Страница:
stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passion turned out to be
murder. He was kept alive with food brought by his mother, who also kept him
informed of the injured man's condition. When all turned out well he emerged
from his hiding place and went back to the work of clearing land as though
nothing had happened.
The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes of the Bentleys and
was responsible for the rise of the youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward,
Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they were
all killed. For a time after they went away to the South, old Tom tried to
run the place, but he was not successful. When the last of the four had been
killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come home.
Then the mother, who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and
the father became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and
moving into town. All day he went about shaking his head and muttering. The
work in the fields was neglected and weeds grew high in the corn. Old Tim
hired men but he did not use them intelligently. When they had gone away to
the fields in the morning he wandered into the woods and sat down on a log.
Sometimes he forgot to come home at night and one of the daughters had to go
in search of him.
When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and began to take charge of
things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At eighteen he
had left home to go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a
minister of the Presbyterian Church. All through his boyhood he had been
what in our country was called an "odd sheep" and had not got on with his
brothers. Of all the family only his mother had understood him and she was
now dead. When he came home to take charge of the farm, that had at that
time grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and
in the nearby town of Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle
the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.
There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse
did not look like a man at all. He was small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a long black
coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused when they saw
him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when they saw the
woman he had married in the city.
As a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon go under. That was perhaps
Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War
was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate. Jesse
was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days. She
tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her
go on without interference. She helped to do the milking and did part of the
housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a year
she worked every day from sunrise until late at night and then after giving
birth to a child she died.
As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately built man there was
something within him that could not easily be killed. He had brown curly
hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and
uncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature. His
mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child. Jesse
Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for
this he suffered and made others suffer. Never did he succeed in getting
what he wanted out of fife and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very
short time after he came home to the Bentley farm he made everyone there a
little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his
mother had been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks after his coming,
old Tom Bentley made over to him the entire ownership of the place and
retired into the background. Everyone retired into the background. In spite
of his youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of
his people. He was so in earnest in everything he did and said that no one
understood him. He made everyone on the farm work as they had never worked
before and yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well they went
well for Jesse and never for the people who were his dependents. Like a
thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in
these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could master others but he
could not master himself. The running of the farm as it had never been run
before was easy for him. When he came home from Cleveland where he had been
in school, he shut himself off from all of his people and began to make
plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men on the farms about him worked too hard and were too fired to
think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its
success was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something in his
passionate nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to
the old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked
into the barnyard and other windows that looked off across the fields. By
the window he sat down to think. Hour after hour and day after day he sat
and looked over the land and thought out his new place in life. The
passionate burning thing in his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard.
He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced
before and then he wanted something else. It was the indefinable hunger
within that made his eyes waver and that kept him always more and more
silent before people. He would have given much to achieve peace and in him
was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his small frame was
gathered the force of a long line of strong men. He had always been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later when he
was a young man in school. In the school he had studied and thought of God
and the Bible with his whole mind and heart. As time passed and he grew to
know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man,
one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing
of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how
like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also
such a clod. Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he
was blind to the fact that his young wife was doing a strong woman's work
even after she had become large with child and that she was killing herself
in his service, he did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the farm
and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he shrugged
his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.
In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs. In the stables he could hear the
tramping of his horses and the restless movement of his cattle. Away in the
fields he could see other cattle wandering over green hills. The voices of
men, his men who worked for him, came in to him through the window. From the
milkhouse there was the steady thump, thump of a churn being manipulated by
the half-witted girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind went back to the men of
Old Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God
had come down out of the skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to
notice and to talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness to in
some way achieve in his own life the flavor of significance that had hung
over these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his own words strengthened and fed his
eagerness.
"I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields," he
declared. "Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all
the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me another Jesse,
like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the father of sons who
shall be rulers!" Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and jumping to his
feet walked up and down in the room. In fancy he saw himself living in old
times and among old peoples. The land that lay stretched out before him
became of vast significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of
men sprung from himself. It seemed to him that in his day as in those other
and older days, kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the
lives of men by the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He
longed to be such a servant. "It is God's work I have come to the land to
do," he declared in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.
It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later
day to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last fifty years a vast change has
taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken
place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of
affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us
from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the
building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past
farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has
worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our
people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be
in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by
the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer
standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to
overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines
have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a
kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the
stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.
In Jesse Bentley's time and in the country districts of the whole
Middle West in the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored too
hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed
upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took
possession of them. They believed in God and in God's power to control their
lives. In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of
God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and
intellectual life of the times. The figure of God was big in the hearts of
men.
And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward
God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God in that.
When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the running of the
farm, he took that also as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came
to him, he walked about at night through the streets thinking of the matter
and when he had come home and had got the work on the farm well under way,
he went again at night to walk through the forests and over the low hills
and to think of God.
As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew
in his mind. He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained
only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the edge of some
meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the
stars shining down at him.
One evening, some months after his father's death, and when his wife
Katherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse
left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was situated in a
tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the
stream to the end of his own land and on through the fields of his
neighbors. As he walked the valley broadened and then narrowed again. Great
open stretches of field and wood lay before him. The moon came out from
behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat down to think.
Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his possession. He
thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder
and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over
stones, and he began to think of the men of old times who like himself had
owned flocks and lands.
A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of
Jesse Bentley. He remembered how in the old Bible story the Lord had
appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to where
Saul and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the Valley of
Elah. Into Jesse's mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who
owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies of God.
"Suppose," he whispered to himself, "there should come from among them one
who, like Goliath the Philistine of Gath, could defeat me and take from me
my possessions." In fancy he felt the sickening dread that he thought must
have lain heavy on the heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to
his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His
voice carried far over the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to
me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all
of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy
service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth."
II
DAVID HARDY OF Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley farms. When he was twelve years old he went to the old
Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came into
the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that
he be given a son, had grown to womanhood on the farm and had married young
John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not
live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. She was a
small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been
inclined to fits of temper and when not angry she was often morose and
silent. In Winesburg it was said that she drank. Her husband, the banker,
who was a careful, shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy. When he began
to make money he bought for her a large brick house on Elm Street in
Winesburg and he was the first man in that town to keep a manservant to
drive his wife's carriage.
