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CHAPTER XI The Round of Life
Anne was back in Avonlea with the luster of the Thorburn Scholarship on her brow.
People told her she hadn't changed much, in a tone which hinted they were surprised and
a little disappointed she hadn't.
Avonlea had not changed, either. At least, so it seemed at first.
But as Anne sat in the Green Gables pew, on the first Sunday after her return, and
looked over the congregation, she saw several little changes which, all coming
home to her at once, made her realize that
time did not quite stand still, even in Avonlea.
A new minister was in the pulpit. In the pews more than one familiar face was
missing forever.
Old "Uncle Abe," his prophesying over and done with, Mrs. Peter Sloane, who had
sighed, it was to be hoped, for the last time, Timothy Cotton, who, as Mrs. Rachel
Lynde said "had actually managed to die at
last after practicing at it for twenty years," and old Josiah Sloane, whom nobody
knew in his coffin because he had his whiskers neatly trimmed, were all sleeping
in the little graveyard behind the church.
And Billy Andrews was married to Nettie Blewett!
They "appeared out" that Sunday.
When Billy, beaming with pride and happiness, showed his be-plumed and be-
silked bride into the Harmon Andrews' pew, Anne dropped her lids to hide her dancing
eyes.
She recalled the stormy winter night of the Christmas holidays when Jane had proposed
for Billy. He certainly had not broken his heart over
his rejection.
Anne wondered if Jane had also proposed to Nettie for him, or if he had mustered
enough *** to ask the fateful question himself.
All the Andrews family seemed to share in his pride and pleasure, from Mrs. Harmon in
the pew to Jane in the choir. Jane had resigned from the Avonlea school
and intended to go West in the fall.
"Can't get a beau in Avonlea, that's what," said Mrs. Rachel Lynde scornfully.
"SAYS she thinks she'll have better health out West.
I never heard her health was poor before."
"Jane is a nice girl," Anne had said loyally.
"She never tried to attract attention, as some did."
"Oh, she never chased the boys, if that's what you mean," said Mrs. Rachel.
"But she'd like to be married, just as much as anybody, that's what.
What else would take her out West to some forsaken place whose only recommendation is
that men are plenty and women scarce? Don't you tell me!"
But it was not at Jane, Anne gazed that day in dismay and surprise.
It was at Ruby Gillis, who sat beside her in the choir.
What had happened to Ruby?
She was even handsomer than ever; but her blue eyes were too bright and lustrous, and
the color of her cheeks was hectically brilliant; besides, she was very thin; the
hands that held her hymn-book were almost transparent in their delicacy.
"Is Ruby Gillis ill?" Anne asked of Mrs. Lynde, as they went home
from church.
"Ruby Gillis is dying of galloping consumption," said Mrs. Lynde bluntly.
"Everybody knows it except herself and her FAMILY.
They won't give in.
If you ask THEM, she's perfectly well.
She hasn't been able to teach since she had that attack of congestion in the winter,
but she says she's going to teach again in the fall, and she's after the White Sands
school.
She'll be in her grave, poor girl, when White Sands school opens, that's what."
Anne listened in shocked silence. Ruby Gillis, her old school-chum, dying?
Could it be possible?
Of late years they had grown apart; but the old tie of school-girl intimacy was there,
and made itself felt sharply in the tug the news gave at Anne's heartstrings.
Ruby, the brilliant, the merry, the coquettish!
It was impossible to associate the thought of her with anything like death.
She had greeted Anne with gay cordiality after church, and urged her to come up the
next evening. "I'll be away Tuesday and Wednesday
evenings," she had whispered triumphantly.
"There's a concert at Carmody and a party at White Sands.
Herb Spencer's going to take me. He's my LATEST.
Be sure to come up tomorrow.
I'm dying for a good talk with you. I want to hear all about your doings at
Redmond."
Anne knew that Ruby meant that she wanted to tell Anne all about her own recent
flirtations, but she promised to go, and Diana offered to go with her.
"I've been wanting to go to see Ruby for a long while," she told Anne, when they left
Green Gables the next evening, "but I really couldn't go alone.
It's so awful to hear Ruby rattling on as she does, and pretending there is nothing
the matter with her, even when she can hardly speak for coughing.
She's fighting so hard for her life, and yet she hasn't any chance at all, they
say." The girls walked silently down the red,
twilit road.
The robins were singing vespers in the high treetops, filling the golden air with their
jubilant voices.
The silver fluting of the frogs came from marshes and ponds, over fields where seeds
were beginning to stir with life and thrill to the sunshine and rain that had drifted
over them.
The air was fragrant with the wild, sweet, wholesome smell of young raspberry copses.
White mists were hovering in the silent hollows and violet stars were shining
bluely on the brooklands.
"What a beautiful sunset," said Diana. "Look, Anne, it's just like a land in
itself, isn't it?
That long, low back of purple cloud is the shore, and the clear sky further on is like
a golden sea."
"If we could sail to it in the moonshine boat Paul wrote of in his old composition--
you remember?--how nice it would be," said Anne, rousing from her reverie.
"Do you think we could find all our yesterdays there, Diana--all our old
springs and blossoms?
The beds of flowers that Paul saw there are the roses that have bloomed for us in the
past?" "Don't!" said Diana.
"You make me feel as if we were old women with everything in life behind us."
"I think I've almost felt as if we were since I heard about poor Ruby," said Anne.
"If it is true that she is dying any other sad thing might be true, too."
"You don't mind calling in at Elisha Wright's for a moment, do you?" asked
Diana.
"Mother asked me to leave this little dish of jelly for Aunt Atossa."
"Who is Aunt Atossa?" "Oh, haven't you heard?
She's Mrs. Samson Coates of Spencervale-- Mrs. Elisha Wright's aunt.
She's father's aunt, too.
Her husband died last winter and she was left very poor and lonely, so the Wrights
took her to live with them. Mother thought we ought to take her, but
father put his foot down.
Live with Aunt Atossa he would not." "Is she so terrible?" asked Anne absently.
"You'll probably see what she's like before we can get away," said Diana significantly.
"Father says she has a face like a hatchet- -it cuts the air.
But her tongue is sharper still." Late as it was Aunt Atossa was cutting
potato sets in the Wright kitchen.
She wore a faded old wrapper, and her gray hair was decidedly untidy.
Aunt Atossa did not like being "caught in a kilter," so she went out of her way to be
disagreeable.
"Oh, so you're Anne Shirley?" she said, when Diana introduced Anne.
"I've heard of you." Her tone implied that she had heard nothing
good.
"Mrs. Andrews was telling me you were home. She said you had improved a good deal."
There was no doubt Aunt Atossa thought there was plenty of room for further
improvement.
