Respectability - Page 2

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