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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

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

‘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!

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

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

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

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

‘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.’

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

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 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-’

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Her mother sent for me,” he said. “She wrote me a letter and asked me to come to their house at Dayton. When I got there it was evening about this time.” Wash Williams’ voice rose to half scream. “I sat in the parlor of that house two hours. Her

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

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

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

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

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

He once told the story to George Willard and the telling of the tale came about in this way: George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer of women’s hats who worked in a millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh.

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

‘ 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

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

‘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;

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

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

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

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-’

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

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

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