She ceased not from cutting sets with much energy.
"Is it any use to ask you to sit down?" she inquired sarcastically.
"Of course, there's nothing very entertaining here for you.
The rest are all away." "Mother sent you this little pot of rhubarb
jelly," said Diana pleasantly.
"She made it today and thought you might like some."
"Oh, thanks," said Aunt Atossa sourly. "I never fancy your mother's jelly--she
always makes it too sweet.
However, I'll try to worry some down. My appetite's been dreadful poor this
spring. I'm far from well," continued Aunt Atossa
solemnly, "but still I keep a-doing.
People who can't work aren't wanted here. If it isn't too much trouble will you be
condescending enough to set the jelly in the pantry?
I'm in a hurry to get these spuds done tonight.
I suppose you two LADIES never do anything like this.
You'd be afraid of spoiling your hands."
"I used to cut potato sets before we rented the farm," smiled Anne.
"I do it yet," laughed Diana. "I cut sets three days last week.
Of course," she added teasingly, "I did my hands up in lemon juice and kid gloves
every night after it." Aunt Atossa sniffed.
"I suppose you got that notion out of some of those silly magazines you read so many
of. I wonder your mother allows you.
But she always spoiled you.
We all thought when George married her she wouldn't be a suitable wife for him."
Aunt Atossa sighed heavily, as if all forebodings upon the occasion of George
Barry's marriage had been amply and darkly fulfilled.
"Going, are you?" she inquired, as the girls rose.
"Well, I suppose you can't find much amusement talking to an old woman like me.
It's such a pity the boys ain't home."
"We want to run in and see Ruby Gillis a little while," explained Diana.
"Oh, anything does for an excuse, of course," said Aunt Atossa, amiably.
"Just whip in and whip out before you have time to say how-do decently.
It's college airs, I s'pose. You'd be wiser to keep away from Ruby
Gillis.
The doctors say consumption's catching. I always knew Ruby'd get something, gadding
off to Boston last fall for a visit. People who ain't content to stay home
always catch something."
"People who don't go visiting catch things, too.
Sometimes they even die," said Diana solemnly.
"Then they don't have themselves to blame for it," retorted Aunt Atossa triumphantly.
"I hear you are to be married in June, Diana."
"There is no truth in that report," said Diana, blushing.
"Well, don't put it off too long," said Aunt Atossa significantly.
"You'll fade soon--you're all complexion and hair.
And the Wrights are terrible fickle. You ought to wear a hat, MISS SHIRLEY.
Your nose is freckling scandalous.
My, but you ARE redheaded! Well, I s'pose we're all as the Lord made
us! Give Marilla Cuthbert my respects.
She's never been to see me since I come to Avonlea, but I s'pose I oughtn't to
complain. The Cuthberts always did think themselves a
cut higher than any one else round here."
"Oh, isn't she dreadful?" gasped Diana, as they escaped down the lane.
"She's worse than Miss Eliza Andrews," said Anne.
"But then think of living all your life with a name like Atossa!
Wouldn't it sour almost any one? She should have tried to imagine her name
was Cordelia.
It might have helped her a great deal. It certainly helped me in the days when I
didn't like ANNE." "Josie Pye will be just like her when she
grows up," said Diana.
"Josie's mother and Aunt Atossa are cousins, you know.
Oh, dear, I'm glad that's over. She's so malicious--she seems to put a bad
flavor in everything.
Father tells such a funny story about her. One time they had a minister in Spencervale
who was a very good, spiritual man but very deaf.
He couldn't hear any ordinary conversation at all.
Well, they used to have a prayer meeting on Sunday evenings, and all the church members
present would get up and pray in turn, or say a few words on some Bible verse.
But one evening Aunt Atossa bounced up.
She didn't either pray or preach.
Instead, she lit into everybody else in the church and gave them a fearful raking down,
calling them right out by name and telling them how they all had behaved, and casting
up all the quarrels and scandals of the past ten years.
Finally she wound up by saying that she was disgusted with Spencervale church and she
never meant to darken its door again, and she hoped a fearful judgment would come
upon it.
Then she sat down out of breath, and the minister, who hadn't heard a word she said,
immediately remarked, in a very devout voice, 'amen!
The Lord grant our dear sister's prayer!'
You ought to hear father tell the story."
"Speaking of stories, Diana," remarked Anne, in a significant, confidential tone,
"do you know that lately I have been wondering if I could write a short story--a
story that would be good enough to be published?"
"Why, of course you could," said Diana, after she had grasped the amazing
suggestion.
"You used to write perfectly thrilling stories years ago in our old Story Club."
"Well, I hardly meant one of that kind of stories," smiled Anne.
"I've been thinking about it a little of late, but I'm almost afraid to try, for, if
I should fail, it would be too humiliating."
"I heard Priscilla say once that all Mrs. Morgan's first stories were rejected.
But I'm sure yours wouldn't be, Anne, for it's likely editors have more sense
nowadays."
"Margaret Burton, one of the Junior girls at Redmond, wrote a story last winter and
it was published in the Canadian Woman. I really do think I could write one at
least as good."
"And will you have it published in the Canadian Woman?"
"I might try one of the bigger magazines first.
It all depends on what kind of a story I write."
"What is it to be about?" "I don't know yet.
I want to get hold of a good plot.
I believe this is very necessary from an editor's point of view.
The only thing I've settled on is the heroine's name.
It is to be AVERIL LESTER.
Rather pretty, don't you think? Don't mention this to any one, Diana.
I haven't told anybody but you and Mr. Harrison.
HE wasn't very encouraging--he said there was far too much trash written nowadays as
it was, and he'd expected something better of me, after a year at college."
"What does Mr. Harrison know about it?" demanded Diana scornfully.
They found the Gillis home gay with lights and callers.
Leonard Kimball, of Spencervale, and Morgan Bell, of Carmody, were glaring at each
other across the parlor. Several merry girls had dropped in.
Ruby was dressed in white and her eyes and cheeks were very brilliant.
She laughed and chattered incessantly, and after the other girls had gone she took
Anne upstairs to display her new summer dresses.
"I've a blue silk to make up yet, but it's a little heavy for summer wear.
I think I'll leave it until the fall. I'm going to teach in White Sands, you
How do you like my hat? That one you had on in church yesterday was
real dinky. But I like something brighter for myself.
Did you notice those two ridiculous boys downstairs?
They've both come determined to sit each other out.
I don't care a single bit about either of them, you know.
Herb Spencer is the one I like. Sometimes I really do think he's MR. RIGHT.
At Christmas I thought the Spencervale schoolmaster was that.
But I found out something about him that turned me against him.
