Lucy Maud Montgomery Read online

  ‘Well, I will,’ said Marilla, reflecting that it would probably be the wiser course. ‘Don’t cry any more, Anne. It will be all right.’

  Marilla had changed her mind about its being all right by the time she got back from Orchard Slope. Anne was watching for her coming and flew to the porch door to meet her.

  ‘Oh, Marilla, I know by your face that it’s been no use,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘Mrs Barry won’t forgive me?’

  ‘Mrs Barry, indeed!’ snapped Marilla. ‘Of all the unreasonable women I ever saw she’s the worst. I told her it was all a mistake and you weren’t to blame, but she just simply didn’t believe me. And she rubbed it well in about my currant wine and how I’d always said it couldn’t have the least effect on anybody. I just told her plainly that currant wine wasn’t meant to be drunk three tumblerfuls at a time and that if a child I had to do with was so greedy I’d sober her up with a right good spanking.’

  Marilla whisked into the kitchen, grievously disturbed, leaving a very much distracted little soul in the porch behind her. Presently Anne stepped out bareheaded into the chill autumn dusk; very determinedly and steadily she took her way down through the sere clover field over the log bridge and up through the spruce grove, lighted by a pale little moon hanging low over the western woods. Mrs Barry, coming to the door in answer to a timid knock, found a white-lipped, eager-eyed suppliant on the doorstep.

  Her face hardened. Mrs Barry was a woman of strong prejudices and dislikes, and her anger was of the cold, sullen sort which is always hardest to overcome. To do her justice, she really believed Anne had made Diana drunk out of sheer malice prepense, and she was honestly anxious to preserve her little daughter from the contamination of further intimacy with such a child.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said stiffly.

  Anne clasped her hands.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Barry, please forgive me. I did not mean to – to – intoxicate Diana. How could I? Just imagine if you were a poor little orphan girl that kind people had adopted and you had just one bosom friend in all the world. Do you think you would intoxicate her on purpose? I thought it was only raspberry cordial. I was firmly convinced it was raspberry cordial. Oh, please don’t say that you won’t let Diana play with me any more. If you do you will cover my life with a dark cloud of woe.’

  This speech, which would have softened good Mrs Lynde’s heart in a twinkling, had no effect on Mrs Barry except to irritate her still more. She was suspicious of Anne’s big words and dramatic gestures and imagined that the child was making fun of her. So she said, coldly and cruelly:

  ‘I don’t think you are a fit little girl for Diana to associate with. You’d better go home and behave yourself.’

  Anne’s lip quivered.

  ‘Won’t you let me see Diana just once to say farewell?’ she implored.

  ‘Diana has gone over to Carmody with her father,’ said Mrs Barry, going in and shutting the door.

  Anne went back to Green Gables calm with despair.

  ‘My last hope is gone,’ she told Marilla. ‘I went up and saw Mrs Barry myself and she treated me very insultingly. Marilla, I do not think she is a well-bred woman. There is nothing more to do except to pray and I haven’t much hope that that’ll do much good because, Marilla, I do not believe that God Himself can do very much with such an obstinate person as Mrs Barry.’

  ‘Anne, you shouldn’t say such things,’ rebuked Marilla, striving to overcome that unholy tendency to laughter which she was dismayed to find growing upon her. And indeed, when she told the whole story to Matthew that night, she did laugh heartily over Anne’s tribulations.

  But when she slipped into the east gable before going to bed and found that Anne had cried herself to sleep an unaccustomed softness crept into her face.

  ‘Poor little soul,’ she murmured, lifting a loose curl of hair from the child’s tear-stained face. Then she bent down and kissed the flushed cheek on the pillow.

  17

  A New Interest in Life

  The next afternoon Anne, bending over her patchwork at the kitchen window, happened to glance out and beheld Diana down by the Dryad’s Bubble beckoning mysteriously. In a trice Anne was out of the house and flying down to the hollow, astonishment and hope struggling in her expressive eyes. But the hope faded when she saw Diana’s dejected countenance.

  ‘Your mother hasn’t relented?’ she gasped.

  Diana shook her head mournfully.

