Chapter: GODLINESS

A Tale in Four Parts

There were always three or four old people sitting on
the front porch of the house or puttering about the
garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the old people
were women and sisters to Jesse. They were a colorless,
soft voiced lot. Then there was a silent old man with
thin white hair who was Jesse's uncle.

The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outer-covering
over a framework of logs. It was in reality not one
house but a cluster of houses joined together in a
rather haphazard manner. Inside, the place was full of
surprises. One went up steps from the living room into
the dining room and there were always steps to be
ascended or descended in passing from one room to
another. At meal times the place was like a beehive. At
one moment all was quiet, then doors began to open,
feet clattered on stairs, a murmur of soft voices arose
and people appeared from a dozen obscure corners.

Besides the old people, already mentioned, many others
lived in the Bentley house. There were four hired men,
a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe, who was in charge of
the housekeeping, a dull-witted girl named Eliza
Stoughton, who made beds and helped with the milking, a
boy who worked in the stables, and Jesse Bentley
himself, the owner and overlord of it all.

By the time the American Civil War had been over for
twenty years, that part of Northern Ohio where the
Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge from pioneer
life. Jesse then owned machinery for harvesting grain.
He had built modern barns and most of his land was
drained with carefully laid tile drain, but in order to
understand the man we will have to go back to an
earlier day.

The Bentley family had been in Northern Ohio for
several generations before Jesse's time. They came from
New York State and took up land when the country was
new and land could be had at a low price. For a long
time they, in common with all the other Middle Western
people, were very poor. The land they had settled upon
was heavily wooded and covered with fallen logs and
underbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing these
away and cutting the timber, there were still the
stumps to be reckoned with. Plows run through the
fields caught on hidden roots, stones lay all about, on
the low places water gathered, and the young corn
turned yellow, sickened and died.

When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers had come into
their ownership of the place, much of the harder part
of the work of clearing had been done, but they clung
to old traditions and worked like driven animals. They
lived as practically all of the farming people of the
time lived. In the spring and through most of the
winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg
were a sea of mud. The four young men of the family
worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of
coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired
beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little
that was not coarse and brutal and outwardly they were
themselves coarse and brutal. On Saturday afternoons
they hitched a team of horses to a three-seated wagon
and went off to town. In town they stood about the
stoves in the stores talking to other farmers or to the
store keepers. They were dressed in overalls and in the
winter wore heavy coats that were flecked with mud.
Their hands as they stretched them out to the heat of
the stoves were cracked and red. It was difficult for
them to talk and so they for the most part kept silent.
When they had bought meat, flour, sugar, and salt, they
went into one of the Winesburg saloons and drank beer.
Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts
of their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor
of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of
crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of
them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats
and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long
and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into
songs. Once Enoch Bentley, the older one of the boys,
struck his father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a
teamster's whip, and the old man seemed likely to die.
For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in the loft of the
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 Tom 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 life
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 inter-urban 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 fifty-five 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 modern 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 torn 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.

               *  *  *

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 her
association with people something quite different, and
that it was possible by such an act to pass into a new
life as one opens a door and goes into a room. Day and
night she thought of the matter, but although the thing
she wanted so earnestly was something very warm and
close it had as yet no conscious connection with sex.
It had not become that definite, and her mind had only
alighted upon the person of John Hardy because he was
at hand and unlike his sisters had not been unfriendly
to her.

The Hardy sisters, Mary and Harriet, were both older
than Louise. In a certain kind of knowledge of the
world they were years older. They lived as all of the
young women of Middle Western towns lived. In those
days young women did not go out of our towns to Eastern
colleges and ideas in regard to social classes had
hardly begun to exist. A daughter of a laborer was in
much the same social position as a daughter of a farmer
or a merchant, and there were no leisure classes. A
girl was "nice" or she was "not nice." If a nice girl,
she had a young man who came to her house to see her on
Sunday and on Wednesday evenings. Sometimes she went
with her young man to a dance or a church social. At
other times she received him at the house and was given
the use of the parlor for that purpose. No one intruded
upon her. For hours the two sat behind closed doors.
Sometimes the lights were turned low and the young man
and woman embraced. Cheeks became hot and hair
disarranged. After a year or two, if the impulse within
them became strong and insistent enough, they married.