He nearly went insane when I turned him down.
I wish those two boys hadn't come tonight. I wanted to have a nice good talk with you,
Anne, and tell you such heaps of things.
You and I were always good chums, weren't we?"
Ruby slipped her arm about Anne's waist with a shallow little laugh.
But just for a moment their eyes met, and, behind all the luster of Ruby's, Anne saw
something that made her heart ache. "Come up often, won't you, Anne?" whispered
Ruby.
"Come alone--I want you." "Are you feeling quite well, Ruby?"
"Me! Why, I'm perfectly well.
I never felt better in my life.
Of course, that congestion last winter pulled me down a little.
But just see my color. I don't look much like an invalid, I'm
sure."
Ruby's voice was almost sharp.
She pulled her arm away from Anne, as if in resentment, and ran downstairs, where she
was gayer than ever, apparently so much absorbed in bantering her two swains that
Diana and Anne felt rather out of it and soon went away.
>
CHAPTER XII "Averil's Atonement"
"What are you dreaming of, Anne?" The two girls were loitering one evening in
a fairy hollow of the brook.
Ferns nodded in it, and little grasses were green, and wild pears hung finely-scented,
white curtains around it. Anne roused herself from her reverie with a
happy sigh.
"I was thinking out my story, Diana." "Oh, have you really begun it?" cried
Diana, all alight with eager interest in a moment.
"Yes, I have only a few pages written, but I have it all pretty well thought out.
I've had such a time to get a suitable plot.
None of the plots that suggested themselves suited a girl named AVERIL."
"Couldn't you have changed her name?" "No, the thing was impossible.
I tried to, but I couldn't do it, any more than I could change yours.
AVERIL was so real to me that no matter what other name I tried to give her I just
thought of her as AVERIL behind it all.
But finally I got a plot that matched her. Then came the excitement of choosing names
for all my characters. You have no idea how fascinating that is.
I've lain awake for hours thinking over those names.
The hero's name is PERCEVAL DALRYMPLE." "Have you named ALL the characters?" asked
Diana wistfully.
"If you hadn't I was going to ask you to let me name one--just some unimportant
person. I'd feel as if I had a share in the story
then."
"You may name the little hired boy who lived with the LESTERS," conceded Anne.
"He is not very important, but he is the only one left unnamed."
"Call him RAYMOND FITZOSBORNE," suggested Diana, who had a store of such names laid
away in her memory, relics of the old "Story Club," which she and Anne and Jane
Andrews and Ruby Gillis had had in their schooldays.
Anne shook her head doubtfully. "I'm afraid that is too aristocratic a name
for a chore boy, Diana.
I couldn't imagine a Fitzosborne feeding pigs and picking up chips, could you?"
Diana didn't see why, if you had an imagination at all, you couldn't stretch it
to that extent; but probably Anne knew best, and the chore boy was finally
christened ROBERT RAY, to be called BOBBY should occasion require.
"How much do you suppose you'll get for it?" asked Diana.
But Anne had not thought about this at all.
She was in pursuit of fame, not filthy lucre, and her literary dreams were as yet
untainted by mercenary considerations. "You'll let me read it, won't you?" pleaded
Diana.
"When it is finished I'll read it to you and Mr. Harrison, and I shall want you to
criticize it SEVERELY. No one else shall see it until it is
published."
"How are you going to end it--happily or unhappily?"
"I'm not sure. I'd like it to end unhappily, because that
would be so much more romantic.
But I understand editors have a prejudice against sad endings.
I heard Professor Hamilton say once that nobody but a genius should try to write an
unhappy ending.
And," concluded Anne modestly, "I'm anything but a genius."
"Oh I like happy endings best.
You'd better let him marry her," said Diana, who, especially since her engagement
to Fred, thought this was how every story should end.
"But you like to cry over stories?"
"Oh, yes, in the middle of them. But I like everything to come right at
last." "I must have one pathetic scene in it,"
said Anne thoughtfully.
"I might let ROBERT RAY be injured in an accident and have a death scene."
"No, you mustn't kill BOBBY off," declared Diana, laughing.
"He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish.
Kill somebody else if you have to."
For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to mood, in her literary
pursuits.
Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary
character would NOT behave properly. Diana could not understand this.
"MAKE them do as you want them to," she said.
"I can't," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine.
She WILL do and say things I never meant her to.
Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over
again."
Finally, however, the story was finished, and Anne read it to Diana in the seclusion
of the porch gable.
She had achieved her "pathetic scene" without sacrificing ROBERT RAY, and she
kept a watchful eye on Diana as she read it.
Diana rose to the occasion and cried properly; but, when the end came, she
looked a little disappointed. "Why did you kill MAURICE LENNOX?" she
asked reproachfully.
"He was the villain," protested Anne. "He had to be punished."
"I like him best of them all," said unreasonable Diana.
"Well, he's dead, and he'll have to stay dead," said Anne, rather resentfully.
"If I had let him live he'd have gone on persecuting AVERIL and PERCEVAL."
"Yes--unless you had reformed him."
"That wouldn't have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too
long."
"Well, anyway, it's a perfectly elegant story, Anne, and will make you famous, of
that I'm sure. Have you got a title for it?"
"Oh, I decided on the title long ago.
I call it AVERIL'S ATONEMENT. Doesn't that sound nice and alliterative?
Now, Diana, tell me candidly, do you see any faults in my story?"
"Well," hesitated Diana, "that part where AVERIL makes the cake doesn't seem to me
quite romantic enough to match the rest. It's just what anybody might do.
Heroines shouldn't do cooking, I think."
"Why, that is where the humor comes in, and it's one of the best parts of the whole
story," said Anne. And it may be stated that in this she was
quite right.
Diana prudently refrained from any further criticism, but Mr. Harrison was much harder
to please. First he told her there was entirely too
much description in the story.
"Cut out all those flowery passages," he said unfeelingly.
Anne had an uncomfortable conviction that Mr. Harrison was right, and she forced
herself to expunge most of her beloved descriptions, though it took three re-
writings before the story could be pruned down to please the fastidious Mr. Harrison.
"I've left out ALL the descriptions but the sunset," she said at last.
"I simply COULDN'T let it go.
It was the best of them all." "It hasn't anything to do with the story,"
said Mr. Harrison, "and you shouldn't have laid the scene among rich city people.
What do you know of them?
Why didn't you lay it right here in Avonlea--changing the name, of course, or
else Mrs. Rachel Lynde would probably think she was the heroine."
"Oh, that would never have done," protested Anne.
"Avonlea is the dearest place in the world, but it isn't quite romantic enough for the
scene of a story."
