THREE LIVES (American Classics Series). Gertrude Stein
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Mathilda never wanted to do any scolding. “But you must please Miss Mathilda,” Anna said.
Miss Mathilda every day put off the scolding, hoping always that Anna would learn to manage Molly better. It never did get better and at last Miss Mathilda saw that the scolding simply had to be.
It was agreed between the good Anna and her Miss Mathilda that Anna should be away when Molly would be scolded. The next evening that it was Anna’s evening out, Miss Mathilda faced her task and went down into the kitchen.
Molly was sitting in the little kitchen leaning her elbows on the table. She was a tall, thin, sallow girl, aged twenty-three, by nature slatternly and careless but trained by Anna into superficial neatness. Her drab striped cotton dress and gray black checked apron increased the length and sadness of her melancholy figure. “Oh, Lord!” groaned Miss Mathilda to herself as she approached her.
“Molly, I want to speak to you about your behaviour to Anna!”, here Molly dropped her head still lower on her arms and began to cry.
“Oh! Oh!” groaned Miss Mathilda.
“It’s all Miss Annie’s fault, all of it,” Molly said at last, in a trembling voice, “I do my best.”
“I know Anna is often hard to please,” began Miss Mathilda, with a twinge of mischief, and then she sobered herself to her task, “but you must remember, Molly, she means it for your good and she is really very kind to you.”
“I don’t want her kindness,” Molly cried, “I wish you would tell me what to do, Miss Mathilda, and then I would be all right. I hate Miss Annie.”
“This will never do Molly,” Miss Mathilda said sternly, in her deepest, firmest tones, “Anna is the head of the kitchen and you must either obey her or leave.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” whimpered melancholy Molly. “Well Molly then try and do better,” answered Miss Mathilda, keeping a good stern front, and backing quickly from the kitchen.
“Oh! Oh!” groaned Miss Mathilda, as she went back up the stairs.
Miss Mathilda’s attempt to make peace between the constantly contending women in the kitchen had no real effect. They were very soon as bitter as before.
At last it was decided that Molly was to go away. Molly went away to work in a factory in the town, and she went to live with an old woman in the slums, a very bad old woman Anna said.
Anna was never easy in her mind about the fate of Molly. Sometimes she would see or hear of her. Molly was not well, her cough was worse, and the old woman really was a bad one.
After a year of this unwholesome life, Molly was completely broken down. Anna then again took her in charge. She brought her from her work and from the woman where she lived, and put her in a hospital to stay till she was well. She found a place for her as nursemaid to a little girl out in the country, and Molly was at last established and content.
Molly had had, at first, no regular successor. In a few months it was going to be the summer and Miss Mathilda would be gone away, and old Katie would do very well to come in every day and help Anna with her work.
Old Katy was a heavy, ugly, short and rough old german woman, with a strange distorted german-english all her own. Anna was worn out now with her attempt to make the younger generation do all that it should and rough old Katy never answered back, and never wanted her own way. No scolding or abuse could make its mark on her uncouth and aged peasant hide. She said her “Yes, Miss Annie,” when an answer had to come, and that was always all that she could say.
“Old Katy is just a rough old woman, Miss Mathilda,” Anna said, “but I think I keep her here with me. She can work and she don’t give me trouble like I had with Molly all the time.”
Anna always had a humorous sense from this old Katy’s twisted peasant english, from the roughness on her tongue of buzzing s’s and from the queer ways of her brutish servile humor. Anna could not let old Katy serve at table — old Katy was too coarsely made from natural earth for that — and so Anna had all this to do herself and that she never liked, but even then this simple rough old creature was pleasanter to her than any of the upstart young.
Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the summer came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the ocean to be gone for several months. When she went away this summer old Katy was so sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old Katy cried hard for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps of the little red brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned, toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and her strong, squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in her blue striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough and harsh to see — and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her in, blubbering, her apron to her face, and making queer guttural broken moans.
When Miss Mathilda early in the fall came to her house again old Katy was not there.
“I never thought old Katy would act so Miss Mathilda,” Anna said, “when she was so sorry when you went away, and I gave her full wages all the summer, but they are all alike Miss Mathilda, there isn’t one of them that’s fit to trust. You know how Katy said she liked you, Miss Mathilda, and went on about it when you went away and then she was so good and worked all right until the middle of the summer, when I got sick, and then she went away and left me all alone and took a place out in the country, where they gave her some more money. She didn’t say a word, Miss Mathilda, she just went off and left me there alone when I was sick after that awful hot summer that we had, and after all we done for her when she had no place to go, and all summer I gave her better things to eat than I had for myself. Miss Mathilda, there isn’t one of them has any sense of what’s the right way for a girl to do, not one of them.”
Old Katy was never heard from any more.
No under servant was decided upon now for several months. Many came and many went, and none of them would do. At last Anna heard of Sallie.
Sallie was the oldest girl in a family of eleven and Sallie was just sixteen years old. From Sallie down they came always littler and littler in her family, and all of them were always out at work excepting only the few littlest of them all.
Sallie was a pretty blonde and smiling german girl, and stupid and a little silly. The littler they came in her family the brighter they all were. The brightest of them all was a little girl of ten. She did a good day’s work washing dishes for a man and wife in a saloon, and she earned a fair day’s wage, and then there was one littler still. She only worked for half the day. She did the house work for a bachelor doctor. She did it all, all of the housework and received each week her eight cents for her wage. Anna was always indignant when she told that story.
“I think he ought to give her ten cents Miss Mathilda any way. Eight cents is so mean when she does all his work and she is such a bright little thing too, not stupid like our Sallie. Sallie would never learn to do a thing if I didn’t scold her all the time, but Sallie is a good girl, and I take care and she will do all right.”
Sallie was a good, obedient german child. She never answered Anna back, no more did Peter, old Baby and little Rags and so though always Anna’s voice was sharply raised in strong rebuke and worn expostulation, they were a happy family all there together in the kitchen.
Anna was a mother now to Sallie, a good incessant german mother who watched and scolded hard to keep the girl from any evil step. Sallie’s temptations and transgressions were much like those of naughty Peter and jolly little Rags, and Anna took the same way to keep all three from doing what was bad.
Sallie’s chief badness besides forgetting all the time and never washing her hands clean to serve at table, was the butcher boy.
He was an unattractive youth enough, that butcher boy. Suspicion began to close in around Sallie that she spent the evenings when Anna was away, in company with this bad boy.
“Sallie