Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town LifeAnderson, Sherwood
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Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
Anderson, Sherwood
City and town life -- Fiction; Ohio -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Pastoral fiction
A kind of terror he had never known before took possession of David.
Crouching beneath a tree he watched the man on the ground before him
and his own knees began to tremble. It seemed to him that he was in the
presence not only of his grandfather but of someone else, someone who
might hurt him, someone who was not kindly but dangerous and brutal. He
began to cry and reaching down picked up a small stick, which he held
tightly gripped in his fingers. When Jesse Bentley, absorbed in his own
idea, suddenly arose and advanced toward him, his terror grew until his
whole body shook. In the woods an intense silence seemed to lie over
everything and suddenly out of the silence came the old man’s harsh and
insistent voice. Gripping the boy’s shoulders, Jesse turned his face to
the sky and shouted. The whole left side of his face twitched and his
hand on the boy’s shoulder twitched also. “Make a sign to me, God,” he
cried. “Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to me out of the sky
and make Thy presence known to me.”
With a cry of fear, David turned and, shaking himself loose from the
hands that held him, ran away through the forest. He did not believe
that the man who turned up his face and in a harsh voice shouted at the
sky was his grandfather at all. The man did not look like his
grandfather. The conviction that something strange and terrible had
happened, that by some miracle a new and dangerous person had come into
the body of the kindly old man, took possession of him. On and on he
ran down the hillside, sobbing as he ran. When he fell over the roots
of a tree and in falling struck his head, he arose and tried to run on
again. His head hurt so that presently he fell down and lay still, but
it was only after Jesse had carried him to the buggy and he awoke to
find the old man’s hand stroking his head tenderly that the terror left
him. “Take me away. There is a terrible man back there in the woods,”
he declared firmly, while Jesse looked away over the tops of the trees
and again his lips cried out to God. “What have I done that Thou dost
not approve of me,” he whispered softly, saying the words over and over
as he drove rapidly along the road with the boy’s cut and bleeding head
held tenderly against his shoulder.
SURRENDER
PART THREE
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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