"I daresay there's been many a romance in Avonlea--and many a tragedy, too," said Mr.
Harrison drily. "But your folks ain't like real folks
anywhere.
They talk too much and use too high-flown language.
There's one place where that DALRYMPLE chap talks even on for two pages, and never lets
the girl get a word in edgewise.
If he'd done that in real life she'd have pitched him."
"I don't believe it," said Anne flatly.
In her secret soul she thought that the beautiful, poetical things said to AVERIL
would win any girl's heart completely.
Besides, it was gruesome to hear of AVERIL, the stately, queen-like AVERIL, "pitching"
any one. AVERIL "declined her suitors."
"Anyhow," resumed the merciless Mr. Harrison, "I don't see why MAURICE LENNOX
didn't get her. He was twice the man the other is.
He did bad things, but he did them.
Perceval hadn't time for anything but mooning."
"Mooning." That was even worse than "pitching!"
"MAURICE LENNOX was the villain," said Anne indignantly.
"I don't see why every one likes him better than PERCEVAL."
"Perceval is too good.
He's aggravating. Next time you write about a hero put a
little spice of human nature in him." "AVERIL couldn't have married MAURICE.
He was bad."
"She'd have reformed him. You can reform a man; you can't reform a
jelly-fish, of course. Your story isn't bad--it's kind of
interesting, I'll admit.
But you're too young to write a story that would be worth while.
Wait ten years."
Anne made up her mind that the next time she wrote a story she wouldn't ask anybody
to criticize it. It was too discouraging.
She would not read the story to Gilbert, although she told him about it.
"If it is a success you'll see it when it is published, Gilbert, but if it is a
failure nobody shall ever see it."
Marilla knew nothing about the venture.
In imagination Anne saw herself reading a story out of a magazine to Marilla,
entrapping her into praise of it--for in imagination all things are possible--and
then triumphantly announcing herself the author.
One day Anne took to the Post Office a long, bulky envelope, addressed, with the
delightful confidence of youth and inexperience, to the very biggest of the
"big" magazines.
Diana was as excited over it as Anne herself.
"How long do you suppose it will be before you hear from it?" she asked.
"It shouldn't be longer than a fortnight.
Oh, how happy and proud I shall be if it is accepted!"
"Of course it will be accepted, and they will likely ask you to send them more.
You may be as famous as Mrs. Morgan some day, Anne, and then how proud I'll be of
knowing you," said Diana, who possessed, at least, the striking merit of an unselfish
admiration of the gifts and graces of her friends.
A week of delightful dreaming followed, and then came a bitter awakening.
One evening Diana found Anne in the porch gable, with suspicious-looking eyes.
On the table lay a long envelope and a crumpled manuscript.
"Anne, your story hasn't come back?" cried Diana incredulously.
"Yes, it has," said Anne shortly. "Well, that editor must be crazy.
What reason did he give?"
"No reason at all. There is just a printed slip saying that it
wasn't found acceptable." "I never thought much of that magazine,
anyway," said Diana hotly.
"The stories in it are not half as interesting as those in the Canadian Woman,
although it costs so much more. I suppose the editor is prejudiced against
any one who isn't a Yankee.
Don't be discouraged, Anne. Remember how Mrs. Morgan's stories came
back. Send yours to the Canadian Woman."
"I believe I will," said Anne, plucking up heart.
"And if it is published I'll send that American editor a marked copy.
But I'll cut the sunset out.
I believe Mr. Harrison was right."
Out came the sunset; but in spite of this heroic mutilation the editor of the
Canadian Woman sent Averil's Atonement back so promptly that the indignant Diana
declared that it couldn't have been read at
all, and vowed she was going to stop her subscription immediately.
Anne took this second rejection with the calmness of despair.
She locked the story away in the garret trunk where the old Story Club tales
reposed; but first she yielded to Diana's entreaties and gave her a copy.
"This is the end of my literary ambitions," she said bitterly.
She never mentioned the matter to Mr. Harrison, but one evening he asked her
bluntly if her story had been accepted.
"No, the editor wouldn't take it," she answered briefly.
Mr. Harrison looked sidewise at the flushed, delicate profile.
"Well, I suppose you'll keep on writing them," he said encouragingly.
"No, I shall never try to write a story again," declared Anne, with the hopeless
finality of nineteen when a door is shut in its face.
"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively.
"I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it.
I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday
English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss
over the fact.
If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a
chance.
There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a
long piece to find them--though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad.
But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us.
Keep on writing, Anne." "No.
It was very foolish of me to attempt it.
When I'm through Redmond I'll stick to teaching.
I can teach. I can't write stories."
"It'll be time for you to be getting a husband when you're through Redmond," said
Mr. Harrison. "I don't believe in putting marrying off
too long--like I did."
Anne got up and marched home. There were times when Mr. Harrison was
really intolerable. "Pitching," "mooning," and "getting a
husband."
Ow!!
>
CHAPTER XIII The Way of Transgressors
Davy and Dora were ready for Sunday School. They were going alone, which did not often
happen, for Mrs. Lynde always attended Sunday School.
But Mrs. Lynde had twisted her ankle and was lame, so she was staying home this
morning.
The twins were also to represent the family at church, for Anne had gone away the
evening before to spend Sunday with friends in Carmody, and Marilla had one of her
headaches.
Davy came downstairs slowly. Dora was waiting in the hall for him,
having been made ready by Mrs. Lynde. Davy had attended to his own preparations.
He had a cent in his pocket for the Sunday School collection, and a five-cent piece
for the church collection; he carried his Bible in one hand and his Sunday School
quarterly in the other; he knew his lesson
and his Golden Text and his catechism question perfectly.
Had he not studied them--perforce--in Mrs. Lynde's kitchen, all last Sunday afternoon?
Davy, therefore, should have been in a placid frame of mind.
As a matter of fact, despite text and catechism, he was inwardly as a ravening
wolf.
Mrs. Lynde limped out of her kitchen as he joined Dora.
"Are you clean?" she demanded severely. "Yes--all of me that shows," Davy answered
with a defiant scowl.
Mrs. Rachel sighed. She had her suspicions about Davy's neck
and ears.
But she knew that if she attempted to make a personal examination Davy would likely
take to his heels and she could not pursue him today.
"Well, be sure you behave yourselves," she warned them.
"Don't walk in the dust. Don't stop in the porch to talk to the
other children.
Don't squirm or wriggle in your places. Don't forget the Golden Text.
Don't lose your collection or forget to put it in.
Don't whisper at prayer time, and don't forget to pay attention to the sermon."
Davy deigned no response. He marched away down the lane, followed by
the meek Dora.
But his soul seethed within.