But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of
temper during which she was sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and
quarrelsome. She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from the
kitchen and threatened her husband's life. Once she deliberately set fire to
the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her own room and would
see no one. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave rise to all sorts of
stories concerning her. It was said that she took drugs and that she hid
herself away from people because she was often so under the influence of
drink that her condition could not be concealed. Sometimes on summer
afternoons she came out of the house and got into her carriage. Dismissing
the driver she took the reins in her own hands and drove off at top speed
through the streets. If a pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead
and the frightened citizen had to escape as best he could. To the people of
the town it seemed as though she wanted to run them down. When she had
driven through several streets, tearing around corners and beating the
horses with the whip, she drove off into the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow down
to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed. She became thoughtful and
muttered words. Sometimes tears came into her eyes. And then when she came
back into town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets. But for
the influence of her husband and the respect he inspired in people's minds
she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.
Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well
be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood. He was too young then
to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was difficult for
him not to have very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother.
David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the
people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard. His eyes were brown and as
a child he had a habit of looking at things and people a long time without
appearing to see what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of
harshly or when he overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and
ran away to hide. Sometimes he could not find a hiding place and that
confused him. Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the
wall, he closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything. He had a habit
of talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet sadness
often took possession of him.
On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished that he
would never have to go back to town and once when he had come home from the
farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his
mind.
David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the
street in which the Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall evening
and the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could
not bear to go into the house where his mother and father lived, and on an
impulse he decided to run away from home. He intended to go back to the farm
and to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered weeping
and frightened on country roads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in
the sky. The boy's imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see
and hear strange things in the darkness. Into his mind came the conviction
that he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind
blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team of horses approached along the
road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a fence. Through a
field he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt
of the soft ground with his fingers. But for the figure of his grandfather,
whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the world
must be altogether empty. When his cries were heard by a farmer who was
walking home from town and he was brought back to his father's house, he was
so tired and excited that he did not know what was happening to him.
By chance David's father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son's return to
town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy with
several men of the town went to search the country. The report that David
had been kidnapped ran about through the streets of Winesburg. When he came
home there were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched
him eagerly in her arms. David thought she had suddenly become another
woman. He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With
her own hands Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food.
She would not let him go to bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew
out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour
the woman sat in the darkness and held her boy. All the time she kept
talking in a low voice. David could not understand what had so changed her.
Her habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most peaceful
and lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held him more
and more tightly. On and on went her voice. It was not harsh or shrill as
when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling on trees.
Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found,
but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them away. He thought
it must be a game his mother and the men of the town were playing with him
and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the thought that his having been
lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter. He
thought that he would have been willing to go through the frightful
experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long
black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become.
During the last years of young David's boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived.
Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older it
became more definite. When he was twelve years old he went to the Bentley
farm to live. Old Jesse came into town and fairly demanded that he be given
charge of the boy. The old man was excited and determined on having his own
way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and
then the two men went to the house on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They
both expected her to make trouble but were mistaken. She was very quiet and
when Jesse had explained his mission and had gone on at some length about
the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet
atmosphere of the old farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval. "It is an
atmosphere not corrupted by my presence," she said sharply. Her shoulders
shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. "It is a place for a
man child, although it was never a place for me," she went on. "You never
wanted me there and of course the air of your house did me no good. It was
like poison in my blood but it will be different with him."
Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two men to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her room for
days. Even when the boy's clothes were packed and he was taken away she did
not appear. The loss of her son made a sharp break in her life and she
seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John Hardy thought it had
all turned out very well indeed.
And so young David went to live in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two of the old farmer's sisters were alive and still lived in the house.
They were afraid of Jesse and rarely spoke when he was about. One of the
women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she was younger was a
born mother and became the boy's caretaker. Every night when he had gone to
bed she went into his room and sat on the floor until he fell asleep. When
he became drowsy she became bold and whispered things that he later thought
he must have dreamed.
Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his
mother had come to him and that she had changed so that she was always as
she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and reaching out
his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so that she was
ecstatically happy. Everyone in the old house became happy after the boy
went there. The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley that had kept the
people in the house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by
the presence of the girl Louise was apparently swept away by the coming of
the boy. It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.
The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all
the valley of Wine Creek, and who had wanted God to send him a sign of
approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think that
at last his prayers had been answered. Although he was at that time only
fiftyfive years old he looked seventy and was worn out with much thinking
and scheming. The effort he had made to extend his land holdings had been
successful and there were few farms in the valley that did not belong to
him, but until David came he was a bitterly disappointed man.
There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been a battleground for these influences. First there was the old
thing in him. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men of God.
His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had brought him
close to nature and there were forces in the passionately religious man that
ran out to the forces in nature. The disappointment that had come to him
when a daughter and not a son had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him
like a blow struck by some unseen hand and the blow had somewhat softened
his egotism. He still believed that God might at any moment make himself
manifest out of the winds or the clouds, but he no longer demanded such
recognition. Instead he prayed for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful
and thought God had deserted the world. He regretted the fate that had not
let him live in a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some
strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into
the wilderness to create new races. While he worked night and day to make
his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land, he regretted
that he could not use his own restless energy in the building of temples,
the slaying of unbelievers and in general in the work of glorifying God's
name on earth.
That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the Civil War
and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the deep influences
that were at work in the country during those years when modem industrialism
was being born. He began to buy machines that would permit him to do the
work of the farms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if
he were a younger man he would give up farming altogether and start a
factory in Winesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit of
reading newspapers and magazines. He invented a machine for the making of
fence out of wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and
places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign
to the thing that was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of
the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention
to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve
and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of
mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse
the man of God as it was to the men about him. The greedy thing in him
wanted to make money faster than it could be made by tilling the land. More
than once he went into Winesburg to talk with his son-in-law John Hardy
about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I never had," he said
and his eyes shone. "I am thinking about it all the time. Big things are
going to be done in the country and there will be more money to be made than
I ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your
chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more
and more excited as he talked. At one time in his life he had been
threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As
he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when
night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old
feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who
might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and
appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the
things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be made almost
without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the coming of the
boy David did much to bring back with renewed force the old faith and it
seemed to him that God had at last looked with favor upon him.
