Winesburg, Ohio: Godliness

It was in reality not one house but a cluster of houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner.

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.

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.

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.

He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained only six hundred acres.

"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."

From childhood she had been inclined to fits of temper and when not angry she was often morose and silent.

Her husband, the banker, who was a careful, shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy.

Her life, lived as a half recluse, gave rise to all sorts of stories concerning her.

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.

When he heard his mother spoken of harshly or when he overheard her berating his father, he was frightened and ran away to hide.

He also grew bold and reaching out his hand stroked the face of the woman on the floor so that she was ecstatically happy.

It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.

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.

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.

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.

Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with his mind in a ferment.

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.

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.

"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."

"Oh, well, girls will be girls," he muttered philosophically.

"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.

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.

When the alarm that had tricked them into marriage proved to be groundless, she was angry and said bitter, hurtful things.

When John Hardy reproached her for her cruelty, she laughed.

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.

He was exultant and could not conceal his delight.

One of the Bentley sisters cooked the little animal and he ate it with great gusto.

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.

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.

"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.