Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena — John Shaqi
Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle LenaStein, Gertrude
General
Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena
Stein, Gertrude
Working class women -- Fiction
To Anna alone there in the carriage, drawing always nearer to the
struggle with her mistress, the warmth, the slowness, the jolting over
stones, the steaming from the horses, the cries of men and animals and
birds, and the new life all round about were simply maddening. "Baby!
if you don't lie still, I think I kill you. I can't stand it any more
like this."
At this time Anna, about twenty-seven years of age, was not yet all
thin and worn. The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face
were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the
humor showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was
begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward
pressure of resolve.
To-day, alone there in the carriage, she was all stiff and yet all
trembling with the sore effort of decision and revolt.
As the carriage turned into the Wadsmith gate, little Jane ran out to
see. She just looked at Anna's face; she did not say a word about blue
dressings.
Anna got down from the carriage with little Baby in her arms. She took
out all the goods that she had brought and the carriage drove away.
Anna left everything on the porch, and went in to where Miss Mary
Wadsmith was sitting by the fire.
Miss Mary was sitting in a large armchair by the fire. All the nooks
and crannies of the chair were filled full of her soft and spreading
body. She was dressed in a black satin morning gown, the sleeves,
great monster things, were heavy with the mass of her soft flesh.
She sat there always, large, helpless, gentle. She had a fair, soft,
regular, good-looking face, with pleasant, empty, grey-blue eyes, and
heavy sleepy lids.
Behind Miss Mary was the little Jane, nervous and jerky with
excitement as she saw Anna come into the room.
"Miss Mary," Anna began. She had stopped just within the door, her
body and her face stiff with repression, her teeth closed hard and the
white lights flashing sharply in the pale, clean blue of her eyes.
Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear,
the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the
rigidness of forced control, all the queer ways the passions have to
show themselves all one.
"Miss Mary," the words came slowly with thick utterance and with
jerks, but always firm and strong. "Miss Mary, I can't stand it
any more like this. When you tell me anything to do, I do it. I do
everything I can and you know I work myself sick for you. The blue
dressings in your room makes too much work to have for summer. Miss
Jane don't know what work is. If you want to do things like that I go
away."
Anna stopped still. Her words had not the strength of meaning
they were meant to have, but the power in the mood of Anna's soul
frightened and awed Miss Mary through and through.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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