As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a
thousand new and delightful ways. The kindly attitude of all about him
expanded his quiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner he
had always had with his people. At night when he went to bed after a long
day of adventures in the stables, in the fields, or driving about from farm
to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the house. If
Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each night to sit on the floor by his
bedside, did not appear at once, he went to the head of the stairs and
shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow halls where for so long
there had been a tradition of silence. In the morning when he awoke and lay
still in bed, the sounds that came in to him through the windows filled him
with delight. He thought with a shudder of the life in the house in
Winesburg and of his mother's angry voice that had always made him tremble.
There in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. When he awoke at dawn
the barnyard back of the house also awoke. In the house people stirred
about. Eliza Stoughton the half-witted girl was poked in the ribs by a farm
hand and giggled noisily, in some distant field a cow bawled and was
answered by the cattle in the stables, and one of the farm hands spoke
sharply to the horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped out of
bed and ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excited his mind,
and he wondered what his mother was doing in the house in town.
From the windows of his own room he could not see directly into the
barnyard where the farm hands had now all assembled to do the morning
shores, but he could hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the
horses. When one of the men laughed, he laughed also. Leaning out at the
open window, he looked into an orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a
litter of tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning he counted the pigs. "Four,
five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up
and down marks on the window ledge. David ran to put on his trousers and
shirt. A feverish desire to get out of doors took possession of him. Every
morning he made such a noise coming down stairs that Aunt Callie, the
housekeeper, declared he was trying to tear the house down. When he had run
through the long old house, shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he
came into the barnyard and looked about with an amazed air of expectancy. It
seemed to him that in such a place tremendous things might have happened
during the night. The farm hands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader,
an old man who had been on the farm since Jesse came into possession and who
before David's time had never been known to make a joke, made the same joke
every morning. It amused David so that he laughed and clapped his hands.
"See, come here and look," cried the old man. "Grandfather Jesse's white
mare has tom the black stocking she wears on her foot."
Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to
farm up and down the valley of Wine Creek, and his grandson went with him.
They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white horse. The old man
scratched his thin white beard and talked to himself of his plans for
increasing the productiveness of the fields they visited and of God's part
in the plans all men made. Sometimes he looked at David and smiled happily
and then for a long time he appeared to forget the boy's existence. More and
more every day now his mind turned back again to the dreams that had filled
his mind when he had first come out of the city to live on the land. One
afternoon he startled David by letting his dreams take entire possession of
him. With the boy as a witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about
an accident that nearly destroyed the companionship that was growing up
between them.
Jesse and his grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley
some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the forest
Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river. All the
afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk. His
mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a
giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again
as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he
became excited to the edge of insanity. Stopping the horse he got out of the
buggy and asked David to get out also. The two climbed over a fence and
walked along the bank of the stream. The boy paid no attention to the
muttering of his grandfather, but ran along beside him and wondered what was
going to happen. When a rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he
clapped his hands and danced with delight. He looked at the tall trees and
was sorry that he was not a little animal to climb high in the air without
being frightened. Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the
head of his grandfather into a clump of bushes. "Wake up, little animal. Go
and climb to the top of the trees," he shouted in a shrill voice.
Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with
his mind in a ferment. His earnestness affected the boy, who presently
became silent and a little alarmed. Into the old man's mind had come the
notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the sky,
that the presence of the boy and man on their knees in some lonely spot in
the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost inevitable.
"It was in just such a place as this that other David tended the sheep when
his father came and told him to go down unto Saul," he muttered.
Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen
log and when he had come to an open place among the trees he dropped upon
his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.
A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David.
Crouching beneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him and his
own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the presence not
only of his grandfather but of someone else, someone who might hurt him,
someone who was not kindly but dangerous and brutal. He began to cry and
reaching down picked up a small stick, which he held tightly gripped in his
fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in his own idea, suddenly arose and
advanced toward him, his terror grew until his whole body shook. In the
woods an intense silence seemed to lie over everything and suddenly out of
the silence came the old man's harsh and insistent voice. Gripping the boy's
shoulders, Jesse turned his face to the sky and shouted. The whole left side
of his face twitched and his hand on the boy's shoulder twitched also. "Make
a sign to me, God," he cried. "Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to
me out of the sky and make Thy presence known to me."
With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the
hands that held him, ran away through the forest. He did not believe that
the man who turned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the sky was
his grandfather at all. The man did not look like his grandfather. The
conviction that something strange and terrible had happened, that by some
miracle a new and dangerous person had come into the body of the kindly old
man, took possession of him. On and on he ran down the hillside, sobbing as
he ran. When he fell over the roots of a tree and in falling struck his
head, he arose and tried to run on again. His head hurt so that presently he
fell down and lay still, but it was only after Jesse had carried him to the
buggy and he awoke to find the old man's hand stroking his head tenderly
that the terror left him. "Take me away. There is a terrible man back there
in the woods," he declared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of
the trees and again his lips cried out to God. "What have I done that Thou
dost not approve of me," he whispered softly, saying the words over and over
as he drove rapidly along the road with the boy's cut and bleeding head held
tenderly against his shoulder.
III
Surrender
THE STORY OF Louise Bentley, who became Mrs. John Hardy and lived with
her husband in a brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg, is a story of
misunderstanding.
Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made
livable, much will have to be done. Thoughtful books will have to be written
and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.
Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard,
imaginative father, who did not look with favor upon her coming into the
world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of
over-sensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in such
great numbers into the world.
During her early years she lived on the Bentley farm, a silent, moody
child, wanting love more than anything else in the world and not getting it.
