hair bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must for evermore remain the Sleeping Beauty

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

‘Miss Tildy,’ said he, ‘I want to apologize for what I done the other evening’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways – some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in the bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled

For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons, and arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders

Mr. Seeders walked back to were they stood.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon upon her heart. A red hair – bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue Badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart

At four o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies.

would rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous.

Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to Aileen; and she did not want to overshadow her friend

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

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

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

‘Miss Tildy,’ said he, ‘I want to apologize for what I done the other evening’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I

wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my pology, and beleive that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known that I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.’

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.’

been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.

He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson.

‘ I be staing with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.’

‘All right,’ Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negrees before. But even if he had, he still would not have

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways – some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in the bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled

The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and

hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic

The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had been publicly kissed in the restaurant.

Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she went and stood at Bogle’s desk.

wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my pology, and beleive that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known that I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.’

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

‘Miss Tildy,’ said he, ‘I want to apologize for what I done the other evening’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I

Her eyes were shining; she tried not to let her words sound proud and boastful.

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day’, she said. ‘He hugged me around the waist and kissed me’.

That so?’ said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. ‘After this week you get a dollar a week more.’

Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine who must be coy when the Romans

were at their banquet boards. Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered lawn – the robe of Venus herself

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week someone took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman

whom she and Tildy had privately christened ‘The Hog’presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as ‘Freshy’, who rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth

When Mr. Seeders had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy’s waist, kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street, snapped his fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself to play pennies in the slot machines at

the Amusement Arcade.

For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen shaking at her an arch fore finger, and saying:

‘Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain’t you getting to be awful, Miss Slyboots! First thing I know you’ll be stealing some of my fellows. I must keep an eye on you, my lady.’

Among the customers at Bogle’s was a young man named Seeders, who worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair, and appeared

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!

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

‘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.

to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too different to aspire Aileen’s notice; so he usually sat at one of Tildy’s tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled weakfish.

One day when Mr. Seeders came in to dinner he had been drinking beer. There were only two or three customers in the restaurant

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

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

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

Then he sat perfectly still while the hot wind blew in his wild white mane. Now he comprehended what the old Negress had meant. He remembered now that it was Edmonds who had actually sent the boy to Jefferson in the first place:

he had caught the boy breaking into his commissary store and had ordered him off the place and had forbidden him ever to return. And that’s who I am to find, save, Stevens thought.. Because he did not for a moment doubt the old Negress’s instinct And not the sheriff, the police, he thought. Something broader, quicker in scope

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

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

Caught red-handed, whereupon he had struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who surprised him and then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with a pistol-butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like

furious laughter through the blood. Then two nights later he broke out of jail and was seen no more – a youth not yet twenty-one, with something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and who was now in the State Penitentiary for mans laughter – some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad.

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

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

‘ I be staing with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.’

‘All right,’ Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negrees before. But even if he had, he still would not have

been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.

He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson.

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

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

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.”

Only his caller seemed impervious to it, though by appearance she should have owned in that breeze no more of weight and solidity than the intact ash of a scrap of burned paper – a little old negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white

headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child.

‘Beauchamp?’ Stevens said. ‘You live on Mr Carothers Edmonds’s place.’

‘I done left,’ she said. ‘I come to find my boy.’ Then, sitting on the hard chair opposite him and without moving, she began to chant. ‘Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him-’

“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

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

“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

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.”

‘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.

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-’

‘That will not be necessary,’ she said. He watched her open the reticule; he watched her count on to the desk twenty-five dollars in frayed bills and coins ranging down to nickels and dimes and pennies. ‘That will take care of the immediate expense. I will tell her – you are sure there is no hope?’

‘I am sure. He will die tonight.’

‘I will tell her this afternoon that he is dead then.’

‘Would you like for me to tell her?’

‘I will tell her,’ she said.

‘Would you like for me to come out and see her, then, talk to her?’

‘It would be kind of you.’ Then she was gone, erect her feet crisp and light, almost brisk on the stairs, ceasing. He telephoned again, to the Illinois warden, then to an undertaker in Joliet. Then once more he crossed the hot, empty square. He had only to wait a short while for the editor to return from dinner

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

‘Yes,’ Stevens said. ‘I have already talked with Mr. Wilmoth at the paper. He had agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper… Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr. Edmonds, and I will telephone him; and even if the

other darkies should hear about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t. And then maybe in about two or three month I could go out there and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North…’ This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased

‘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

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.

He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning:

Mississippi negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp-

Well, he’s in worth trouble than that now. I don’t doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too-’

‘Wait,’ the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk.

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 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

‘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.’

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

‘We’re bringing him home,’ he said. ‘Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost-’

‘Wait’, the editor said. ‘What others?’

‘I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him;

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.’

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

I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay-’

‘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.

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-’

‘Wait,’ the editor said. ‘Wait.’

‘And he will come in on Number Four the day after tomorrow and we will meet it, Miss Worsham and his grandmother, the old nigger, in my car and you and me in yours. Miss Worsham and the old woman will take him back home, back where he was born. Or where the old woman raised him. Or where she tried to. And the hearse out there

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.’

