The Bulwark by Theodore Dreiser

Author:Theodore Dreiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: IIIT
Published: 1946-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

it carefully hidden in her room, but for days she dreamedabout the two lovers. She did not as yet exactly understandthe physical facts of love, nor could she follow the tragic plotin all of its implications, yet she felt as if she had been plungedinto a new world of romance and reality.

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THE OPPOSITION OF ETTA AND STEWARTBarnes to their home was due to their growing perceptionthat it was entirely inadequate to their individual and tem-peramental needs, particularly as illustrated by their relation-ship with their father.

Yet Solon Barnes, in so far as his wife’s estimate was con-cerned, was all that she had deemed him to be. For twentyyears, in connection with all sorts of matters, public and pri-vate, in sickness and in health, in season and out of season,she had yet to see him lose his temper, burst forth in unseemlywrath, or do anything which she considered unfair or unkind.Always he seemed to have before him the biblical injunctionof which the Quakers so much approve; “Let thy speech beyea, yea, and nay, nay.” If a merchant or a banker or a law-yer came to his office, or to his house, he did not at once as-sume that they were likely to err, or to plot or plan to cheathim, or to fail in their ability or their duty to him or to others.Rather it was the other way about. He expected them to soconduct themselves that there would be no complaint, and hewas rarely disappointed. When he found that it was other-wise, it was more in sorrow than anger that he turned away.

So in dealing with men he sought only such as were abovereproach. His watchmaker, his grocer, his butcher, his tailorwere men whose public and private conduct were above sus-picion. The great thing under Divine Providence, so far as hecould reason it out, was to marry, have children, and raisethem in decency and in the fear of the Lord. To do less than

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that was to trifle with evil, and when he looked about himand saw how, in places, the social fabric had broken down andthere were whole groups and regions which seemed to lack asense of responsibility and virtue of any kind, it seemed tohim that earlier errors on the part of those who should havemarried and raised children properly, or who, having married,had failed in their duties as parents, must be to blame.

To be sure, there were strange catastrophes, accidents, dis-eases and weaknesses of all kinds fluttering about and interrupt-ing the normal progress of things and of men, but in the main,if one could go far enough back, one would find them perhapsto be the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, evenunto the third and fourth generations. God was on His throne.In the hollow of His hand were all the seeded beauties of thenight. It was not for little man to rise and scoff and deny. Ratherit behooved him to sink on his knees in awe and reverence,wiving thanks for the manifold blessings that were

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