One evening during her first winter in Winesburg,
Louise had an adventure that gave a new impulse to her
desire to break down the wall that she thought stood
between her and John Hardy. It was Wednesday and
immediately after the evening meal Albert Hardy put on
his hat and went away. Young John brought the wood and
put it in the box in Louise's room. "You do work hard,
don't you?" he said awkwardly, and then before she
could answer he also went away.

Louise heard him go out of the house and had a mad
desire to run after him. Opening her window she leaned
out and called softly, "John, dear John, come back,
don't go away." The night was cloudy and she could not
see far into the darkness, but as she waited she
fancied she could hear a soft little noise as of
someone going on tiptoes through the trees in the
orchard. She was frightened and closed the window
quickly. For an hour she moved about the room trembling
with excitement and when she could not longer bear the
waiting, she crept into the hall and down the stairs
into a closet-like room that opened off the parlor.

Louise had decided that she would perform the
courageous act that had for weeks been in her mind. She
was convinced that John Hardy had concealed himself in
the orchard beneath her window and she was determined
to find him and tell him that she wanted him to come
close to her, to hold her in his arms, to tell her of
his thoughts and dreams and to listen while she told
him her thoughts and dreams. "In the darkness it will
be easier to say things," she whispered to herself, as
she stood in the little room groping for the door.

And then suddenly Louise realized that she was not
alone in the house. In the parlor on the other side of
the door a man's voice spoke softly and the door
opened. Louise just had time to conceal herself in a
little opening beneath the stairway when Mary Hardy,
accompanied by her young man, came into the little dark
room.

For an hour Louise sat on the floor in the darkness and
listened. Without words Mary Hardy, with the aid of the
man who had come to spend the evening with her, brought
to the country girl a knowledge of men and women.
Putting her head down until she was curled into a
little ball she lay perfectly still. It seemed to her
that by some strange impulse of the gods, a great gift
had been brought to Mary Hardy and she could not
understand the older woman's determined protest.

The young man took Mary Hardy into his arms and kissed
her. When she struggled and laughed, he but held her
the more tightly. For an hour the contest between them
went on and then they went back into the parlor and
Louise escaped up the stairs. "I hope you were quiet
out there. You must not disturb the little mouse at her
studies," she heard Harriet saying to her sister as she
stood by her own door in the hallway above.

Louise wrote a note to John Hardy and late that night,
when all in the house were asleep, she crept downstairs
and slipped it under his door. She was afraid that if
she did not do the thing at once her courage would
fail. In the note she tried to be quite definite about
what she wanted. "I want someone to love me and I want
to love someone," she wrote. "If you are the one for me
I want you to come into the orchard at night and make a
noise under my window. It will be easy for me to crawl
down over the shed and come to you. I am thinking about
it all the time, so if you are to come at all you must
come soon."

For a long time Louise did not know what would be the
outcome of her bold attempt to secure for herself a
lover. In a way she still did not know whether or not
she wanted him to come. Sometimes it seemed to her that
to be held tightly and kissed was the whole secret of
life, and then a new impulse came and she was terribly
afraid. The age-old woman's desire to be possessed had
taken possession of her, but so vague was her notion of
life that it seemed to her just the touch of John
Hardy's hand upon her own hand would satisfy. She
wondered if he would understand that. At the table next
day while Albert Hardy talked and the two girls
whispered and laughed, she did not look at John but at
the table and as soon as possible escaped. In the
evening she went out of the house until she was sure he
had taken the wood to her room and gone away. When
after several evenings of intense listening she heard
no call from the darkness in the orchard, she was half
beside herself with grief and decided that for her
there was no way to break through the wall that had
shut her off from the joy of life.