When she was fifteen she went to live in Winesburg with the family of Albert
Hardy, who had a store for the sale of buggies and wagons, and who was a
member of the town board of education.
Louise went into town to be a student in the Winesburg High School and
she went to live at the Hardys' because Albert Hardy and her father were
friends.
Hardy, the vehicle merchant of Winesburg, like thousands of other men
of his times, was an enthusiast on the subject of education. He had made his
own way in the world without learning got from books, but he was convinced
that had he but known books things would have gone better with him. To
everyone who came into his shop he talked of the matter, and in his own
household he drove his family distracted by his constant harping on the
subject.
He had two daughters and one son, John Hardy, and more than once the
daughters threatened to leave school altogether. As a matter of principle
they did just enough work in their classes to avoid punishment. "I hate
books and I hate anyone who likes books," Harriet, the younger of the two
girls, declared passionately.
In Winesburg as on the farm Louise was not happy. For years she had
dreamed of the time when she could go forth into the world, and she looked
upon the move into the Hardy household as a great step in the direction of
freedom. Always when she had thought of the matter, it had seemed to her
that in town all must be gaiety and life, that there men and women must live
happily and freely, giving and taking friendship and affection as one takes
the feel of a wind on the cheek. After the silence and the cheerlessness of
life in the Bentley house, she dreamed of stepping forth into an atmosphere
that was warm and pulsating with life and reality. And in the Hardy
household Louise might have got something of the thing for which she so
hungered but for a mistake she made when she had just come to town.
Louise won the disfavor of the two Hardy girls, Mary and Harriet, by
her application to her studies in school. She did not come to the house
until the day when school was to begin and knew nothing of the feeling they
had in the matter. She was timid and during the first month made no
acquaintances. Every Friday afternoon one of the hired men from the farm
drove into Winesburg and took her home for the week-end, so that she did not
spend the Saturday holiday with the town people. Because she was embarrassed
and lonely she worked constantly at her studies. To Mary and Harriet, it
seemed as though she tried to make trouble for them by her proficiency. In
her eagerness to appear well Louise wanted to answer every question put to
the class by the teacher. She jumped up and down and her eyes flashed. Then
when she had answered some question the others in the class had been unable
to answer, she smiled happily. "See, I have done it for you," her eyes
seemed to say. "You need not bother about the matter. I will answer all
questions. For the whole class it will be easy while I am here."
In the evening after supper in the Hardy house, Albert Hardy began to
praise Louise. One of the teachers had spoken highly of her and he was
delighted. "Well, again I have heard of it," he began, looking hard at his
daughters and then turning to smile at Louise. "Another of the teachers has
told me of the good work Louise is doing. Everyone in Winesburg is telling
me how smart she is. I am ashamed that they do not speak so of my own
girls." Arising, the merchant marched about the room and lighted his evening
cigar.
The two girls looked at each other and shook their heads wearily.
Seeing their indifference the father became angry. "I tell you it is
something for you two to be thinking about," he cried, glaring at them.
"There is a big change coming here in America and in learning is the only
hope of the coming generations. Louise is the daughter of a rich man but she
is not ashamed to study. It should make you ashamed to see what she does."
The merchant took his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to
depart for the evening. At the door he stopped and glared back. So fierce
was his manner that Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to her own room.
The daughters began to speak of their own affairs. "Pay attention to me,"
roared the merchant. "Your minds are lazy. Your indifference to education is
affecting your characters. You will amount to nothing. Now mark what I
say--Louise will be so far ahead of you that you will never catch up."
The distracted man went out of the house and into the street shaking
with wrath. He went along muttering words and swearing, but when he got into
Main Street his anger passed. He stopped to talk of the weather or the crops
with some other merchant or with a farmer who had come into town and forgot
his daughters altogether or, if he thought of them, only shrugged his
shoulders. "Oh, well, girls will be girls," he muttered philosophically.
In the house when Louise came down into the room where the two girls
sat, they would have nothing to do with her. One evening after she had been
there for more than six weeks and was heartbroken because of the continued
air of coldness with which she was always greeted, she burst into tears.
"Shut up your crying and go back to your own room and to your books," Mary
Hardy said sharply.
x x x
The room occupied by Louise was on the second floor of the Hardy house,
and her window looked out upon an orchard. There was a stove in the room and
every evening young John Hardy carried up an armful of wood and put it in a
box that stood by the wall. During the second month after she came to the
house, Louise gave up all hope of getting on a friendly footing with the
Hardy girls and went to her own room as soon as the evening meal was at an
end.
Her mind began to play with thoughts of making friends with John Hardy.
When he came into the room with the wood in his arms, she pretended to be
busy with her studies but watched him eagerly. When he had put the wood in
the box and turned to go out, she put down her head and blushed. She tried
to make talk but could say nothing, and after he had gone she was angry at
herself for her stupidity.
The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing
close to the young man. She thought that in him might be found the quality
she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her that between
herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and
that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that
must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed with
the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of
murder. He was kept alive with food brought by his mother, who also kept him
informed of the injured man's condition. When all turned out well he emerged
from his hiding place and went back to the work of clearing land as though
nothing had happened.
The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the fortunes of the Bentleys and
was responsible for the rise of the youngest son, Jesse. Enoch, Edward,
Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they were
all killed. For a time after they went away to the South, old Tom tried to
run the place, but he was not successful. When the last of the four had been
killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come home.
Then the mother, who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and
the father became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and
moving into town. All day he went about shaking his head and muttering. The
work in the fields was neglected and weeds grew high in the corn. Old Tim
hired men but he did not use them intelligently. When they had gone away to
the fields in the morning he wandered into the woods and sat down on a log.
Sometimes he forgot to come home at night and one of the daughters had to go
in search of him.
When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and began to take charge of
things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At eighteen he
had left home to go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a
minister of the Presbyterian Church. All through his boyhood he had been
what in our country was called an "odd sheep" and had not got on with his
brothers. Of all the family only his mother had understood him and she was
now dead. When he came home to take charge of the farm, that had at that
time grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and
in the nearby town of Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle
the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.
