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When Jesse Bentley came home to the farm and
began to take charge of things he was a slight,
sensitive-looking man of twenty-two. At eighteen
he had left home to go to school to become a scholar
and eventually to become a minister of the Presbyterian
Church. All through his boyhood he had been
what in our country was called an "odd sheep" and
had not got on with his brothers. Of all the family
only his mother had understood him and she was
now dead. When he came home to take charge of
the farm, that had at that time grown to more than
six hundred acres, everyone on the farms about and
in the nearby town of Winesburg smiled at the idea
of his trying to handle the work that had been done
by his four strong brothers.
There was indeed good cause to smile. By the
standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man
at all. He was small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers,
wore a long black coat and a narrow black
string tie. The neighbors were amused when they
saw him, after the years away, and they were even
more amused when they saw the woman he had
married in the city.
As a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon go under.
That was perhaps Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern
Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War was no
place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley
was delicate. Jesse was hard with her as he was with
everybody about him in those days. She tried to do
such work as all the neighbor women about her did
and he let her go on without interference. She
helped to do the milking and did part of the housework;
she made the beds for the men and prepared
their food. For a year she worked every day from
sunrise until late at night and then after giving birth
to a child she died.
As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately
built man there was something within him that
could not easily be killed. He had brown curly hair
and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at
times wavering and uncertain. Not only was he slender
but he was also short of stature. His mouth was
like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined
child. Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man
born out of his time and place and for this he suffered
and made others suffer. Never did he succeed
in getting what he wanted out of fife and he did not
know what he wanted. Within a very short time
after he came home to the Bentley farm he made
everyone there a little afraid of him, and his wife,
who should have been close to him as his mother
had been, was afraid also. At the end of two weeks
after his coming, old Tom Bentley made over to him
the entire ownership of the place and retired into
the background. Everyone retired into the background.
In spite of his youth and inexperience, Jesse
had the trick of mastering the souls of his people.
He was so in earnest in everything he did and said
that no one understood him. He made everyone on
the farm work as they had never worked before and
yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well
they went well for Jesse and never for the people
who were his dependents. Like a thousand other
strong men who have come into the world here in
America in these later times, Jesse was but half
strong. He could master others but he could not
master himself. The running of the farm as it had
never been run before was easy for him. When he
came home from Cleveland where he had been in
school, he shut himself off from all of his people
and began to make plans. He thought about the
farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men on the farms about him worked too hard
and were too fired to think, but to think of the farm
and to be everlastingly making plans for its success
was a relief to Jesse. It partially satisfied something
in his passionate nature. Immediately after he came
home he had a wing built on to the old house and
in a large room facing the west he had windows that
looked into the barnyard and other windows that
looked off across the fields. By the window he sat
down to think. Hour after hour and day after day
he sat and looked over the land and thought out his
new place in life. The passionate burning thing in
his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard. He
wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his
state had ever produced before and then he wanted
something else. It was the indefinable hunger within
that made his eyes waver and that kept him always
more and more silent before people. He would have
given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear
that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
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