Davy had suffered, or thought he had suffered, many things at the hands and
tongue of Mrs. Rachel Lynde since she had come to Green Gables, for Mrs. Lynde could
not live with anybody, whether they were
nine or ninety, without trying to bring them up properly.
And it was only the preceding afternoon that she had interfered to influence
Marilla against allowing Davy to go fishing with the Timothy Cottons.
Davy was still boiling over this.
As soon as he was out of the lane Davy stopped and twisted his countenance into
such an unearthly and terrific contortion that Dora, although she knew his gifts in
that respect, was honestly alarmed lest he
should never in the world be able to get it straightened out again.
"Darn her," exploded Davy. "Oh, Davy, don't swear," gasped Dora in
dismay.
"'Darn' isn't swearing--not real swearing. And I don't care if it is," retorted Davy
recklessly. "Well, if you MUST say dreadful words don't
say them on Sunday," pleaded Dora.
Davy was as yet far from repentance, but in his secret soul he felt that, perhaps, he
had gone a little too far. "I'm going to invent a swear word of my
own," he declared.
"God will punish you if you do," said Dora solemnly.
"Then I think God is a mean old scamp," retorted Davy.
"Doesn't He know a fellow must have some way of 'spressing his feelings?"
"Davy!!!" said Dora. She expected that Davy would be struck down
dead on the spot.
But nothing happened. "Anyway, I ain't going to stand any more of
Mrs. Lynde's bossing," spluttered Davy. "Anne and Marilla may have the right to
boss me, but SHE hasn't.
I'm going to do every single thing she told me not to do.
You watch me."
In grim, deliberate silence, while Dora watched him with the fascination of horror,
Davy stepped off the green grass of the roadside, ankle deep into the fine dust
which four weeks of rainless weather had
made on the road, and marched along in it, shuffling his feet viciously until he was
enveloped in a hazy cloud. "That's the beginning," he announced
triumphantly.
"And I'm going to stop in the porch and talk as long as there's anybody there to
talk to.
I'm going to squirm and wriggle and whisper, and I'm going to say I don't know
the Golden Text. And I'm going to throw away both of my
collections RIGHT NOW."
And Davy hurled cent and nickel over Mr. Barry's fence with fierce delight.
"Satan made you do that," said Dora reproachfully.
"He didn't," cried Davy indignantly.
"I just thought it out for myself. And I've thought of something else.
I'm not going to Sunday School or church at all.
I'm going up to play with the Cottons.
They told me yesterday they weren't going to Sunday School today, 'cause their mother
was away and there was nobody to make them. Come along, Dora, we'll have a great time."
"I don't want to go," protested Dora.
"You've got to," said Davy. "If you don't come I'll tell Marilla that
Frank Bell kissed you in school last Monday."
"I couldn't help it.
I didn't know he was going to," cried Dora, blushing scarlet.
"Well, you didn't slap him or seem a bit cross," retorted Davy.
"I'll tell her THAT, too, if you don't come.
We'll take the short cut up this field." "I'm afraid of those cows," protested poor
Dora, seeing a prospect of escape.
"The very idea of your being scared of those cows," scoffed Davy.
"Why, they're both younger than you." "They're bigger," said Dora.
"They won't hurt you.
Come along, now. This is great.
When I grow up I ain't going to bother going to church at all.
I believe I can get to heaven by myself."
"You'll go to the other place if you break the Sabbath day," said unhappy Dora,
following him sorely against her will. But Davy was not scared--yet.
Hell was very far off, and the delights of a fishing expedition with the Cottons were
very near. He wished Dora had more ***.
She kept looking back as if she were going to cry every minute, and that spoiled a
fellow's fun. Hang girls, anyway.
Davy did not say "darn" this time, even in thought.
He was not sorry--yet--that he had said it once, but it might be as well not to tempt
the Unknown Powers too far on one day.
The small Cottons were playing in their back yard, and hailed Davy's appearance
with whoops of delight. Pete, Tommy, Adolphus, and Mirabel Cotton
were all alone.
Their mother and older sisters were away. Dora was thankful Mirabel was there, at
least. She had been afraid she would be alone in a
crowd of boys.
Mirabel was almost as bad as a boy--she was so noisy and sunburned and reckless.
But at least she wore dresses. "We've come to go fishing," announced Davy.
"Whoop," yelled the Cottons.
They rushed away to dig worms at once, Mirabel leading the van with a tin can.
Dora could have sat down and cried. Oh, if only that hateful Frank Bell had
never kissed her!
Then she could have defied Davy, and gone to her beloved Sunday School.
They dared not, of course, go fishing on the pond, where they would be seen by
people going to church.
They had to resort to the brook in the woods behind the Cotton house.
But it was full of trout, and they had a glorious time that morning--at least the
Cottons certainly had, and Davy seemed to have it.
Not being entirely bereft of prudence, he had discarded boots and stockings and
borrowed Tommy Cotton's overalls. Thus accoutered, bog and marsh and
undergrowth had no terrors for him.
Dora was frankly and manifestly miserable.
She followed the others in their peregrinations from pool to pool, clasping
her Bible and quarterly tightly and thinking with bitterness of soul of her
beloved class where she should be sitting
that very moment, before a teacher she adored.
Instead, here she was roaming the woods with those half-wild Cottons, trying to
keep her boots clean and her pretty white dress free from rents and stains.
Mirabel had offered the loan of an apron but Dora had scornfully refused.
The trout bit as they always do on Sundays.
In an hour the transgressors had all the fish they wanted, so they returned to the
house, much to Dora's relief.
She sat primly on a hencoop in the yard while the others played an uproarious game
of tag; and then they all climbed to the top of the pig-house roof and cut their
initials on the saddleboard.
The flat-roofed henhouse and a pile of straw beneath gave Davy another
inspiration.
They spent a splendid half hour climbing on the roof and diving off into the straw with
whoops and yells. But even unlawful pleasures must come to an
end.
When the rumble of wheels over the pond bridge told that people were going home
from church Davy knew they must go.
He discarded Tommy's overalls, resumed his own rightful attire, and turned away from
his string of trout with a sigh. No use to think of taking them home.
"Well, hadn't we a splendid time?" he demanded defiantly, as they went down the
hill field. "I hadn't," said Dora flatly.
"And I don't believe you had--really-- either," she added, with a flash of insight
that was not to be expected of her. "I had so," cried Davy, but in the voice of
one who doth protest too much.
"No wonder you hadn't--just sitting there like a--like a mule."
"I ain't going to, 'sociate with the Cottons," said Dora loftily.
"The Cottons are all right," retorted Davy.
"And they have far better times than we have.
They do just as they please and say just what they like before everybody.