There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse
did not look like a man at all. He was small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a long black
coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused when they saw
him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when they saw the
woman he had married in the city.
As a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon go under. That was perhaps
Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War
was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate. Jesse
was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days. She
tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her
go on without interference. She helped to do the milking and did part of the
housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a year
she worked every day from sunrise until late at night and then after giving
birth to a child she died.
As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately built man there was
something within him that could not easily be killed. He had brown curly
hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and
uncertain. Not only was he slender but he was also short of stature. His
mouth was like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child. Jesse
Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for
this he suffered and made others suffer. Never did he succeed in getting
what he wanted out of fife and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very
short time after he came home to the Bentley farm he made everyone there a
little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his
mother had been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks after his coming,
old Tom Bentley made over to him the entire ownership of the place and
retired into the background. Everyone retired into the background. In spite
of his youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of
his people. He was so in earnest in everything he did and said that no one
understood him. He made everyone on the farm work as they had never worked
before and yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well they went
well for Jesse and never for the people who were his dependents. Like a
thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in
these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could master others but he
could not master himself. The running of the farm as it had never been run
before was easy for him. When he came home from Cleveland where he had been
in school, he shut himself off from all of his people and began to make
plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men on the farms about him worked too hard and were too fired to
think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its
success was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something in his
passionate nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to
the old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked
into the barnyard and other windows that looked off across the fields. By
the window he sat down to think. Hour after hour and day after day he sat
and looked over the land and thought out his new place in life. The
passionate burning thing in his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard.
He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced
before and then he wanted something else. It was the indefinable hunger
within that made his eyes waver and that kept him always more and more
silent before people. He would have given much to achieve peace and in him
was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive. In his small frame was
gathered the force of a long line of strong men. He had always been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later when he
was a young man in school. In the school he had studied and thought of God
and the Bible with his whole mind and heart. As time passed and he grew to
know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man,
one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing
of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how
like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also
such a clod. Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he
was blind to the fact that his young wife was doing a strong woman's work
even after she had become large with child and that she was killing herself
in his service, he did not intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the farm
and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he shrugged
his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.
In the room by the window overlooking the land that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs. In the stables he could hear the
tramping of his horses and the restless movement of his cattle. Away in the
fields he could see other cattle wandering over green hills. The voices of
men, his men who worked for him, came in to him through the window. From the
milkhouse there was the steady thump, thump of a churn being manipulated by
the half-witted girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind went back to the men of
Old Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God
had come down out of the skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to
notice and to talk to him also. A kind of feverish boyish eagerness to in
some way achieve in his own life the flavor of significance that had hung
over these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his own words strengthened and fed his
eagerness.
"I am a new kind of man come into possession of these fields," he
declared. "Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all
the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me another Jesse,
like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the father of sons who
shall be rulers!" Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and jumping to his
feet walked up and down in the room. In fancy he saw himself living in old
times and among old peoples. The land that lay stretched out before him
became of vast significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of
men sprung from himself. It seemed to him that in his day as in those other
and older days, kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the
lives of men by the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He
longed to be such a servant. "It is God's work I have come to the land to
do," he declared in a loud voice and his short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.
It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later
day to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last fifty years a vast change has
taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken
place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of
affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us
from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the
building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past
farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has
worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our
people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be
in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by
the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer
standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to
overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines
have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a
kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the
stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.
In Jesse Bentley's time and in the country districts of the whole
Middle West in the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored too
hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed
upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took
possession of them. They believed in God and in God's power to control their
lives. In the little Protestant churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of
God and his works. The churches were the center of the social and
intellectual life of the times. The figure of God was big in the hearts of
men.
And so, having been born an imaginative child and having within him a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward
God. When the war took his brothers away, he saw the hand of God in that.
When his father became ill and could no longer attend to the running of the
farm, he took that also as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came
to him, he walked about at night through the streets thinking of the matter
and when he had come home and had got the work on the farm well under way,
he went again at night to walk through the forests and over the low hills
and to think of God.
As he walked the importance of his own figure in some divine plan grew
in his mind. He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained
only six hundred acres. Kneeling in a fence corner at the edge of some
meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence and looking up he saw the
stars shining down at him.
One evening, some months after his father's death, and when his wife
Katherine was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of childbirth, Jesse
left his house and went for a long walk. The Bentley farm was situated in a
tiny valley watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of the
stream to the end of his own land and on through the fields of his
neighbors. As he walked the valley broadened and then narrowed again. Great
open stretches of field and wood lay before him. The moon came out from
behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat down to think.
Jesse thought that as the true servant of God the entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his possession. He
thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder
and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over
stones, and he began to think of the men of old times who like himself had
owned flocks and lands.
A fantastic impulse, half fear, half greediness, took possession of
Jesse Bentley. He remembered how in the old Bible story the Lord had
appeared to that other Jesse and told him to send his son David to where
Saul and the men of Israel were fighting the Philistines in the Valley of
Elah. Into Jesse's mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who
owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies of God.
"Suppose," he whispered to himself, "there should come from among them one
who, like Goliath the Philistine of Gath, could defeat me and take from me
my possessions." In fancy he felt the sickening dread that he thought must
have lain heavy on the heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to
his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His
voice carried far over the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to
me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all
of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy
service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth."
II
DAVID HARDY OF Winesburg, Ohio, was the grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley farms. When he was twelve years old he went to the old
Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came into
the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that
he be given a son, had grown to womanhood on the farm and had married young
John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not
live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. She was a
small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been
inclined to fits of temper and when not angry she was often morose and
silent. In Winesburg it was said that she drank. Her husband, the banker,
who was a careful, shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy. When he began
to make money he bought for her a large brick house on Elm Street in
Winesburg and he was the first man in that town to keep a manservant to
drive his wife's carriage.
