Winesburg, Ohio

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody.  This monkey is a true monster.  In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty.  Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

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 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, 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.  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 wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet.  First of all, he hated women.  “Bitches,” he called them.  His feeling toward men was somewhat different.  He pitied them.  “Does not every man let his life be managed for him by some bitch or another?” he asked.

In Winesburg no attention was paid to Wash Williams and his hatred of his fellows.  Once Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, complained to the telegraph company, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and smelled abominably, but nothing came of her complaint.  Here and there a man respected the operator.  Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.  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.

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

George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer of women’s hats who worked in a millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh.  The young man was not in love with the woman, who, in fact, had a suitor who worked as bartender in Ed Griffith’s saloon, but as they walked about under the trees they occasionally embraced.  The night and their own thoughts had aroused something in them.  As they were returning to Main Street they passed the little lawn beside the railroad station and saw Wash Williams apparently asleep on the grass beneath a tree.  On the next evening the operator and George Willard walked out together.  Down the railroad they went and sat on a pile of decaying railroad ties beside the tracks.  It was then that the operator told the young reporter his story of hate.

Perhaps a dozen times George Willard and the strange, shapeless man who lived at his father’s hotel had been on the point of talking.  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 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.  “Were you ever married, Mr. Williams?” he began.  “I suppose you were and your wife is dead, is that it?”

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.  I tell you there is something rotten about them.  I was married, sure.  My wife was dead before she married me, she was a foul thing come out a woman more foul.  She was a thing sent to make life unbearable to me.  I was a fool, do you see, as you are now, and so I married this woman.  I would like to see men a little begin to understand women.  They are sent to prevent men making the world worth while.  It is a trick in Nature.  Ugh!  They are creeping, crawling, squirming things, they with their soft hands and their blue eyes.  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.  In the darkness the young reporter found himself imagining that he sat on the railroad ties beside a comely young man with black hair and black shining eyes.  There was something almost beautiful in the voice of Wash Williams, the hideous, telling his story of hate.

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.  “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 blonde girl with the blue eyes whom he had met when he was a young operator at Dayton, Ohio.  Here and there his story was touched with moments of beauty intermingled with strings of vile curses.  The operator had married the daughter of a dentist who was the youngest of three sisters.  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 for George Willard a picture of his life in the house at Columbus, Ohio, with the young wife.  “In the garden back of our house we planted vegetables,” he said, “you know, peas and corn and such things.  We went to Columbus in early March and as soon as the days became warm 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.”

For a moment there was a catch in the voice of the man talking in the darkness.  “I loved her,” he said.  “I don’t claim not to be a fool.  I love her yet.  There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along the black ground to her feet and groveled before her.  I kissed her shoes and the ankles above her shoes.  When the hem of her garment touched my face I trembled.  When after two years of that life I found she had managed to acquire three other lovers who came regularly to our house when I was away at work, I didn’t want to touch them or her.  I just sent her home to her mother and said nothing.  There was nothing to say.  I had four hundred dollars in the bank and I gave her that.  I didn’t ask her reasons.  I didn’t say anything.  When she had gone I cried like a silly boy.  Pretty soon I had a chance to sell the house and I sent that money to her.”

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

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

Wash Williams’ voice rose to a half scream.  “I sat in the parlor of that house two hours.  Her mother took me in there and left me.  Their house was stylish.  They were what is called respectable people.  There were plush chairs and a couch in the room.  I was trembling all over.  I hated the men I thought had wronged her.  I was sick of living alone and wanted her back.  The longer I waited the more raw and tender I became.  I thought that if she came in and just touched me with her hand I would perhaps faint away.  I ached to forgive and forget.”

Wash Williams stopped and stood staring at George Willard.  The boy’s body shook as from a chill.  Again the man’s voice became soft and low.  “She came into the room naked,” he went on.  “Her mother did that.  While I sat there she was taking the girl’s clothes off, perhaps coaxing her to do it.  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.  People moved about laughing and talking.  The young reporter felt ill and weak.  In imagination, he also became old and shapeless.  “I didn’t get the mother killed,” said Wash Williams, staring up and down the street.  “I struck her once with a chair and then the neighbors came in and took it away.  She screamed so loud you see.  I won’t ever have a chance to kill her now.  She died of a fever a month after that happened.”