I'm going to do that, too, after this."
"There are lots of things you wouldn't dare say before everybody," averred Dora.
"No, there isn't." "There is, too.
Would you," demanded Dora gravely, "would you say 'tomcat' before the minister?"
This was a staggerer. Davy was not prepared for such a concrete
example of the freedom of speech.
But one did not have to be consistent with Dora.
"Of course not," he admitted sulkily. "'Tomcat' isn't a holy word.
I wouldn't mention such an animal before a minister at all."
"But if you had to?" persisted Dora. "I'd call it a Thomas ***," said Davy.
"I think 'gentleman cat' would be more polite," reflected Dora.
"YOU thinking!" retorted Davy with withering scorn.
Davy was not feeling comfortable, though he would have died before he admitted it to
Dora.
Now that the exhilaration of truant delights had died away, his conscience was
beginning to give him salutary twinges.
After all, perhaps it would have been better to have gone to Sunday School and
church.
Mrs. Lynde might be bossy; but there was always a box of cookies in her kitchen
cupboard and she was not stingy.
At this inconvenient moment Davy remembered that when he had torn his new school pants
the week before, Mrs. Lynde had mended them beautifully and never said a word to
Marilla about them.
But Davy's cup of iniquity was not yet full.
He was to discover that one sin demands another to cover it.
They had dinner with Mrs. Lynde that day, and the first thing she asked Davy was,
"Were all your class in Sunday School today?"
"Yes'm," said Davy with a gulp.
"All were there--'cept one." "Did you say your Golden Text and
catechism?" "Yes'm."
"Did you put your collection in?"
"Yes'm." "Was Mrs. Malcolm MacPherson in church?"
"I don't know." This, at least, was the truth, thought
wretched Davy.
"Was the Ladies' Aid announced for next week?"
"Yes'm"--quakingly. "Was prayer-meeting?"
"I--I don't know."
"YOU should know. You should listen more attentively to the
announcements. What was Mr. Harvey's text?"
Davy took a frantic gulp of water and swallowed it and the last protest of
conscience together. He glibly recited an old Golden Text
learned several weeks ago.
Fortunately Mrs. Lynde now stopped questioning him; but Davy did not enjoy his
dinner. He could only eat one helping of pudding.
"What's the matter with you?" demanded justly astonished Mrs. Lynde.
"Are you sick?" "No," muttered Davy.
"You look pale.
You'd better keep out of the sun this afternoon," admonished Mrs. Lynde.
"Do you know how many lies you told Mrs. Lynde?" asked Dora reproachfully, as soon
as they were alone after dinner.
Davy, goaded to desperation, turned fiercely.
"I don't know and I don't care," he said. "You just shut up, Dora Keith."
Then poor Davy betook himself to a secluded retreat behind the woodpile to think over
the way of transgressors. Green Gables was wrapped in darkness and
silence when Anne reached home.
She lost no time going to bed, for she was very tired and sleepy.
There had been several Avonlea jollifications the preceding week,
involving rather late hours.
Anne's head was hardly on her pillow before she was half asleep; but just then her door
was softly opened and a pleading voice said, "Anne."
Anne sat up drowsily.
"Davy, is that you? What is the matter?"
A white-clad figure flung itself across the floor and on to the bed.
"Anne," sobbed Davy, getting his arms about her neck.
"I'm awful glad you're home. I couldn't go to sleep till I'd told
somebody."
"Told somebody what?" "How mis'rubul I am."
"Why are you miserable, dear?" "'Cause I was so bad today, Anne.
Oh, I was awful bad--badder'n I've ever been yet."
"What did you do?" "Oh, I'm afraid to tell you.
You'll never like me again, Anne.
I couldn't say my prayers tonight. I couldn't tell God what I'd done.
I was 'shamed to have Him know." "But He knew anyway, Davy."
"That's what Dora said.
But I thought p'raps He mightn't have noticed just at the time.
Anyway, I'd rather tell you first." "WHAT is it you did?"
Out it all came in a rush.
"I run away from Sunday School--and went fishing with the Cottons--and I told ever
so many whoppers to Mrs. Lynde--oh!
'most half a dozen--and--and--I--I said a swear word, Anne--a pretty near swear word,
anyhow--and I called God names." There was silence.
Davy didn't know what to make of it.
Was Anne so shocked that she never would speak to him again?
"Anne, what are you going to do to me?" he whispered.
"Nothing, dear.
You've been punished already, I think." "No, I haven't.
Nothing's been done to me." "You've been very unhappy ever since you
did wrong, haven't you?"
"You bet!" said Davy emphatically. "That was your conscience punishing you,
Davy." "What's my conscience?
I want to know."
"It's something in you, Davy, that always tells you when you are doing wrong and
makes you unhappy if you persist in doing it.
Haven't you noticed that?"
"Yes, but I didn't know what it was. I wish I didn't have it.
I'd have lots more fun. Where is my conscience, Anne?
I want to know.
Is it in my stomach?" "No, it's in your soul," answered Anne,
thankful for the darkness, since gravity must be preserved in serious matters.
"I s'pose I can't get clear of it then," said Davy with a sigh.
"Are you going to tell Marilla and Mrs. Lynde on me, Anne?"
"No, dear, I'm not going to tell any one.
You are sorry you were naughty, aren't you?"
"You bet!" "And you'll never be bad like that again."
"No, but--" added Davy cautiously, "I might be bad some other way."
"You won't say naughty words, or run away on Sundays, or tell falsehoods to cover up
your sins?"
"No. It doesn't pay," said Davy. "Well, Davy, just tell God you are sorry
and ask Him to forgive you." "Have YOU forgiven me, Anne?"
"Yes, dear."
"Then," said Davy joyously, "I don't care much whether God does or not."
"Davy!"
"Oh--I'll ask Him--I'll ask Him," said Davy quickly, scrambling off the bed, convinced
by Anne's tone that he must have said something dreadful.
"I don't mind asking Him, Anne.--Please, God, I'm awful sorry I behaved bad today
and I'll try to be good on Sundays always and please forgive me.--There now, Anne."
"Well, now, run off to bed like a good boy."
"All right. Say, I don't feel mis'rubul any more.
I feel fine.
Good night." "Good night."
Anne slipped down on her pillows with a sigh of relief.
Oh--how sleepy--she was!
In another second-- "Anne!"
Davy was back again by her bed. Anne dragged her eyes open.
"What is it now, dear?" she asked, trying to keep a note of impatience out of her
voice. "Anne, have you ever noticed how Mr.
Harrison spits?
Do you s'pose, if I practice hard, I can learn to spit just like him?"
Anne sat up.