And then on a Monday evening two or three weeks after
the writing of the note, John Hardy came for her.
Louise had so entirely given up the thought of his
coming that for a long time she did not hear the call
that came up from the orchard. On the Friday evening
before, as she was being driven back to the farm for
the week-end by one of the hired men, she had on an
impulse done a thing that had startled her, and as John
Hardy stood in the darkness below and called her name
softly and insistently, she walked about in her room
and wondered what new impulse had led her to commit so
ridiculous an act.

The farm hand, a young fellow with black curly hair,
had come for her somewhat late on that Friday evening
and they drove home in the darkness. Louise, whose mind
was filled with thoughts of John Hardy, tried to make
talk but the country boy was embarrassed and would say
nothing. Her mind began to review the loneliness of her
childhood and she remembered with a pang the sharp new
loneliness that had just come to her. "I hate
everyone," she cried suddenly, and then broke forth
into a tirade that frightened her escort. "I hate
father and the old man Hardy, too," she declared
vehemently. "I get my lessons there in the school in
town but I hate that also."

Louise frightened the farm hand still more by turning
and putting her cheek down upon his shoulder. Vaguely
she hoped that he like that young man who had stood in
the darkness with Mary would put his arms about her and
kiss her, but the country boy was only alarmed. He
struck the horse with the whip and began to whistle.
"The road is rough, eh?" he said loudly. Louise was so
angry that reaching up she snatched his hat from his
head and threw it into the road. When he jumped out of
the buggy and went to get it, she drove off and left
him to walk the rest of the way back to the farm.

Louise Bentley took John Hardy to be her lover. That
was not what she wanted but it was so the young man had
interpreted her approach to him, and so anxious was she
to achieve something else that she made no resistance.
When after a few months they were both afraid that she
was about to become a mother, they went one evening to
the county seat and were married. For a few months they
lived in the Hardy house and then took a house of their
own. All during the first year Louise tried to make her
husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that
had led to the writing of the note and that was still
unsatisfied. Again and again she crept into his arms
and tried to talk of it, but always without success.
Filled with his own notions of love between men and
women, he did not listen but began to kiss her upon the
lips. That confused her so that in the end she did not
want to be kissed. She did not know what she wanted.

When the alarm that had tricked them into marriage
proved to be groundless, she was angry and said bitter,
hurtful things. Later when her son David was born, she
could not nurse him and did not know whether she wanted
him or not. Sometimes she stayed in the room with him
all day, walking about and occasionally creeping close
to touch him tenderly with her hands, and then other
days came when she did not want to see or be near the
tiny bit of humanity that had come into the house. When
John Hardy reproached her for her cruelty, she laughed.
"It is a man child and will get what it wants anyway,"
she said sharply. "Had it been a woman child there is
nothing in the world I would not have done for it."



IV

Terror

When David Hardy was a tall boy of fifteen, he, like
his mother, had an adventure that changed the whole
current of his life and sent him out of his quiet
corner into the world. The shell of the circumstances
of his life was broken and he was compelled to start
forth. He left Winesburg and no one there ever saw him
again. After his disappearance, his mother and
grandfather both died and his father became very rich.
He spent much money in trying to locate his son, but
that is no part of this story.

It was in the late fall of an unusual year on the
Bentley farms. Everywhere the crops had been heavy.
That spring, Jesse had bought part of a long strip of
black swamp land that lay in the valley of Wine Creek.
He got the land at a low price but had spent a large
sum of money to improve it. Great ditches had to be dug
and thousands of tile laid. Neighboring farmers shook
their heads over the expense. Some of them laughed and
hoped that Jesse would lose heavily by the venture, but
the old man went silently on with the work and said
nothing.

When the land was drained he planted it to cabbages and
onions, and again the neighbors laughed. The crop was,
however, enormous and brought high prices. In the one
year Jesse made enough money to pay for all the cost of
preparing the land and had a surplus that enabled him
to buy two more farms. He was exultant and could not
conceal his delight. For the first time in all the
history of his ownership of the farms, he went among
his men with a smiling face.

