Respectability

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