Jennie Gerhardt. Theodore Dreiser

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СКАЧАТЬ in this country, he had made his way by slow stages from New York to Philadelphia and thence westward, working for a time in the various glass factories of Pennsylvania, and found, in one romantic village of this new world, his heart’s ideal. With her, a simple American girl, of immediate German extraction, he had removed to Youngstown, and thence to Columbus, each time following a glass manufacturer by the name of Hammond, whose business prospered and waned by turns.

      It is to some purpose that the natural romance of such a progress is indicated, for this man had now become extremely religious; and this feeling was directly due to the pensive, speculative chord re-echoing in a nature incapable of a broad mental perspective, but producing such actions and wanderings as his life, up to this time, had been full of. Gerhardt felt, rather than reasoned. He had always done so. A slap on the back, accompanied by enthusiastic protestations of affection or regard, was always worth more to him than mere cold propositions concerning his own individual advancement. He loved companionship, and was easily persuaded by it, but never beyond the limit of honesty.

      “William,” his employer used to say to him, “I want you because I can trust you,” and this, to him, was more than silver and gold.

      He might sometimes get so overwrought by praise of this sort that he would talk about it, but ordinarily it was a deep-seated happiness which he found in realizing that he was honest.

      This honesty, like his religious propensity, was wholly due to inheritance. He had never reasoned about it. Father and grandfather before him were sturdy German artisans who had never cheated anybody out of a dollar, and this honesty of intention came into his veins undiminished.

      His Lutheran proclivities had been strengthened by years of church-going and home religious service. In his father’s cottage, the influence of the Lutheran minister had been all-powerful, and from that situation he inherited the feeling that the Lutheran Church was a perfect institution, and its teachings of all-importance when it came to the matter of future life. Having neglected it during the ruddiest period of his youth, he took it up again when it came to the matter of selecting a wife, and was insistent enough to have his sweetheart change her faith at his behest. She would naturally have aligned herself with the Mennonite or perhaps the Dunkard religion, had theology been of equal weight with love. As it was, she came heartily over to the Lutheran denomination, was resoundingly instructed by a preacher of that faith in Beaver Falls, and thereafter came modestly to believe in it—the positive thunderings of the local pulpit seeming scarcely explicable to her on any other grounds than that of absolute truth. Why should these men rage and roar if what they said was not dangerously true? Why wear black, and forever struggle in so solemn a cause? Regularly she attended the small local church with her husband; and the several ministers, who had come and gone in their time, had been regular visitors, and, in a sense, inspectors of this household.

      Pastor Wundt, the latest minister, saw to it personally that they gave a good account of themselves. He was a sincere and ardent churchman, but his bigotry and domineering orthodoxy were all outside the pale of rational religious conception. He considered that the members of his flock were jeopardizing their eternal salvation if they danced, played cards or went to theatres, and he did not hesitate to declare vociferously that hell was yawning for those who disobeyed his injunctions. Drinking, even temperately, was a sin. Smoking—well, he smoked himself. Right conduct in marriage, however, and innocence in the matter of youthful virtue until marriage was reached, were the last essence of Christian necessity. Let no one talk of salvation, he had said, for a daughter who had failed to keep her chastity unstained, or for the parents who, by negligence, had permitted her to fall. Hell was yawning for all such. You must walk the straight and narrow way if you would escape eternal punishment through his theology, and there was scarcely a Sunday in which he did not refer to the iniquitous license which was observable among American young men and women.

      “Such shamelessness!” he used to say. “Such indifference to all youthful reserve and innocence!—Here they go, these young boys, loafing about the street comers, when they should be at home helping their fathers and mothers, or studying and improving their minds.” And the girls—what bitter scenes had he of late not been compelled to contemplate. There was laxness somewhere. These fathers and mothers, whose daughters walked the streets after seven at night, and were seen strolling in the shadowy path of the trees and hanging over gates and fences talking to young men, would rue it some day. There was no possible good to come out of anything like that. The boys could only evolve into loafers and scoundrels, the daughters into something too shameless to name. Let there be heed taken of this.

      Gerhardt and his wife and Jennie heard this, and, so indeed, did all the others except Sebastian, but the little ones were, of course, not able to understand very well. Sebastian could not be made to go to church. He was vigorous and self-willed, and his father, from whipping him, unavailingly, and occasionally threatening to turn him out of doors, had come, out of sympathy for the lad’s mother, merely to complain tempestuously about him every Sunday morning. Jennie herself was convinced that it was terrible the way he acted. She knew that he was honest, and worked steadily, but she thought that he should not neglect the church, and particularly should not offend and grieve his parents. Religion had, as yet, no striking hold upon her. In fact, she felt its claims most lightly. It was a pleasant thing to know that there was a heaven, a fearsome one to realize that there was a hell. Young girls and boys ought to be good, and be genial toward their parents, when they had to work so hard. Otherwise, the whole religious problem was badly jumbled in her mind, and she did not know what to make of it.

      Gerhardt was convinced that everything spoken from the pulpit of his church was literally true. He believed now that he had been rather wild and irreligious in his youth, and that the problem of the future life was the all-important question for man. Death was an awesome thing to him. He had lived in dread of the icy marvel of it ever since his youth, and now that the years were slipping away and the problem of the world was becoming more and more inexplicable, he clung with pathetic anxiety to the doctrines which contained a solution. Oh, if he could only be so honest and upright, he thought, that the Lord would have no excuse for ruling him out. He trembled not only for himself, but for his wife and children. Would he not some day be held responsible for them? Would not his own laxity and lack of system in inculcating the laws of eternal life to them end in his and their damnation? He pictured to himself the torments of hell, and wondered how it would be with him and his in the final hour.

      Naturally, such a deep religious feeling made him stem with his children. He was prone to hold them close to the line of religious duty, and scan with a narrow eye the pleasures and foibles of youthful desire. Jennie was never to have any lover, it seemed. Any flirtation she might have had with the youths she met upon the streets of Columbus could have had no continuation in her home. Her father forgot that he was once young himself, and looked only to the welfare of her spirit. So the senator was a novel factor in her life, and had an open field.

      When he first began to take an interest in their family affairs, the conventional religious standards of Father Gerhardt were set at naught, because he had no means of judging such a character. He was no common comer-boy, coquetting with his pretty daughter. The manner in which he was inducted was so radically original, and so subtle, that he was in and active before any one, so to speak, thought anything about it. Gerhardt himself was deceived, and, expecting nothing but honor and profit to flow to his family from such a source, accepted the interest and the service which this man did him, and plodded peacefully on. His wife did not tell him of the numerous benefactions which had come from the same source before and since the wonderful Christmas.

      The result of this was serious from several points of view. It was not long before the neighbors began to talk, for, of course, the presence of a man like Brander in the life of a girl like Jennie was of too conspicuous a nature to go unobserved. A watchful old friend of Gerhardt’s informed that worthy of the current drift of events. It was from the front of his small front yard that Mr. Otto Weaver addressed Mr. Gerhardt as the latter was setting off to work one evening.

      “Gerhardt, СКАЧАТЬ