Jesse bought a great many new machines for cutting down
the cost of labor and all of the remaining acres in the
strip of black fertile swamp land. One day he went into
Winesburg and bought a bicycle and a new suit of
clothes for David and he gave his two sisters money
with which to go to a religious convention at
Cleveland, Ohio.

In the fall of that year when the frost came and the
trees in the forests along Wine Creek were golden
brown, David spent every moment when he did not have to
attend school, out in the open. Alone or with other
boys he went every afternoon into the woods to gather
nuts. The other boys of the countryside, most of them
sons of laborers on the Bentley farms, had guns with
which they went hunting rabbits and squirrels, but
David did not go with them. He made himself a sling
with rubber bands and a forked stick and went off by
himself to gather nuts. As he went about thoughts came
to him. He realized that he was almost a man and
wondered what he would do in life, but before they came
to anything, the thoughts passed and he was a boy
again. One day he killed a squirrel that sat on one of
the lower branches of a tree and chattered at him. Home
he ran with the squirrel in his hand. One of the
Bentley sisters cooked the little animal and he ate it
with great gusto. The skin he tacked on a board and
suspended the board by a string from his bedroom
window.

That gave his mind a new turn. After that he never
went into the woods without carrying the sling in his
pocket and he spent hours shooting at imaginary animals
concealed among the brown leaves in the trees. Thoughts
of his coming manhood passed and he was content to be a
boy with a boy's impulses.

One Saturday morning when he was about to set off for
the woods with the sling in his pocket and a bag for
nuts on his shoulder, his grandfather stopped him. In
the eyes of the old man was the strained serious look
that always a little frightened David. At such times
Jesse Bentley's eyes did not look straight ahead but
wavered and seemed to be looking at nothing. Something
like an invisible curtain appeared to have come between
the man and all the rest of the world. "I want you to
come with me," he said briefly, and his eyes looked
over the boy's head into the sky. "We have something
important to do today. You may bring the bag for nuts
if you wish. It does not matter and anyway we will be
going into the woods."

Jesse and David set out from the Bentley farmhouse in
the old phaeton that was drawn by the white horse. When
they had gone along in silence for a long way they
stopped at the edge of a field where a flock of sheep
were grazing. Among the sheep was a lamb that had been
born out of season, and this David and his grandfather
caught and tied so tightly that it looked like a little
white ball. When they drove on again Jesse let David
hold the lamb in his arms. "I saw it yesterday and it
put me in mind of what I have long wanted to do," he
said, and again he looked away over the head of the boy
with the wavering, uncertain stare in his eyes.

After the feeling of exaltation that had come to the
farmer as a result of his successful year, another mood
had taken possession of him. For a long time he had
been going about feeling very humble and prayerful.
Again he walked alone at night thinking of God and as
he walked he again connected his own figure with the
figures of old days. Under the stars he knelt on the
wet grass and raised up his voice in prayer. Now he had
decided that like the men whose stories filled the
pages of the Bible, he would make a sacrifice to God.
"I have been given these abundant crops and God has
also sent me a boy who is called David," he whispered
to himself. "Perhaps I should have done this thing long
ago." He was sorry the idea had not come into his mind
in the days before his daughter Louise had been born
and thought that surely now when he had erected a pile
of burning sticks in some lonely place in the woods and
had offered the body of a lamb as a burnt offering, God
would appear to him and give him a message.

More and more as he thought of the matter, he thought
also of David and his passionate self-love was
partially forgotten. "It is time for the boy to begin
thinking of going out into the world and the message
will be one concerning him," he decided. "God will make
a pathway for him. He will tell me what place David is
to take in life and when he shall set out on his
journey. It is right that the boy should be there. If I
am fortunate and an angel of God should appear, David
will see the beauty and glory of God made manifest to
man. It will make a true man of God of him also."

