The Philosopher

Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth
covered by a yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty
white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a
number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies.
His teeth were black and irregular and there was
something strange about his eyes. The lid of the left
eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was
exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window
shade and someone stood inside the doctor's head
playing with the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George
Willard. It began when George had been working for a
year on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship
was entirely a matter of the doctor's own making.

In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor
of the Eagle, went over to Tom Willy's saloon. Along an
alleyway he went and slipping in at the back door of
the saloon began drinking a drink made of a combination
of sloe gin and soda water. Will Henderson was a
sensualist and had reached the age of forty-five. He
imagined the gin renewed the youth in him. Like most
sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and for an
hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy. The
saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with
peculiarly marked hands. That flaming kind of birthmark
that sometimes paints with red the faces of men and
women had touched with red Tom Willy's fingers and the
backs of his hands. As he stood by the bar talking to
Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together. As he grew
more and more excited the red of his fingers deepened.
It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood
that had dried and faded.

As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red
hands and talking of women, his assistant, George
Willard, sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle and
listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.

Doctor Parcival appeared immediately after Will
Henderson had disappeared. One might have supposed that
the doctor had been watching from his office window and
had seen the editor going along the alleyway. Coming in
at the front door and finding himself a chair, he
lighted one of the stogies and crossing his legs began
to talk. He seemed intent upon convincing the boy of
the advisability of adopting a line of conduct that he
was himself unable to define.

"If you have your eyes open you will see that although
I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients," he
began. "There is a reason for that. It is not an
accident and it is not because I do not know as much of
medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients. The
reason, you see, does not appear on the surface. It
lies in fact in my character, which