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.”