The Reverend Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of
Winesburg, and had been in that position ten years. He was forty years
old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in
the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from
Wednesday morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the
two sermons that must be preached on Sunday. Early on Sunday morning he
went into a little room called a study in the bell tower of the church
and prayed. In his prayers there was one note that always predominated.
“Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!” he pleaded,
kneeling on the bare floor and bowing his head in the presence of the
task that lay before him.
The Reverend Hartman was a tall man with a brown beard. His wife, a
stout, nervous woman, was the daughter of a manufacturer of underwear
at Cleveland, Ohio. The minister himself was rather a favorite in the
town. The elders of the church liked him because he was quiet and
unpretentious and Mrs. White, the banker’s wife, thought him scholarly
and refined.
The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other
churches of Winesburg. It was larger and more imposing and its minister
was better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on summer
evenings sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street
and up and down Buckeye Street he went, bowing gravely to the people,
while his wife, afire with secret pride, looked at him out of the
corners of her eyes and worried lest the horse become frightened and
run away.
For a good many years after he came to Winesburg things went well with
Curtis Hartman. He was not one to arouse keen enthusiasm among the
worshippers in his church but on the other hand he made no enemies. In
reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods
of remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the
highways and byways of the town. He wondered if the flame of the spirit
really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new
current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his
soul and the people would tremble before the spirit of God made
manifest in him. “I am a poor stick and that will never really happen
to me,” he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit up his
features. “Oh well, I suppose I’m doing well enough,” he added
philosophically.
The room in the bell tower of the church, where on Sunday mornings the
minister prayed for an increase in him of the power of God, had but one
window. It was long and narrow and swung outward on a hinge like a
door. On the window, made of little leaded panes, was a design showing
the Christ laying his hand upon the head of a child. One Sunday morning
in the summer as he sat by his desk in the room with a large Bible
opened before him, and the sheets of his sermon scattered about, the
minister was shocked to see, in the upper room of the house next door,
a woman lying in her bed and smoking a cigarette while she read a book.
Curtis Hartman went on tiptoe to the window and closed it softly. He
was horror stricken at the thought of a woman smoking and trembled also
to think that his eyes, just raised from the pages of the book of God,
had looked upon the bare shoulders and white throat of a woman. With
his brain in a whirl he went down into the pulpit and preached a long
sermon without once thinking of his gestures or his voice. The sermon
attracted unusual attention because of its power and clearness. “I
wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying a message into her
soul,” he thought and began to hope that on future Sunday mornings he
might be able to say words that would touch and awaken the woman
apparently far gone in secret sin.
The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through the windows of
which the minister had seen the sight that had so upset him, was
occupied by two women. Aunt Elizabeth Swift, a grey competent-looking
widow with money in the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with her
daughter Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school teacher was thirty
years old and had a neat trim-looking figure. She had few friends and
bore a reputation of having a sharp tongue. When he began to think
about her, Curtis Hartman remembered that she had been to Europe and
had lived for two years in New York City. “Perhaps after all her
smoking means nothing,” he thought. He began to remember that when he
was a student in college and occasionally read novels, good, although
somewhat worldly women, had smoked through the pages of a book that had
once fallen into his hands. With a rush of new determination he worked
on his sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to reach
the ears and the soul of this new listener, both his embarrassment in
the pulpit and the necessity of prayer in the study on Sunday mornings.
Reverend Hartman’s experience with women had been somewhat limited. He
was the son of a wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his
way through college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer had
boarded in a house where he lived during his school days and he had
married her after a formal and prolonged courtship, carried on for the
most part by the girl herself. On his marriage day the underwear
manufacturer had given his daughter five thousand dollars and he
promised to leave her at least twice that amount in his will. The
minister had thought himself fortunate in marriage and had never
permitted himself to think of other women. He did not want to think of
other women. What he wanted was to do the work of God quietly and
earnestly.
