GODLINESS PART 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 d** 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 pa**ed. 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 embarra**ed 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 pa**ionately 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 a**embled 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.