In silence Jesse and David drove along the road until
they came to that place where Jesse had once before
appealed to God and had frightened his grandson. The
morning had been bright and cheerful, but a cold wind
now began to blow and clouds hid the sun. When David
saw the place to which they had come he began to
tremble with fright, and when they stopped by the
bridge where the creek came down from among the trees,
he wanted to spring out of the phaeton and run away.

A dozen plans for escape ran through David's head, but
when Jesse stopped the horse and climbed over the fence
into the wood, he followed. "It is foolish to be
afraid. Nothing will happen," he told himself as he
went along with the lamb in his arms. There was
something in the helplessness of the little animal held
so tightly in his arms that gave him courage. He could
feel the rapid beating of the beast's heart and that
made his own heart beat less rapidly. As he walked
swiftly along behind his grandfather, he untied the
string with which the four legs of the lamb were
fastened together. "If anything happens we will run
away together," he thought.

In the woods, after they had gone a long way from the
road, Jesse stopped in an opening among the trees where
a clearing, overgrown with small bushes, ran up from
the creek. He was still silent but began at once to
erect a heap of dry sticks which he presently set
afire. The boy sat on the ground with the lamb in his
arms. His imagination began to invest every movement of
the old man with significance and he became every
moment more afraid. "I must put the blood of the lamb
on the head of the boy," Jesse muttered when the sticks
had begun to blaze greedily, and taking a long knife
from his pocket he turned and walked rapidly across the
clearing toward David.

Terror seized upon the soul of the boy. He was sick
with it. For a moment he sat perfectly still and then
his body stiffened and he sprang to his feet. His face
became as white as the fleece of the lamb that, now
finding itself suddenly released, ran down the hill.
David ran also. Fear made his feet fly. Over the low
bushes and logs he leaped frantically. As he ran he put
his hand into his pocket and took out the branched
stick from which the sling for shooting squirrels was
suspended. When he came to the creek that was shallow
and splashed down over the stones, he dashed into the
water and turned to look back, and when he saw his
grandfather still running toward him with the long
knife held tightly in his hand he did not hesitate, but
reaching down, selected a stone and put it in the
sling. With all his strength he drew back the heavy
rubber bands and the stone whistled through the air. It
hit Jesse, who had entirely forgotten the boy and was
pursuing the lamb, squarely in the head. With a groan
he pitched forward and fell almost at the boy's feet.
When David saw that he lay still and that he was
apparently dead, his fright increased immeasurably. It
became an insane panic.

With a cry he turned and ran off through the woods
weeping convulsively. "I don't care--I killed him, but
I don't care," he sobbed. As he ran on and on he
decided suddenly that he would never go back again to
the Bentley farms or to the town of Winesburg. "I have
killed the man of God and now I will myself be a man
and go into the world," he said stoutly as he stopped
running and walked rapidly down a road that followed
the windings of Wine Creek as it ran through fields and
forests into the west.

On the ground by the creek Jesse Bentley moved uneasily
about. He groaned and opened his eyes. For a long time
he lay perfectly still and looked at the sky. When at
last he got to his feet, his mind was confused and he
was not surprised by the boy's disappearance. By the
roadside he sat down on a log and began to talk about
God. That is all they ever got out of him. Whenever
David's name was mentioned he looked vaguely at the sky
and said that a messenger from God had taken the boy.
"It happened because I was too greedy for glory," he
declared, and would have no more to say in the matter.