In the soul of the minister a struggle awoke. From wanting to reach the
ears of Kate Swift, and through his sermons to delve into her soul, he
began to want also to look again at the figure lying white and quiet in
the bed. On a Sunday morning when he could not sleep because of his
thoughts he arose and went to walk in the streets. When he had gone
along Main Street almost to the old Richmond place he stopped and
picking up a stone rushed off to the room in the bell tower. With the
stone he broke out a corner of the window and then locked the door and
sat down at the desk before the open Bible to wait. When the shade of
the window to Kate Swift’s room was raised he could see, through the
hole, directly into her bed, but she was not there. She also had arisen
and had gone for a walk and the hand that raised the shade was the hand
of Aunt Elizabeth Swift.
The minister almost wept with joy at this deliverance from the carnal
desire to “peep” and went back to his own house praising God. In an ill
moment he forgot, however, to stop the hole in the window. The piece of
glass broken out at the corner of the window just nipped off the bare
heel of the boy standing motionless and looking with rapt eyes into the
face of the Christ.
Curtis Hartman forgot his sermon on that Sunday morning. He talked to
his congregation and in his talk said that it was a mistake for people
to think of their minister as a man set aside and intended by nature to
lead a blameless life. “Out of my own experience I know that we, who
are the ministers of God’s word, are beset by the same temptations that
assail you,” he declared. “I have been tempted and have surrendered to
temptation. It is only the hand of God, placed beneath my head, that
has raised me up. As he has raised me so also will he raise you. Do not
despair. In your hour of sin raise your eyes to the skies and you will
be again and again saved.”
Resolutely the minister put the thoughts of the woman in the bed out of
his mind and began to be something like a lover in the presence of his
wife. One evening when they drove out together he turned the horse out
of Buckeye Street and in the darkness on Gospel Hill, above Waterworks
Pond, put his arm about Sarah Hartman’s waist. When he had eaten
breakfast in the morning and was ready to retire to his study at the
back of his house he went around the table and kissed his wife on the
cheek. When thoughts of Kate Swift came into his head, he smiled and
raised his eyes to the skies. “Intercede for me, Master,” he muttered,
“keep me in the narrow path intent on Thy work.”
And now began the real struggle in the soul of the brown-bearded
minister. By chance he discovered that Kate Swift was in the habit of
lying in her bed in the evenings and reading a book. A lamp stood on a
table by the side of the bed and the light streamed down upon her white
shoulders and bare throat. On the evening when he made the discovery
the minister sat at the desk in the dusty room from nine until after
eleven and when her light was put out stumbled out of the church to
spend two more hours walking and praying in the streets. He did not
want to kiss the shoulders and the throat of Kate Swift and had not
allowed his mind to dwell on such thoughts. He did not know what he
wanted. “I am God’s child and he must save me from myself,” he cried,
in the darkness under the trees as he wandered in the streets. By a
tree he stood and looked at the sky that was covered with hurrying
clouds. He began to talk to God intimately and closely. “Please,
Father, do not forget me. Give me power to go tomorrow and repair the
hole in the window. Lift my eyes again to the skies. Stay with me, Thy
servant, in his hour of need.”
Up and down through the silent streets walked the minister and for days
and weeks his soul was troubled. He could not understand the temptation
that had come to him nor could he fathom the reason for its coming. In
a way he began to blame God, saying to himself that he had tried to
keep his feet in the true path and had not run about seeking sin.
“Through my days as a young man and all through my life here I have
gone quietly about my work,” he declared. “Why now should I be tempted?
What have I done that this burden should be laid on me?”
Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis
Hartman crept out of his house to the room in the bell tower to sit in
the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and
later went to walk and pray in the streets. He could not understand
himself. For weeks he would go along scarcely thinking of the school
teacher and telling himself that he had conquered the carnal desire to
look at her body. And then something would happen. As he sat in the
study of his own house, hard at work on a sermon, he would become
nervous and begin to walk up and down the room. “I will go out into the
streets,” he told himself and even as he let himself in at the church
door he persistently denied to himself the cause of his being there. “I
will not repair the hole in the window and I will train myself to come
here at night and sit in the presence of this woman without raising my
eyes. I will not be defeated in this thing. The Lord has devised this
temptation as a test of my soul and I will grope my way out of darkness
into the light of righteousness.”