"Davy Keith," she said, "go straight to your bed and don't let me catch you out of
it again tonight! Go, now!"
Davy went, and stood not upon the order of his going.
>
CHAPTER XIV The Summons
Anne was sitting with Ruby Gillis in the Gillis' garden after the day had crept
lingeringly through it and was gone. It had been a warm, smoky summer afternoon.
The world was in a splendor of out- flowering.
The idle valleys were full of hazes. The woodways were pranked with shadows and
the fields with the purple of the asters.
Anne had given up a moonlight drive to the White Sands beach that she might spend the
evening with Ruby.
She had so spent many evenings that summer, although she often wondered what good it
did any one, and sometimes went home deciding that she could not go again.
Ruby grew paler as the summer waned; the White Sands school was given up--"her
father thought it better that she shouldn't teach till New Year's"--and the fancy work
she loved oftener and oftener fell from hands grown too weary for it.
But she was always gay, always hopeful, always chattering and whispering of her
beaux, and their rivalries and despairs.
It was this that made Anne's visits hard for her.
What had once been silly or amusing was gruesome, now; it was death peering through
a wilful mask of life.
Yet Ruby seemed to cling to her, and never let her go until she had promised to come
again soon.
Mrs. Lynde grumbled about Anne's frequent visits, and declared she would catch
consumption; even Marilla was dubious. "Every time you go to see Ruby you come
home looking tired out," she said.
"It's so very sad and dreadful," said Anne in a low tone.
"Ruby doesn't seem to realize her condition in the least.
And yet I somehow feel she needs help-- craves it--and I want to give it to her and
can't.
All the time I'm with her I feel as if I were watching her struggle with an
invisible foe--trying to push it back with such feeble resistance as she has.
That is why I come home tired."
But tonight Anne did not feel this so keenly.
Ruby was strangely quiet. She said not a word about parties and
drives and dresses and "fellows."
She lay in the hammock, with her untouched work beside her, and a white shawl wrapped
about her thin shoulders.
Her long yellow braids of hair--how Anne had envied those beautiful braids in old
schooldays!--lay on either side of her. She had taken the pins out--they made her
head ache, she said.
The hectic flush was gone for the time, leaving her pale and childlike.
The moon rose in the silvery sky, empearling the clouds around her.
Below, the pond shimmered in its hazy radiance.
Just beyond the Gillis homestead was the church, with the old graveyard beside it.
The moonlight shone on the white stones, bringing them out in clear-cut relief
against the dark trees behind. "How strange the graveyard looks by
moonlight!" said Ruby suddenly.
"How ghostly!" she shuddered. "Anne, it won't be long now before I'll be
lying over there.
You and Diana and all the rest will be going about, full of life--and I'll be
there--in the old graveyard--dead!" The surprise of it bewildered Anne.
For a few moments she could not speak.
"You know it's so, don't you?" said Ruby insistently.
"Yes, I know," answered Anne in a low tone. "Dear Ruby, I know."
"Everybody knows it," said Ruby bitterly.
"I know it--I've known it all summer, though I wouldn't give in.
And, oh, Anne"--she reached out and caught Anne's hand pleadingly, impulsively--"I
don't want to die.
I'm AFRAID to die." "Why should you be afraid, Ruby?" asked
Anne quietly. "Because--because--oh, I'm not afraid but
that I'll go to heaven, Anne.
I'm a church member. But--it'll be all so different.
I think--and think--and I get so frightened--and--and--homesick.
Heaven must be very beautiful, of course, the Bible says so--but, Anne, IT WON'T BE
WHAT I'VE BEEN USED TO."
Through Anne's mind drifted an intrusive recollection of a funny story she had heard
Philippa Gordon tell--the story of some old man who had said very much the same thing
about the world to come.
It had sounded funny then--she remembered how she and Priscilla had laughed over it.
But it did not seem in the least humorous now, coming from Ruby's pale, trembling
lips.
It was sad, tragic--and true! Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used
to.
There had been nothing in her gay, frivolous life, her shallow ideals and
aspirations, to fit her for that great change, or make the life to come seem to
her anything but alien and unreal and undesirable.
Anne wondered helplessly what she could say that would help her.
Could she say anything?
"I think, Ruby," she began hesitatingly-- for it was difficult for Anne to speak to
any one of the deepest thoughts of her heart, or the new ideas that had vaguely
begun to shape themselves in her mind,
concerning the great mysteries of life here and hereafter, superseding her old childish
conceptions, and it was hardest of all to speak of them to such as Ruby Gillis--"I
think, perhaps, we have very mistaken ideas
about heaven--what it is and what it holds for us.
I don't think it can be so very different from life here as most people seem to
think.
I believe we'll just go on living, a good deal as we live here--and be OURSELVES just
the same--only it will be easier to be good and to--follow the highest.
All the hindrances and perplexities will be taken away, and we shall see clearly.
Don't be afraid, Ruby." "I can't help it," said Ruby pitifully.
"Even if what you say about heaven is true- -and you can't be sure--it may be only that
imagination of yours--it won't be JUST the same.
It CAN'T be.
I want to go on living HERE. I'm so young, Anne.
I haven't had my life.
I've fought so hard to live--and it isn't any use--I have to die--and leave
EVERYTHING I care for." Anne sat in a pain that was almost
intolerable.
She could not tell comforting falsehoods; and all that Ruby said was so horribly
true. She WAS leaving everything she cared for.
She had laid up her treasures on earth only; she had lived solely for the little
things of life--the things that pass-- forgetting the great things that go onward
into eternity, bridging the gulf between
the two lives and making of death a mere passing from one dwelling to the other--
from twilight to unclouded day.
God would take care of her there--Anne believed--she would learn--but now it was
no wonder her soul clung, in blind helplessness, to the only things she knew
and loved.
Ruby raised herself on her arm and lifted up her bright, beautiful blue eyes to the
moonlit skies. "I want to live," she said, in a trembling
voice.
"I want to live like other girls. I--I want to be married, Anne--and--and--
have little children. You know I always loved babies, Anne.
I couldn't say this to any one but you.
I know you understand. And then poor Herb--he--he loves me and I
love him, Anne.
The others meant nothing to me, but HE does--and if I could live I would be his
wife and be so happy. Oh, Anne, it's hard."
Ruby sank back on her pillows and sobbed convulsively.
Anne pressed her hand in an agony of sympathy--silent sympathy, which perhaps
helped Ruby more than broken, imperfect words could have done; for presently she
grew calmer and her sobs ceased.
"I'm glad I've told you this, Anne," she whispered.
"It has helped me just to say it all out. I've wanted to all summer--every time you
came.
I wanted to talk it over with you--but I COULDN'T.
