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
Lena had the flat chest, straight back and forward falling shoulders
of the patient and enduring working woman, though her body was now
still in its milder girlhood and work had not yet made these lines too
clear.
The rarer feeling that there was with Lena, showed in all the even
quiet of her body movements, but in all it was the strongest in the
patient, old-world ignorance, and earth made pureness of her brown,
flat, soft featured face. Lena had eyebrows that were a wondrous
thickness. They were black, and spread, and very cool, with their dark
color and their beauty, and beneath them were her hazel eyes, simple
and human, with the earth patience of the working, gentle, german
woman.
Yes it was all a peaceful life for Lena. The other girls, of course,
did tease her, but then that only made a gentle stir within her.
"What you got on your finger Lena," Mary, one of the girls she always
sat with, one day asked her. Mary was good natured, quick, intelligent
and Irish.
Lena had just picked up the fancy paper made accordion that the little
girl had dropped beside her, and was making it squeak sadly as she
pulled it with her brown, strong, awkward finger.
"Why, what is it, Mary, paint?" said Lena, putting her finger to her
mouth to taste the dirt spot.
"That's awful poison Lena, don't you know?" said Mary, "that green
paint that you just tasted."
Lena had sucked a good deal of the green paint from her finger. She
stopped and looked hard at the finger. She did not know just how much
Mary meant by what she said.
"Ain't it poison, Nellie, that green paint, that Lena sucked just
now," said Mary. "Sure it is Lena, its real poison, I ain't foolin'
this time anyhow."
Lena was a little troubled. She looked hard at her finger where the
paint was, and she wondered if she had really sucked it.
It was still a little wet on the edges and she rubbed it off a long
time on the inside of her dress, and in between she wondered and
looked at the finger and thought, was it really poison that she had
just tasted.
"Ain't it too bad, Nellie, Lena should have sucked that," Mary said.
Nellie smiled and did not answer. Nellie was dark and thin, and looked
Italian. She had a big mass of black hair that she wore high up on her
head, and that made her face look very fine.
Nellie always smiled and did not say much, and then she would look at
Lena to perplex her.
And so they all three sat with their little charges in the pleasant
sunshine a long time. And Lena would often look at her finger and
wonder if it was really poison that she had just tasted and then she
would rub her finger on her dress a little harder.
Mary laughed at her and teased her and Nellie smiled a little and
looked queerly at her.
Then it came time, for it was growing cooler, for them to drag
together the little ones, who had begun to wander, and to take each
one back to its own mother. And Lena never knew for certain whether it
was really poison, that green stuff that she had tasted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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