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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

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

‘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.

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.’

‘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

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-’

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

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-

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.

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.

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

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,

‘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.

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.’

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

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 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-’

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,

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 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

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.