 "Godliness" is a tale in four parts telling of the disintegration of the Bentley family. Jesse Bentley, the family patriarch, has, through hard work and thrift, become a wealthy and successful leader in the community. As the years have passed, however, Jesse, once a devout man, has come to confuse amassing wealth with serving God. Thus we again have the distortion of something good into something warped and grotesque. Part One of the story traces the history of Jesse's family, how Tom Bentley and his four burly, hard-drinking sons wrested the farm from frontier wildness. When the four sons are killed in the Civil War, Tom has to ask his fifth son, Jesse, to give up his studies for the ministry and come home to take care of the farm. To everyone's surprise, the frail Jesse manages the farm very successfully after his father dies. He makes everyone on the farm work long hours and although there is no joy on the place, the farm does prosper. Jesse, therefore, begins to be proud, and when his wife is about to have a child he prays to God that the baby will be a boy, to "be called David and . . . help me to pluck at last all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines." Part Two begins about thirty years later and concerns David Hardy, the grandson of Jesse. We learn that Jesse had only one child, Louise, whose mother died when the baby was born. The farmhouse has been a rather sad, drab place, filled with maiden aunts, hired hands, and servants, but repressed by Jesse's obsession for more land. The atmosphere is less repressive, however, after the twelve-year-old David comes to live there; even the aged Jesse begins to mellow. Unfortunately, however, as the result of an incident one summer day, a misunderstanding breaks the bond that is growing between Jesse and his grandson. Jesse has taken David into the woods and, looking up at the sky, begins to shout to God, "Come down to me out of the sky and make Thy presence known to me." The youth is so frightened at this strange action that he runs away, falls, and cuts his head. Jesse is thus convinced that God disapproves of His servant Jesse. Part Three reverts back in time to tell the story of Louise Bentley, "a silent, moody child, wanting love more than anything else in the world and not getting it." At fifteen, she left the farm to live with the Hardy family in town so that she could attend school. When the two Hardy daughters reject her, she feels that "between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up." In desperation, she slips a note under the door of John's room. "I want someone to love me and I want to love someone," her note reads. John interprets this message as George Willard interprets Louise Trunnion's message in "Nobody Knows"; Louise Bentley and John Hardy become lovers and thinking that Louise is pregnant, they get married. After David is born, Louise is often cruel to him but she excuses herself saying, "It is a man child and will get what it wants anyway." The feeling of isolation is even more apparent in Louise's story than it is in that of Jesse Bentley or David Hardy. Louise has grown up knowing that her father wanted a son, not a daughter. The motherless girl hoped to find fun and friendship in town; instead, sexual promiscuity trapped her into marriage. She becomes a bitter, neurotic woman, frequently hateful to her husband and son, often drunk and staying in her locked room alone for days. This is what David escaped from when his grandfather asked him to live on the farm. In this chronologically jumbled story, Part Four tells about Jesse's taking fifteen-year-old David into the woods again. This time Jesse intends to sacrifice a lamb to God in thanks for a bountiful harvest, but he does not bother to explain this to David. When the boy sees his wild-eyed grandfather with a knife in his hand approaching him and the lamb, David is again frightened and flees. Jesse pursues and David hits him with a small rock fired from his slingshot. Seeing his grandfather fall, David thinks that the old man is dead and he runs away from Winesburg, never to return. In shooting Jesse with a slingshot, David is obviously reenacting the David-Goliath story, but, here, Goliath is not the rather pitiful figure of Jesse Bentley; instead, Goliath is the greedy materialism and fanatic religion which Jesse represents. Jesse personifies America's puritan heritage, a heritage that has fostered in American citizens such desirable qualities as thrift and industry, but has often caused pride, narrow-mindedness, coldness of heart, and greed. Jesse has not only ruled his own family and servants without love, he has scorned his neighbors as Philistines and has coveted their land. Anderson claims in this story that Jesse is typical of his times. He says of Jesse Bentley, "The old brutal ignorance that had in it a kind of beautiful childlike innocence" changed when he "like all men of his time" was "touched by the deep influences that were at work in the country during those years when modern industrialization was being born." Anderson describes this period as "the most materialistic age in the history of the world" and laments that "beauty is well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions." Jesse Bentley welcomes the new machinery that is being manufactured for it enables him to farm more efficiently and with fewer hired hands; yet as Anderson shows us, Jesse is not happy. He is a lonely old man who has killed his wife by overwork, has rejected his daughter, and has frightened away his grandson.

