JENNIE GERHARDT. Theodore Dreiser

Ever since he had returned it had been on her mind.

      In his absence the family finances had become so strained that she had been compelled to pawn it. Martha had got to that place in the matter of apparel where she could no longer go to school unless something new were provided for her. And so, after much discussion, it was decided that the watch must go.

      Bass took it, and after much argument with the local pawnbroker, he had been able to bring home ten dollars. Mrs. Gerhardt expended the money upon her children, and heaved a sigh of relief. Martha looked very much better. Naturally, Jennie was glad.

      Now, however, when the Senator spoke of it, her hour of retribution seemed at hand. She actually trembled, and he noticed her discomfiture.

      “Why, Jennie,” he said gently, “what made you start like that?”

      “Nothing,” she answered.

      “Haven’t you your watch?”

      She paused, for it seemed impossible to tell a deliberate falsehood. There was a strained silence; then she said, with a voice that had too much of a sob in it for him not to suspect the truth, “No, sir.” He persisted, and she confessed everything.

      “Well,” he said, “dearest, don’t feel badly about it. There never was such another girl. I’ll get your watch for you. Hereafter when you need anything I want you to come to me. Do you hear? I want you to promise me that. If I’m not here, I want you to write me. I’ll always be in touch with you from now on. You will have my address. Just let me know, and I’ll help you. Do you understand?”

      “Yes,” said Jennie.

      “You’ll promise to do that now, will you?”

      “Yes,” she replied.

      For a moment neither of them spoke.

      “Jennie,” he said at last, the spring-like quality of the night moving him to a burst of feeling, “I’ve about decided that I can’t do without you. Do you think you could make up your mind to live with me from now on?”

      Jennie looked away, not clearly understanding his words as he meant them.

      “I don’t know,” she said vaguely.

      “Well, you think about it,” he said pleasantly. “I’m serious. Would you be willing to marry me, and let me put you away in a seminary for a few years?”

      “Go away to school?”

      “Yes, after you marry me.”

      “I guess so,” she replied. Her mother came into her mind. Maybe she could help the family.

      He looked around at her, and tried to make out the expression on her face. It was not dark. The moon was now above the trees in the east, and already the vast host of stars were paling before it.

      “Don’t you care for me at all, Jennie?” he asked.

      “Yes!”

      “You never come for my laundry any more, though,” he returned pathetically. It touched her to hear him say this.

      “I didn’t do that,” she answered. “I couldn’t help it; Mother thought it was best.”

      “So it was,” he assented. “Don’t feel badly. I was only joking with you. You’d be glad to come if you could, wouldn’t you?”

      “Yes, I would,” she answered frankly.

      He took her hand and pressed it so feelingly that all his kindly words seemed doubly emphasised to her. Reaching up impulsively, she put her arms about him. “You’re so good to me,” she said with the loving tone of a daughter.

      “You’re my girl, Jennie,” he said with deep feeling. “I’d do anything in the world for you.”

      Chapter VI

       Table of Contents

      The father of this unfortunate family, William Gerhardt, was a man of considerable interest on his personal side. Born in the kingdom of Saxony, he had had character enough to oppose the army conscription iniquity, and to flee in his eighteenth year, to Paris. From there he had set forth for America, the land of promise.

      Arrived 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 in Pennsylvania. In one romantic village of this new world he had found his heart’s ideal. With her, a simple American girl of 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.

      Gerhardt was an honest man, and he liked to think that others appreciated his integrity. “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.

      This honesty, like his religious convictions, 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 the religious observances of home life. In his father’s cottage the influence of the Lutheran minister had been all-powerful; he had inherited the feeling that the Lutheran Church was a perfect institution, and that its teachings were of all-importance when it came to the issue of the future life. His wife, nominally of the Mennonite faith, was quite willing to accept her husband’s creed. And so his household became a God-fearing one; wherever they went their first public step was to ally themselves with the local Lutheran church, and the minister was always a welcome guest in the Gerhardt home.

      Pastor Wundt, the shepherd of the Columbus church, was a sincere and ardent Christian, but his bigotry and hard-and-fast orthodoxy made him intolerant. He considered that the members of his flock were jeopardising 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 before that state were absolute essentials of Christian living. 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, and a just God was angry with sinners every day.

      Gerhardt and his wife, and also Jennie, accepted the doctrines of their Church as expounded by Mr. Wundt without reserve. With Jennie, however, the assent was little more than nominal. Religion had as yet no striking hold upon her. It was a pleasant thing to know that there was a heaven, a fearsome one to realise that there was a hell. Young girls and boys ought to be good and obey their parents. Otherwise the whole religious problem was badly jumbled in her mind.

      Gerhardt was convinced that everything spoken from the pulpit of his church was literally true. Death and the future life were realities to him.

      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 that the Lord might 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 stern with his children. He was prone to scan with a narrow eye the pleasures and foibles of youthful desire. Jennie was never to have a lover if her father had any voice in the matter. Any