  ‘No; and oh, Anne, she says I’m never to play with you again. I’ve cried and cried and I told her it wasn’t your fault, but it wasn’t any use. I had ever such a time coaxing her to let me come down and say good-bye to you. She said I was only to stay ten minutes and she’s timing me by the clock.’

  ‘Ten minutes isn’t very long to say an eternal farewell in,’ said Anne tearfully. ‘Oh, Diana, will you promise faithfully never to forget me, the friend of your youth, no matter what dearer friends may caress thee?’

  ‘Indeed I will,’ sobbed Diana, ‘and I’ll never have another bosom friend — I don’t want to have. I couldn’t love anybody as I love you.’

  ‘Oh, Diana,’ cried Anne, clasping her hands, ‘do you love me?’

  ‘Why, of course I do. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No.’ Anne drew a long breath. ‘I thought you liked me, of course, but I never hoped you loved me. Why, Diana, I didn’t think anybody could love me. Nobody ever has loved me since I can remember. Oh, this is wonderful! It’s a ray of light which will for ever shine on the darkness of a path severed from thee, Diana. Oh, just say it once again.’

  ‘I love you devotedly, Anne,’ said Diana staunchly, ‘and I always will, you may be sure of that.’

  ‘And I will always love thee, Diana,’ said Anne, solemnly extending her hand. ‘In the years to come thy memory will shine like a star over my lonely life, as that last story we read together says. Diana, wilt thou give me a lock of thy jet-black tresses in parting to treasure for evermore?’

  ‘Have you got anything to cut it with?’ queried Diana, wiping away the tears which Anne’s affecting accents had caused to flow afresh, and returning to practicalities.

  ‘Yes. I’ve got my patchwork scissors in my apron pocket fortunately,’ said Anne. She solemnly clipped one of Diana’s curls. ‘Fare thee well, my beloved friend. Henceforth we must be as strangers though living side by side. But my heart will ever be faithful to thee.’

  Anne stood and watched Diana out of sight, mournfully waving her hand to the latter whenever she turned to look back. Then she returned to the house, not a little consoled for the time being by this romantic parting.

  ‘It is all over,’ she informed Marilla. ‘I shall never have another friend. I’m really worse off than ever before, for I haven’t Katie Maurice and Violetta now. And even if I had it wouldn’t be the same. Somehow, little dream girls are not satisfying after a real friend. Diana and I had such an affecting farewell down by the spring. It will be sacred in my memory for ever. I used the most pathetic language I could think of and said “thou” and “thee”. “Thou” and “thee” seems so much more romantic than “you”. Diana gave me a lock of her hair and I’m going to sew it up in a little bag and wear it around my neck all my life. Please see that it is buried with me, for I don’t believe I’ll live very long. Perhaps when she sees me lying cold and dead before her Mrs Barry may feel remorse for what she has done and will let Diana come to my funeral.’

  ‘I don’t think there is much fear of your dying of grief as long as you can talk, Anne,’ said Marilla unsympathetically.

  The following Monday Anne surprised Marilla by coming down from her room with her basket of books on her arm and her lips primmed up into a line of determination.

  ‘I’m going back to school,’ she announced. ‘That is all there is left in life for me, now that my friend has been ruthlessly torn from me. In school I can look at her and muse over days departed.’

  ‘You’d better muse over your lessons and sums,’ said Marilla,
concealing her delight at this development of the situation. ‘If you’re going back to school I hope we’ll hear no more of breaking slates over people’s heads and such carryings-on. Behave yourself and do just what your teacher tells you.’

  ‘I’ll try to be a model pupil,’ agreed Anne dolefully. ‘There won’t be much fun in it, I expect. Mr Phillips said Minnie Andrews was a model pupil and there isn’t a spark of imagination or life in her. She is just dull and poky and never seems to have a good time. But I feel so depressed that perhaps it will come easy to me now. I’m going round by the road. I couldn’t bear to go by the Birch Path all alone. I should weep bitter tears if I did.’

  Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing, and her dramatic ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner hour. Ruby Gillis smuggled three blue plums over to her during testament reading; Ella May MacPherson gave her an enormous yellow pansy cut from the covers of a floral catalogue –a species of desk decoration much prized in Avonlea school. Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new pattern of knit lace, so nice for trimming aprons. Katie Boulter gave her a perfume bottle to keep slate-water in, and Julia Bell copied carefully on a piece of pale pink paper, scalloped on the edges, the following effusion:

  TO ANNE

  When twilight drops her curtain down

  And pins it with a star

  Remember that you have a friend

  Though she may wander far.