But Louise could not be made happy. She flew into half insane fits of
temper during which she was sometimes silent, sometimes noisy and
quarrelsome. She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from the
kitchen and threatened her husband's life. Once she deliberately set fire to
the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her own room and would
see no one. Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave rise to all sorts of
stories concerning her. It was said that she took drugs and that she hid
herself away from people because she was often so under the influence of
drink that her condition could not be concealed. Sometimes on summer
afternoons she came out of the house and got into her carriage. Dismissing
the driver she took the reins in her own hands and drove off at top speed
through the streets. If a pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead
and the frightened citizen had to escape as best he could. To the people of
the town it seemed as though she wanted to run them down. When she had
driven through several streets, tearing around corners and beating the
horses with the whip, she drove off into the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow down
to a walk and her wild, reckless mood passed. She became thoughtful and
muttered words. Sometimes tears came into her eyes. And then when she came
back into town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets. But for
the influence of her husband and the respect he inspired in people's minds
she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.
Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well
be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood. He was too young then
to have opinions of his own about people, but at times it was difficult for
him not to have very definite opinions about the woman who was his mother.
David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the
people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard. His eyes were brown and as
a child he had a habit of looking at things and people a long time without
appearing to see what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of
harshly or when he overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and
ran away to hide. Sometimes he could not find a hiding place and that
confused him. Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the
wall, he closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything. He had a habit
of talking aloud to himself, and early in life a spirit of quiet sadness
often took possession of him.
On the occasions when David went to visit his grandfather on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished that he
would never have to go back to town and once when he had come home from the
farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his
mind.
David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to go about his own affairs and left the boy at the head of the
street in which the Hardy house stood. It was early dusk of a fall evening
and the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could
not bear to go into the house where his mother and father lived, and on an
impulse he decided to run away from home. He intended to go back to the farm
and to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered weeping
and frightened on country roads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in
the sky. The boy's imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see
and hear strange things in the darkness. Into his mind came the conviction
that he was walking and running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind
blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team of horses approached along the
road in which he walked he was frightened and climbed a fence. Through a
field he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt
of the soft ground with his fingers. But for the figure of his grandfather,
whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the world
must be altogether empty. When his cries were heard by a farmer who was
walking home from town and he was brought back to his father's house, he was
so tired and excited that he did not know what was happening to him.
By chance David's father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son's return to
town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy with
several men of the town went to search the country. The report that David
had been kidnapped ran about through the streets of Winesburg. When he came
home there were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched
him eagerly in her arms. David thought she had suddenly become another
woman. He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With
her own hands Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food.
She would not let him go to bed but, when he had put on his nightgown, blew
out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms. For an hour
the woman sat in the darkness and held her boy. All the time she kept
talking in a low voice. David could not understand what had so changed her.
Her habitually dissatisfied face had become, he thought, the most peaceful
and lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held him more
and more tightly. On and on went her voice. It was not harsh or shrill as
when she talked to her husband, but was like rain falling on trees.
Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found,
but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them away. He thought
it must be a game his mother and the men of the town were playing with him
and laughed joyously. Into his mind came the thought that his having been
lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter. He
thought that he would have been willing to go through the frightful
experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long
black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become.
During the last years of young David's boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she became for him just a woman with whom he had once lived.
Still he could not get her figure out of his mind and as he grew older it
became more definite. When he was twelve years old he went to the Bentley
farm to live. Old Jesse came into town and fairly demanded that he be given
charge of the boy. The old man was excited and determined on having his own
way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and
then the two men went to the house on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They
both expected her to make trouble but were mistaken. She was very quiet and
when Jesse had explained his mission and had gone on at some length about
the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and in the quiet
atmosphere of the old farmhouse, she nodded her head in approval. "It is an
atmosphere not corrupted by my presence," she said sharply. Her shoulders
shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. "It is a place for a
man child, although it was never a place for me," she went on. "You never
wanted me there and of course the air of your house did me no good. It was
like poison in my blood but it will be different with him."
Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two men to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her room for
days. Even when the boy's clothes were packed and he was taken away she did
not appear. The loss of her son made a sharp break in her life and she
seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John Hardy thought it had
all turned out very well indeed.
And so young David went to live in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two of the old farmer's sisters were alive and still lived in the house.
They were afraid of Jesse and rarely spoke when he was about. One of the
women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she was younger was a
born mother and became the boy's caretaker. Every night when he had gone to
bed she went into his room and sat on the floor until he fell asleep. When
he became drowsy she became bold and whispered things that he later thought
he must have dreamed.
Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed that his
mother had come to him and that she had changed so that she was always as
she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and reaching out
his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so that she was
ecstatically happy. Everyone in the old house became happy after the boy
went there. The hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley that had kept the
people in the house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by
the presence of the girl Louise was apparently swept away by the coming of
the boy. It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.
The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in all
the valley of Wine Creek, and who had wanted God to send him a sign of
approval by way of a son out of the womb of Katherine, began to think that
at last his prayers had been answered. Although he was at that time only
fiftyfive years old he looked seventy and was worn out with much thinking
and scheming. The effort he had made to extend his land holdings had been
successful and there were few farms in the valley that did not belong to
him, but until David came he was a bitterly disappointed man.
There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been a battleground for these influences. First there was the old
thing in him. He wanted to be a man of God and a leader among men of God.
His walking in the fields and through the forests at night had brought him
close to nature and there were forces in the passionately religious man that
ran out to the forces in nature. The disappointment that had come to him
when a daughter and not a son had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him
like a blow struck by some unseen hand and the blow had somewhat softened
his egotism. He still believed that God might at any moment make himself
manifest out of the winds or the clouds, but he no longer demanded such
recognition. Instead he prayed for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful
and thought God had deserted the world. He regretted the fate that had not
let him live in a simpler and sweeter time when at the beckoning of some
strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into
the wilderness to create new races. While he worked night and day to make
his farms more productive and to extend his holdings of land, he regretted
that he could not use his own restless energy in the building of temples,
the slaying of unbelievers and in general in the work of glorifying God's
name on earth.
