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.”