‘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

will be fifteen more, not counting the flowers-’

‘Flowers?’ the editor cried.

‘Flowers,’ Stevens said. ‘Call the whole thing two hundred and twenty-five. And it will probably be mostly you and me. All right?’

‘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.’

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

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

And that night after supper he walked through the breathless and star-filled darkness to Miss Worsham’s house on the edge of town and knocked on the paintless front door. Hamp Worsham admitted him – an old man, belly-bloated from the vegetables on which he and

his wife and Miss Worsham all three mostly lived, with blurred old eyes and a fridge of white hair about the head and face of a Roman general.

‘She expecting you,’ he said. ‘She say to kindly step up to the chamber.’

‘Is that where Aunt Mollie is?’ Stevens said.

‘We all dar,’ Worsham said.

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,

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.

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

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.

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

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

Oh yes, Lord,’ Worsham said.

‘Hush,’ Miss Worsham said. ‘Hush, Hamp.’

‘I telephoned Mr. Edmonds,’ Stevens said. ‘He will have everything ready when you get there.’

‘Roth Edmonds sold him,’ the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. ‘Sold my Benjamin.’

‘Hush,’ Miss Worsham said. ‘Hush, Mollie. Hush now.’

‘No,’ Stevens said. ‘No he didn’t, Aunt Mollie. It wasn’t Mr. Edmonds. Mr Edmonds didn’t-’ But she can’t hear me, he thought. She was not even looking at him. She never had looked at him.

‘Sold my Benjamin,’ she said. ‘Sold him in Egypt.’

‘Sold him in Egypt,’ Worsham said.

‘Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin.’

‘Sold him to Pharaoh.’

‘Sold him to Pharaoh and now he dead.’

‘I’ll better go,’ Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but he did not wait for her to precede him.

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,’

‘Sold him in Egypt. Oh yes, Lord.’

He descended the stairs almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell and feel it: the breathing and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait, turning at the door, watching Miss Worsham as she followed him to the door – the high, white, erect, old-time head approaching through the old-time lamplight.

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

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

He went down the hall fast, almost running; he did not even know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. Then there will be air, space breath. Then he could hear her behind him – the crisp, light, brisk yet unhurried feet as he had heard them descending the stairs from his office, and beyond them the voices:

‘Sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt.’

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 descended the stairs almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell and feel it: the breathing and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait, turning at the door, watching Miss Worsham as she followed him to the door – the high,

white, erect, old-time head approaching through the old-time lamplight. Now he could hear the third voice, which would be that of Hamp’s wife – a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister

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, 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,

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

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

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.

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

‘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

I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him; I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay-’

‘Wait,’ the editor said. ‘Wait.’

‘And he will come in on Number Four the day after tomorrow and we will meet it, Miss Worsham and his grandmother, the old nigger, in my car and you and me in yours. Miss Worsham and the old woman will take him back home, back where he was born. Or where the old woman raised him. Or where she tried to. And the hearse out there will be fifteen more, not counting the flowers-’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,’

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.’

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,’

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.’

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

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

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

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

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,

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

‘We’re bringing him home,’ he said. ‘Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost-’

‘Wait’, the editor said. ‘What others?’

‘I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him;

I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay-’

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

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

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.

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-’

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.

‘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.

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

‘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.

I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay-’

‘We’re bringing him home,’ he said. ‘Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost-’

‘Wait’, the editor said. ‘What others?’

‘I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him;

‘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.

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

Well, he’s in worth trouble than that now. I don’t doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too-’

‘Wait,’ the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk.

“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

He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning:

Mississippi negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp-

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

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

‘Yes,’ Stevens said. ‘I have already talked with Mr. Wilmoth at the paper. He had agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper… Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr. Edmonds, and I will telephone him; and even if the

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

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,

other darkies should hear about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t. And then maybe in about two or three month I could go out there and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North…’ This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased

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

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

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

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

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.”

“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

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

Only his caller seemed impervious to it, though by appearance she should have owned in that breeze no more of weight and solidity than the intact ash of a scrap of burned paper – a little old negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white

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

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

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

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

headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child.

‘Beauchamp?’ Stevens said. ‘You live on Mr Carothers Edmonds’s place.’

‘I done left,’ she said. ‘I come to find my boy.’ Then, sitting on the hard chair opposite him and without moving, she began to chant. ‘Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him-’

‘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!

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

‘ I be staing with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.’

‘All right,’ Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negrees before. But even if he had, he still would not have

been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.

He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson.

Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine who must be coy when the Romans

to and fro in the restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of wit. None of them loudly ‘jollied’ her of mornings as they did Aileen, accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the company of envied swains.

Caught red-handed, whereupon he had struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who surprised him and then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with a pistol-butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like

furious laughter through the blood. Then two nights later he broke out of jail and was seen no more – a youth not yet twenty-one, with something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and who was now in the State Penitentiary for mans laughter – some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad.

In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the freckled skin, the bag-o’-meal figure had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her with his eyes when she went

were at their banquet boards. Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered lawn – the robe of Venus herself

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

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

otherwise-flavoured accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that Aileen’s pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and eggs.

