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
They were very happy all that day in their wandering. They had taken
things along to eat together. They sat in the bright fields and they
were happy, they wandered in the woods and they were happy. Jeff
always loved in this way to wander. Jeff always loved to watch
everything as it was growing, and he loved all the colors in the trees
and on the ground, and the little, new, bright colored bugs he found
in the moist ground and in the grass he loved to lie on and in which
he was always so busy searching. Jeff loved everything that moved and
that was still, and that had color, and beauty, and real being.
Jeff loved very much this day while they were wandering. He almost
forgot that he had any trouble with him still inside him. Jeff loved
to be there with Melanctha Herbert. She was always so sympathetic to
him for the way she listened to everything he found and told her, the
way she felt his joy in all this being, the way she never said she
wanted anything different from the way they had it. It was certainly a
busy and a happy day, this their first long day of really wandering.
Later they were tired, and Melanctha sat down on the ground, and Jeff
threw himself his full length beside her. Jeff lay there, very quiet,
and then he pressed her hand and kissed it and murmured to her, "You
certainly are very good to me, Melanctha." Melanctha felt it very deep
and did not answer. Jeff lay there a long time, looking up above
him. He was counting all the little leaves he saw above him. He was
following all the little clouds with his eyes as they sailed past him.
He watched all the birds that flew high beyond him, and all the time
Jeff knew he must tell to Melanctha what it was he knew now, that
which Jane Harden, just a week ago, had told him. He knew very well
that for him it was certain that he had to say it. It was hard, but
for Jeff Campbell the only way to lose it was to say it, the only way
to know Melanctha really, was to tell her all the struggle he had
made to know her, to tell her so she could help him to understand his
trouble better, to help him so that never again he could have any way
to doubt her.
Jeff lay there a long time, very quiet, always looking up above him,
and yet feeling very close now to Melanctha. At last he turned a
little toward her, took her hands closer in his to make him feel it
stronger, and then very slowly, for the words came very hard for him,
slowly he began his talk to her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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