  ‘It’s so nice to be appreciated,’ sighed Anne rapturously to Marilla that night.

  The girls were not the only scholars who ‘appreciated’ her. When Anne went to her seat after dinner hour — she had been told by Mr Phillips to sit with the model Minnie Andrews — she found on her desk a big, luscious ‘strawberry apple’. Anne caught it up all ready to take a bite, when she remembered that the only place in Avonlea where strawberry apples grew was in the old Blythe orchard on the other side of the Lake of Shining Waters. Anne dropped the apple as if it were a red-hot coal and ostentatiously wiped her fingers on her handkerchief. The apple lay untouched on her desk until the next morning, when little Timothy Andrews, who swept the school and kindled the fire, annexed it as one of his perquisites. Charlie Sloane’s slate pencil, gorgeously bedizened with striped red and yellow paper, costing two cents where ordinary pencils cost only one, which he sent up to her after dinner hour, met with a more favourable reception. Anne was graciously pleased to accept it and rewarded the donor with a smile which exalted that infatuated youth straightway into the seventh heaven of delight and caused him to make such fearful errors in his dictation that Mr Phillips kept him in after school to rewrite it.

  But as

  The Caesar’s pageant shorn of Brutus’ bust

  Did but of Rome’s best son remind her more,

  so the marked absence of any tribute or recognition from Diana Barry, who was sitting with Gertie Pye, embittered Anne’s little triumph.

  ‘Diana might just have smiled at me once, I think,’ she mourned to Marilla that night. But the next morning a note, most fearfully and wonderfully twisted and folded, and a small parcel, were passed across to Anne.

  Dear Anne [ran the former],

  Mother says I’m not to play with you or talk to you even in school. It isn’t my fault and don’t be cross at me, because I love you as much as ever. I miss you awfully to tell all my secrets to and I don’t like Gertie Pye one bit. I made you one of the new bookmarkers out of red tissue paper. They are awfully fashionable now and only three girls in school know how to make them. When you look at it remember

  Your true friend,

  DIANA BARRY

  Anne read the note, kissed the bookmark, and dispatched a prompt reply back to the other side of the school.

  My own darling Diana,

  Of course I am not cross at you because you have to obey your mother. Our spirits can commune. I shall keep your lovely present for ever. Minnie Andrews is a very nice little girl — although she has no imagination — but after having been Diana’s busum friend I cannot be Minnie’s. Please excuse mistakes because my spelling isn’t very good yet, although much improved.

  Yours until death do us part,

  ANNE or CORDELIA SHIRLEY

  P.S. I shall sleep with your letter under my pillow tonight.

  A. or C.S.

  Marilla pessimistically expected more trouble since Anne had again begun to go to school. But none developed. Perhaps Anne caught something of the ‘model’ spirit from Minnie Andrews; at least she got on very well with Mr Phillips thenceforth. She flung herself into her studies heart and soul, determined not to be out-done in any class by Gilbert Blythe. The rivalry between them was soon apparent; it was entirely good-natured on Gilbert’s side; but it is much to be feared that the same thing cannot be said of Anne, who had certainly an unpraiseworthy tenacity for holding grudges. She was as intense in her hatreds as in her loves. She would not stoop to admit that she meant to rival Gilbert in school work, because that would have been to acknowledge his existence which Anne persistently ignored; but the rivalry was there and honours fluctuated between them. Now Gilbert was head of the spelling class; now Anne, with a toss of her long red braids, spelled him down. One morning Gilbert had all his sums done correctly and had his name written on the blackboard on the roll of honour; the next morning Anne, having wrestled wildly with decimals the entire evening before, would be first. One awful day they were ties and their names were written up together. It was almost as bad as a ‘take-notice’, and Anne’s mortification was as evident as Gilbert’s satisfaction. When the written examinations at the end of each month were held the suspense was terrible. The first month Gilbert came out three marks ahead. The second Anne beat him by five. But her triumph was marred by the fact that Gilbert congratulated her heartily before the whole school. It would have been ever so much sweeter to her if he had felt the sting of his defeat.