That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the Civil War
and he, like all men of his time, had been touched by the deep influences
that were at work in the country during those years when modem industrialism
was being born. He began to buy machines that would permit him to do the
work of the farms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if
he were a younger man he would give up farming altogether and start a
factory in Winesburg for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit of
reading newspapers and magazines. He invented a machine for the making of
fence out of wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and
places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign
to the thing that was growing up in the minds of others. The beginning of
the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention
to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve
and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of
mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse
the man of God as it was to the men about him. The greedy thing in him
wanted to make money faster than it could be made by tilling the land. More
than once he went into Winesburg to talk with his son-in-law John Hardy
about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I never had," he said
and his eyes shone. "I am thinking about it all the time. Big things are
going to be done in the country and there will be more money to be made than
I ever dreamed of. You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your
chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down in the bank office and grew more
and more excited as he talked. At one time in his life he had been
threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As
he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later when he drove back home and when
night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old
feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who
might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and
appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the
things read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to be made almost
without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the coming of the
boy David did much to bring back with renewed force the old faith and it
seemed to him that God had at last looked with favor upon him.
As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself to him in a
thousand new and delightful ways. The kindly attitude of all about him
expanded his quiet nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner he
had always had with his people. At night when he went to bed after a long
day of adventures in the stables, in the fields, or driving about from farm
to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the house. If
Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each night to sit on the floor by his
bedside, did not appear at once, he went to the head of the stairs and
shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow halls where for so long
there had been a tradition of silence. In the morning when he awoke and lay
still in bed, the sounds that came in to him through the windows filled him
with delight. He thought with a shudder of the life in the house in
Winesburg and of his mother's angry voice that had always made him tremble.
There in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. When he awoke at dawn
the barnyard back of the house also awoke. In the house people stirred
about. Eliza Stoughton the half-witted girl was poked in the ribs by a farm
hand and giggled noisily, in some distant field a cow bawled and was
answered by the cattle in the stables, and one of the farm hands spoke
sharply to the horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped out of
bed and ran to a window. All of the people stirring about excited his mind,
and he wondered what his mother was doing in the house in town.
From the windows of his own room he could not see directly into the
barnyard where the farm hands had now all assembled to do the morning
shores, but he could hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the
horses. When one of the men laughed, he laughed also. Leaning out at the
open window, he looked into an orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a
litter of tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning he counted the pigs. "Four,
five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up
and down marks on the window ledge. David ran to put on his trousers and
shirt. A feverish desire to get out of doors took possession of him. Every
morning he made such a noise coming down stairs that Aunt Callie, the
housekeeper, declared he was trying to tear the house down. When he had run
through the long old house, shutting the doors behind him with a bang, he
came into the barnyard and looked about with an amazed air of expectancy. It
seemed to him that in such a place tremendous things might have happened
during the night. The farm hands looked at him and laughed. Henry Strader,
an old man who had been on the farm since Jesse came into possession and who
before David's time had never been known to make a joke, made the same joke
every morning. It amused David so that he laughed and clapped his hands.
"See, come here and look," cried the old man. "Grandfather Jesse's white
mare has tom the black stocking she wears on her foot."
Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to
farm up and down the valley of Wine Creek, and his grandson went with him.
They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white horse. The old man
scratched his thin white beard and talked to himself of his plans for
increasing the productiveness of the fields they visited and of God's part
in the plans all men made. Sometimes he looked at David and smiled happily
and then for a long time he appeared to forget the boy's existence. More and
more every day now his mind turned back again to the dreams that had filled
his mind when he had first come out of the city to live on the land. One
afternoon he startled David by letting his dreams take entire possession of
him. With the boy as a witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about
an accident that nearly destroyed the companionship that was growing up
between them.
Jesse and his grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley
some miles from home. A forest came down to the road and through the forest
Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river. All the
afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk. His
mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a
giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again
as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he
became excited to the edge of insanity. Stopping the horse he got out of the
buggy and asked David to get out also. The two climbed over a fence and
walked along the bank of the stream. The boy paid no attention to the
muttering of his grandfather, but ran along beside him and wondered what was
going to happen. When a rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he
clapped his hands and danced with delight. He looked at the tall trees and
was sorry that he was not a little animal to climb high in the air without
being frightened. Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the
head of his grandfather into a clump of bushes. "Wake up, little animal. Go
and climb to the top of the trees," he shouted in a shrill voice.
Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with
his mind in a ferment. His earnestness affected the boy, who presently
became silent and a little alarmed. Into the old man's mind had come the
notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the sky,
that the presence of the boy and man on their knees in some lonely spot in
the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost inevitable.
"It was in just such a place as this that other David tended the sheep when
his father came and told him to go down unto Saul," he muttered.
Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen
log and when he had come to an open place among the trees he dropped upon
his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.
A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David.
Crouching beneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him and his
own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the presence not
only of his grandfather but of someone else, someone who might hurt him,
someone who was not kindly but dangerous and brutal. He began to cry and
reaching down picked up a small stick, which he held tightly gripped in his
fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in his own idea, suddenly arose and
advanced toward him, his terror grew until his whole body shook. In the
woods an intense silence seemed to lie over everything and suddenly out of
the silence came the old man's harsh and insistent voice. Gripping the boy's
shoulders, Jesse turned his face to the sky and shouted. The whole left side
of his face twitched and his hand on the boy's shoulder twitched also. "Make
a sign to me, God," he cried. "Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to
me out of the sky and make Thy presence known to me."
With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the
hands that held him, ran away through the forest. He did not believe that
the man who turned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the sky was
his grandfather at all. The man did not look like his grandfather. The
conviction that something strange and terrible had happened, that by some
miracle a new and dangerous person had come into the body of the kindly old
man, took possession of him. On and on he ran down the hillside, sobbing as
he ran. When he fell over the roots of a tree and in falling struck his
head, he arose and tried to run on again. His head hurt so that presently he
fell down and lay still, but it was only after Jesse had carried him to the
buggy and he awoke to find the old man's hand stroking his head tenderly
that the terror left him. "Take me away. There is a terrible man back there
in the woods," he declared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of
the trees and again his lips cried out to God. "What have I done that Thou
dost not approve of me," he whispered softly, saying the words over and over
as he drove rapidly along the road with the boy's cut and bleeding head held
tenderly against his shoulder.