And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive the flattery and the hommage

No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or invited her upon a voyage to mysterious distant ‘Parsifal’.

Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at her tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare; and then raised their voices in honeyed and

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

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.’

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

But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out – out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt noses hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red-

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways – some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in the bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled

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

hair bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must for evermore remain the Sleeping Beauty

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week someone took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman

whom she and Tildy had privately christened ‘The Hog’presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as ‘Freshy’, who rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth

For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons, and arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders

Mr. Seeders walked back to were they stood.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon upon her heart. A red hair – bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue Badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart

At four o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies.

would rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous.

Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to Aileen; and she did not want to overshadow her friend

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

‘Miss Tildy,’ said he, ‘I want to apologize for what I done the other evening’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I

hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic

The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways – some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in the bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.’

wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my pology, and beleive that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known that I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.’

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.’

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways – some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in the bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled

The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and

hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic

The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had been publicly kissed in the restaurant.

Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she went and stood at Bogle’s desk.

Her eyes were shining; she tried not to let her words sound proud and boastful.

‘A gentleman insulted me to-day’, she said. ‘He hugged me around the waist and kissed me’.

That so?’ said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. ‘After this week you get a dollar a week more.’

At four o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies.

the Amusement Arcade.

For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen shaking at her an arch fore finger, and saying:

‘Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain’t you getting to be awful, Miss Slyboots! First thing I know you’ll be stealing some of my fellows. I must keep an eye on you, my lady.’

When Mr. Seeders had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy’s waist, kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street, snapped his fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself to play pennies in the slot machines at

whom she and Tildy had privately christened ‘The Hog’presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as ‘Freshy’, who rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week someone took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman

Mr. Seeders walked back to were they stood.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon upon her heart. A red hair – bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue Badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart

‘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!

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

But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out – out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt noses hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red-

hair bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must for evermore remain the Sleeping Beauty

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

hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic

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

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 blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and

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

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

furious laughter through the blood. Then two nights later he broke out of jail and was seen no more – a youth not yet twenty-one, with something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and who was now in the State Penitentiary for mans laughter – some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad.

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week someone took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman

whom she and Tildy had privately christened ‘The Hog’presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as ‘Freshy’, who rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth

Caught red-handed, whereupon he had struck with a piece of iron pipe at the officer who surprised him and then lay on the ground where the officer had felled him with a pistol-butt, cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like

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

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,

been surprised. They were like that. You could know two of them for years; they might even have worked for you for years, bearing different names. Then suddenly you learn by pure chance that they are brothers or sisters.

He sat in the hot motion which was not breeze and listened to her toiling slowly down the steep outside stairs, remembering the grandson.

‘ I be staing with Hamp Worsham. He my brother.’

‘All right,’ Stevens said. He was not surprised. He had known Hamp Worsham all his life, though he had never seen the old Negrees before. But even if he had, he still would not have

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

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

“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

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.”

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

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

Only his caller seemed impervious to it, though by appearance she should have owned in that breeze no more of weight and solidity than the intact ash of a scrap of burned paper – a little old negro woman with a shrunken, incredibly old face beneath a white

headcloth and a black straw hat which would have fitted a child.

‘Beauchamp?’ Stevens said. ‘You live on Mr Carothers Edmonds’s place.’

‘I done left,’ she said. ‘I come to find my boy.’ Then, sitting on the hard chair opposite him and without moving, she began to chant. ‘Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him-’

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

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.”

“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-’

‘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.

. 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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ Stevens said. ‘I have already talked with Mr. Wilmoth at the paper. He had agreed not to print anything. I will telephone the Memphis paper, but it’s probably too late for that… If we could just persuade her to go on back home this afternoon, before the Memphis paper… Out there, where the only white person she ever sees is Mr. Edmonds, and I will telephone him; and even if the

other darkies should hear about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t. And then maybe in about two or three month I could go out there and tell her he is dead and buried somewhere in the North…’ This time she was watching him with such an expression that he ceased talking; she sat there, erect on the hard chair, watching him until he had ceased

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

Well, he’s in worth trouble than that now. I don’t doubt her at all. I just hope, for her sake as well as that of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too-’

‘Wait,’ the editor said. He didn’t even need to leave his desk.

He took the press association flimsy from its spike and handed it to Stevens. It was datelined from Joliet, Illinois, this morning:

Mississippi negro, on eve of execution for murder of Chicago policeman, exposes alias by completing census questionnaire. Samuel Worsham Beauchamp-

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.

‘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.’

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

I don’t know how much, but something. And maybe fifty around the square. But the rest of it is you and me, because she insisted on leaving twenty-five with me, which is just twice what I tried to persuade her it would cost and just exactly four times what she can afford to pay-’

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.

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

‘We’re bringing him home,’ he said. ‘Miss Worsham and you and me and some others. It will cost-’

‘Wait’, the editor said. ‘What others?’

‘I don’t know yet. It will cost about two hundred. I’m not counting the telephones; I’ll take care of them myself. I’ll get something out of Carothers Edmonds the first time I catch him;

‘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.’