GODLINESS PART I
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 pa**ing 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 bu*t 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
pa**ion 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 k**ed. 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 k**ed
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 k**ed. 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 pa**ionate 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 pa**ionate 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 pa**ed 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 k**ing 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 d**h,
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 d**h, 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."