One night in January when it was bitter cold and snow lay deep on the
streets of Winesburg Curtis Hartman paid his last visit to the room in
the bell tower of the church. It was past nine o’clock when he left his
own house and he set out so hurriedly that he forgot to put on his
overshoes. In Main Street no one was abroad but Hop Higgins the night
watchman and in the whole town no one was awake but the watchman and
young George Willard, who sat in the office of the _Winesburg Eagle_
trying to write a story. Along the street to the church went the
minister, plowing through the drifts and thinking that this time he
would utterly give way to sin. “I want to look at the woman and to
think of kissing her shoulders and I am going to let myself think what
I choose,” he declared bitterly and tears came into his eyes. He began
to think that he would get out of the ministry and try some other way
of life. “I shall go to some city and get into business,” he declared.
“If my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give myself
over to sin. At least I shall not be a hypocrite, preaching the word of
God with my mind thinking of the shoulders and neck of a woman who does
not belong to me.”
It was cold in the room of the bell tower of the church on that January
night and almost as soon as he came into the room Curtis Hartman knew
that if he stayed he would be ill. His feet were wet from tramping in
the snow and there was no fire. In the room in the house next door Kate
Swift had not yet appeared. With grim determination the man sat down to
wait. Sitting in the chair and gripping the edge of the desk on which
lay the Bible he stared into the darkness thinking the blackest
thoughts of his life. He thought of his wife and for the moment almost
hated her. “She has always been ashamed of passion and has cheated me,”
he thought. “Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a
woman. He has no right to forget that he is an animal and in me there
is something that is Greek. I will throw off the woman of my bosom and
seek other women. I will besiege this school teacher. I will fly in the
face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will live then
for my lusts.”
The distracted man trembled from head to foot, partly from cold, partly
from the struggle in which he was engaged. Hours passed and a fever
assailed his body. His throat began to hurt and his teeth chattered.
His feet on the study floor felt like two cakes of ice. Still he would
not give up. “I will see this woman and will think the thoughts I have
never dared to think,” he told himself, gripping the edge of the desk
and waiting.
Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that night of
waiting in the church, and also he found in the thing that happened
what he took to be the way of life for him. On other evenings when he
had waited he had not been able to see, through the little hole in the
glass, any part of the school teacher’s room except that occupied by
her bed. In the darkness he had waited until the woman suddenly
appeared sitting in the bed in her white nightrobe. When the light was
turned up she propped herself up among the pillows and read a book.
Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes. Only her bare shoulders and
throat were visible.
On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after
his mind had two or three times actually slipped away into an odd land
of fantasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself
back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next door a
lamp was lighted and the waiting man stared into an empty bed. Then
upon the bed before his eyes a naked woman threw herself. Lying face
downward she wept and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final
outburst of weeping she half arose, and in the presence of the man who
had waited to look and not to think thoughts the woman of sin began to
pray. In the lamplight her figure, slim and strong, looked like the
figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window.
Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the church. With a
cry he arose, dragging the heavy desk along the floor. The Bible fell,
making a great clatter in the silence. When the light in the house next
door went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the street. Along
the street he went and ran in at the door of the _Winesburg Eagle_. To
George Willard, who was tramping up and down in the office undergoing a
struggle of his own, he began to talk half incoherently. “The ways of
God are beyond human understanding,” he cried, running in quickly and
closing the door. He began to advance upon the young man, his eyes
glowing and his voice ringing with fervor. “I have found the light,” he
cried. “After ten years in this town, God has manifested himself to me
in the body of a woman.” His voice dropped and he began to whisper. “I
did not understand,” he said. “What I took to be a trial of my soul was
only a preparation for a new and more beautiful fervor of the spirit.
God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher,
kneeling naked on a bed. Do you know Kate Swift? Although she may not
be aware of it, she is an instrument of God, bearing the message of
truth.”
Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door
he stopped, and after looking up and down the deserted street, turned
again to George Willard. “I am delivered. Have no fear.” He held up a
bleeding fist for the young man to see. “I smashed the glass of the
window,” he cried. “Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The
strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist.”