  Mr Phillips might not be a very good teacher; but a pupil so inflexibly determined on learning as Anne was could hardly escape making progress under any kind of a teacher. By the end of the term Anne and Gilbert were both promoted into the fifth class and allowed to begin studying the elements of ‘the branches’ — by which Latin, geometry, French, and algebra were meant. In geometry Anne met her Waterloo.

  ‘It’s perfectly awful stuff, Marilla,’ she groaned. ‘I’m sure I’ll never be able to make head or tail of it. There is no scope for imagination in it at all. Mr Phillips says I’m the worst dunce he ever saw at it. And Gil — I mean some of the others are so smart at it. It is extremely mortifying, Marilla. Even Diana gets along better than I do. But I don’t mind being beaten by Diana. Even although we meet as strangers now I still love her with an inextinguishable love. It makes me very sad at times to think about her. But really, Marilla, one can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?’

  18

  Anne to the Rescue

  All things great are wound up with all things little. At first glance it might not seem that the decision of a certain Canadian Premier to include Prince Edward Island in a political tour could have much or anything to do with the fortunes of little Anne Shirley at Green Gables. But it had.

  It was in January the Premier came, to address his loyal supporters and such of his non-supporters as chose to be present at the monster mass meeting held in Charlottetown. Most of the Avonlea people were on the Premier’s side of politics; hence, on the night of the meeting nearly all the men and a goodly proportion of the women had gone to town, thirty miles away. Mrs Rachel Lynde had gone too. Mrs Rachel Lynde was a red-hot politician and couldn’t have believed that the political rally could be carried through without her, although she was on the opposite side of politics. So she went to town and took her husband — Thomas would be useful in looking after the horse –and Marilla Cuthbert with her. Marilla had a sneaking interest in politics herself, and as she thought it might be her only chance to s
ee a real live Premier, she promptly took it, leaving Anne and Matthew to keep house until her return the following day.

  Hence, while Marilla and Mrs Rachel were enjoying themselves hugely at the mass meeting, Anne and Matthew had the cheerful kitchen at Green Gables all to themselves. A bright fire was glowing in the old-fashioned Waterloo stove and blue-white frost crystals were shining on the window-panes. Matthew nodded over a Farmer’s Advocate on the sofa and Anne at the table studied her lessons with grim determination, despite sundry wistful glances at the clock shelf, where lay a new book that Jane Andrews had lent her that day. Jane had assured her that it was warranted to produce any number of thrills, or words to that effect, and Anne’s fingers tingled to reach out for it. But that would mean Gilbert Blythe’s triumph on the morrow. Anne turned her back on the clock shelf and tried to imagine it wasn’t there.

  ‘Matthew, did you ever study geometry when you went to school?’

  ‘Well now, no, I didn’t,’ said Matthew, coming out of his doze with a start.

  ‘I wish you had,’ sighed Anne, ‘because then you’d be able to sympathize with me. You can’t sympathize properly if you’ve never studied it. It is casting a cloud over my whole life. I’m such a dunce at it, Matthew.’

  ‘Well now, I dunno,’ said Matthew soothingly. ‘I guess you’re all right at anything. Mr Phillips told me last week in Blair’s store at Carmody that you was the smartest scholar in school and was making rapid progress. “Rapid progress” was his very words. There’s them as runs down Teddy Phillips and says he ain’t much of a teacher; but I guess he’s all right.’

  Matthew would have thought anyone who praised Anne was ‘all right’.

  ‘I’m sure I’d get on better with geometry if only he wouldn’t change the letters,’ complained Anne. ‘I learn the proposition off by heart, and then he draws in on the blackboard and puts different letters from what are in the book and I get all mixed up. I don’t think a teacher should take such a mean advantage, do you? We’re studying agriculture now and I’ve found out at last what makes the roads red. It’s a great comfort. I wonder how Marilla and Mrs Lynde are enjoying themselves. Mrs Lynde says Canada is going to the dogs the way things are being run at Ottawa, and that it’s an awful warning to the electors. She says if women were allowed to vote we would soon see a blessed change. What way do you vote, Matthew?’