III
Surrender
THE STORY OF Louise Bentley, who became Mrs. John Hardy and lived with
her husband in a brick house on Elm Street in Winesburg, is a story of
misunderstanding.
Before such women as Louise can be understood and their lives made
livable, much will have to be done. Thoughtful books will have to be written
and thoughtful lives lived by people about them.
Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard,
imaginative father, who did not look with favor upon her coming into the
world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of
over-sensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in such
great numbers into the world.
During her early years she lived on the Bentley farm, a silent, moody
child, wanting love more than anything else in the world and not getting it.
When she was fifteen she went to live in Winesburg with the family of Albert
Hardy, who had a store for the sale of buggies and wagons, and who was a
member of the town board of education.
Louise went into town to be a student in the Winesburg High School and
she went to live at the Hardys' because Albert Hardy and her father were
friends.
Hardy, the vehicle merchant of Winesburg, like thousands of other men
of his times, was an enthusiast on the subject of education. He had made his
own way in the world without learning got from books, but he was convinced
that had he but known books things would have gone better with him. To
everyone who came into his shop he talked of the matter, and in his own
household he drove his family distracted by his constant harping on the
subject.
He had two daughters and one son, John Hardy, and more than once the
daughters threatened to leave school altogether. As a matter of principle
they did just enough work in their classes to avoid punishment. "I hate
books and I hate anyone who likes books," Harriet, the younger of the two
girls, declared passionately.
In Winesburg as on the farm Louise was not happy. For years she had
dreamed of the time when she could go forth into the world, and she looked
upon the move into the Hardy household as a great step in the direction of
freedom. Always when she had thought of the matter, it had seemed to her
that in town all must be gaiety and life, that there men and women must live
happily and freely, giving and taking friendship and affection as one takes
the feel of a wind on the cheek. After the silence and the cheerlessness of
life in the Bentley house, she dreamed of stepping forth into an atmosphere
that was warm and pulsating with life and reality. And in the Hardy
household Louise might have got something of the thing for which she so
hungered but for a mistake she made when she had just come to town.
Louise won the disfavor of the two Hardy girls, Mary and Harriet, by
her application to her studies in school. She did not come to the house
until the day when school was to begin and knew nothing of the feeling they
had in the matter. She was timid and during the first month made no
acquaintances. Every Friday afternoon one of the hired men from the farm
drove into Winesburg and took her home for the week-end, so that she did not
spend the Saturday holiday with the town people. Because she was embarrassed
and lonely she worked constantly at her studies. To Mary and Harriet, it
seemed as though she tried to make trouble for them by her proficiency. In
her eagerness to appear well Louise wanted to answer every question put to
the class by the teacher. She jumped up and down and her eyes flashed. Then
when she had answered some question the others in the class had been unable
to answer, she smiled happily. "See, I have done it for you," her eyes
seemed to say. "You need not bother about the matter. I will answer all
questions. For the whole class it will be easy while I am here."
In the evening after supper in the Hardy house, Albert Hardy began to
praise Louise. One of the teachers had spoken highly of her and he was
delighted. "Well, again I have heard of it," he began, looking hard at his
daughters and then turning to smile at Louise. "Another of the teachers has
told me of the good work Louise is doing. Everyone in Winesburg is telling
me how smart she is. I am ashamed that they do not speak so of my own
girls." Arising, the merchant marched about the room and lighted his evening
cigar.
The two girls looked at each other and shook their heads wearily.
Seeing their indifference the father became angry. "I tell you it is
something for you two to be thinking about," he cried, glaring at them.
"There is a big change coming here in America and in learning is the only
hope of the coming generations. Louise is the daughter of a rich man but she
is not ashamed to study. It should make you ashamed to see what she does."
The merchant took his hat from a rack by the door and prepared to
depart for the evening. At the door he stopped and glared back. So fierce
was his manner that Louise was frightened and ran upstairs to her own room.
The daughters began to speak of their own affairs. "Pay attention to me,"
roared the merchant. "Your minds are lazy. Your indifference to education is
affecting your characters. You will amount to nothing. Now mark what I
say--Louise will be so far ahead of you that you will never catch up."
The distracted man went out of the house and into the street shaking
with wrath. He went along muttering words and swearing, but when he got into
Main Street his anger passed. He stopped to talk of the weather or the crops
with some other merchant or with a farmer who had come into town and forgot
his daughters altogether or, if he thought of them, only shrugged his
shoulders. "Oh, well, girls will be girls," he muttered philosophically.
In the house when Louise came down into the room where the two girls
sat, they would have nothing to do with her. One evening after she had been
there for more than six weeks and was heartbroken because of the continued
air of coldness with which she was always greeted, she burst into tears.
"Shut up your crying and go back to your own room and to your books," Mary
Hardy said sharply.
x x x
The room occupied by Louise was on the second floor of the Hardy house,
and her window looked out upon an orchard. There was a stove in the room and
every evening young John Hardy carried up an armful of wood and put it in a
box that stood by the wall. During the second month after she came to the
house, Louise gave up all hope of getting on a friendly footing with the
Hardy girls and went to her own room as soon as the evening meal was at an
end.
Her mind began to play with thoughts of making friends with John Hardy.
When he came into the room with the wood in his arms, she pretended to be
busy with her studies but watched him eagerly. When he had put the wood in
the box and turned to go out, she put down her head and blushed. She tried
to make talk but could say nothing, and after he had gone she was angry at
herself for her stupidity.
The mind of the country girl became filled with the idea of drawing
close to the young man. She thought that in him might be found the quality
she had all her life been seeking in people. It seemed to her that between
herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and
that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that
must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed with
the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of