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 mis-
understanding.
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 in-
dustrialism 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 enthu-
siast 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 fam-
ily 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 pun-
ishment. "I hate books and I hate anyone who likes
books," Harriet, the younger of the two girls, de-
clared 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 ques-
tion the others in the class had been unable to an-
swer, 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 de-
lighted. "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 genera-
tions. 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 man-
ner 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 noth-
ing 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 under-
standable 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 some-
thing 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 un-
friendly 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 daugh-
ter 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 in-
truded 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 wom-
an'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 wom-
an'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 whis-
pered 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 lis-
tening 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 insis-
tently, she walked about in her room and wondered
what new impulse had led her to commit so ridicu-
lous 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. Lou-
ise, 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 loneli-
ness that had just come to her. "I hate everyone,"
she cried suddenly, and then broke forth into a ti-
rade 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 shoul-
der. 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 in-
tangible 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 mar-
riage 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."
Read next: GODLINESS A Tale in Four Parts: Part IV Terror, concerning David Hardy
Read previous: GODLINESS A Tale in Four Parts: Part II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
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