It seemed as if it would make death so SURE if I SAID I was going to die, or if any one
else said it or hinted it.
I wouldn't say it, or even think it. In the daytime, when people were around me
and everything was cheerful, it wasn't so hard to keep from thinking of it.
But in the night, when I couldn't sleep--it was so dreadful, Anne.
I couldn't get away from it then.
Death just came and stared me in the face, until I got so frightened I could have
screamed. "But you won't be frightened any more,
Ruby, will you?
You'll be brave, and believe that all is going to be well with you."
"I'll try. I'll think over what you have said, and try
to believe it.
And you'll come up as often as you can, won't you, Anne?"
"Yes, dear." "It--it won't be very long now, Anne.
I feel sure of that.
And I'd rather have you than any one else. I always liked you best of all the girls I
went to school with. You were never jealous, or mean, like some
of them were.
Poor Em White was up to see me yesterday. You remember Em and I were such chums for
three years when we went to school? And then we quarrelled the time of the
school concert.
We've never spoken to each other since. Wasn't it silly?
Anything like that seems silly NOW. But Em and I made up the old quarrel
yesterday.
She said she'd have spoken years ago, only she thought I wouldn't.
And I never spoke to her because I was sure she wouldn't speak to me.
Isn't it strange how people misunderstand each other, Anne?"
"Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think," said Anne.
"I must go now, Ruby.
It's getting late--and you shouldn't be out in the damp."
"You'll come up soon again." "Yes, very soon.
And if there's anything I can do to help you I'll be so glad."
"I know. You HAVE helped me already.
Nothing seems quite so dreadful now.
Good night, Anne." "Good night, dear."
Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight.
The evening had changed something for her.
Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose.
On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred.
It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby.
When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the
shrinking terror of something wholly different--something for which accustomed
thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her.
The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the
things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven
must be begun here on earth.
That good night in the garden was for all time.
Anne never saw Ruby in life again.
The next night the A.V.I.S. gave a farewell party to Jane Andrews before her departure
for the West.
And, while light feet danced and bright eyes laughed and merry tongues chattered,
there came a summons to a soul in Avonlea that might not be disregarded or evaded.
The next morning the word went from house to house that Ruby Gillis was dead.
She had died in her sleep, painlessly and calmly, and on her face was a smile--as if,
after all, death had come as a kindly friend to lead her over the threshold,
instead of the grisly phantom she had dreaded.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was the
handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on.
Her loveliness, as she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had
placed about her, was remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea.
Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it
had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder's
eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it.
But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and
purity of outline never seen before--doing what life and love and great sorrow and
deep womanhood joys might have done for Ruby.
Anne, looking down through a mist of tears, at her old playfellow, thought she saw the
face God had meant Ruby to have, and remembered it so always.
Mrs. Gillis called Anne aside into a vacant room before the funeral procession left the
house, and gave her a small packet. "I want you to have this," she sobbed.
"Ruby would have liked you to have it.
It's the embroidered centerpiece she was working at.
It isn't quite finished--the needle is sticking in it just where her poor little
fingers put it the last time she laid it down, the afternoon before she died."
"There's always a piece of unfinished work left," said Mrs. Lynde, with tears in her
eyes. "But I suppose there's always some one to
finish it."
"How difficult it is to realize that one we have always known can really be dead," said
Anne, as she and Diana walked home. "Ruby is the first of our schoolmates to
go.
One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow."
"Yes, I suppose so," said Diana uncomfortably.
She did not want to talk of that.
She would have preferred to have discussed the details of the funeral--the splendid
white velvet casket Mr. Gillis had insisted on having for Ruby--"the Gillises must
always make a splurge, even at funerals,"
quoth Mrs. Rachel Lynde--Herb Spencer's sad face, the uncontrolled, hysteric grief of
one of Ruby's sisters--but Anne would not talk of these things.
She seemed wrapped in a reverie in which Diana felt lonesomely that she had neither
lot nor part. "Ruby Gillis was a great girl to laugh,"
said Davy suddenly.
"Will she laugh as much in heaven as she did in Avonlea, Anne?
I want to know." "Yes, I think she will," said Anne.
"Oh, Anne," protested Diana, with a rather shocked smile.
"Well, why not, Diana?" asked Anne seriously.
"Do you think we'll never laugh in heaven?"
"Oh--I--I don't know" floundered Diana. "It doesn't seem just right, somehow.
You know it's rather dreadful to laugh in church."
"But heaven won't be like church--all the time," said Anne.
"I hope it ain't," said Davy emphatically. "If it is I don't want to go.
Church is awful dull.
Anyway, I don't mean to go for ever so long.
I mean to live to be a hundred years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands.
He says he's lived so long 'cause he always smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs.
Can I smoke tobacco pretty soon, Anne?" "No, Davy, I hope you'll never use
tobacco," said Anne absently.
"What'll you feel like if the germs kill me then?" demanded Davy.
>
CHAPTER XV A Dream Turned Upside Down
"Just one more week and we go back to Redmond," said Anne.
She was happy at the thought of returning to work, classes and Redmond friends.
Pleasing visions were also being woven around Patty's Place.
There was a warm pleasant sense of home in the thought of it, even though she had
never lived there.
But the summer had been a very happy one, too--a time of glad living with summer suns
and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and
deepening of old friendships; a time in
which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently, to play more
heartily. "All life lessons are not learned at
college," she thought.
"Life teaches them everywhere." But alas, the final week of that pleasant
vacation was spoiled for Anne, by one of those impish happenings which are like a
dream turned upside down.
"Been writing any more stories lately?" inquired Mr. Harrison genially one evening
when Anne was taking tea with him and Mrs. Harrison.
"No," answered Anne, rather crisply.
"Well, no offense meant.
Mrs. Hiram Sloane told me the other day that a big envelope addressed to the
Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Company of Montreal had been dropped into the post
office box a month ago, and she suspicioned
that somebody was trying for the prize they'd offered for the best story that
introduced the name of their baking powder. She said it wasn't addressed in your
writing, but I thought maybe it was you."
"Indeed, no! I saw the prize offer, but I'd never dream
of competing for it.
I think it would be perfectly disgraceful to write a story to advertise a baking
powder. It would be almost as bad as Judson
Parker's patent medicine fence."
So spake Anne loftily, little dreaming of the valley of humiliation awaiting her.
That very evening Diana popped into the porch gable, bright-eyed and rosy cheeked,
carrying a letter.
"Oh, Anne, here's a letter for you. I was at the office, so I thought I'd bring
it along. Do open it quick.
If it is what I believe it is I shall just be wild with delight."
Anne, puzzled, opened the letter and glanced over the typewritten contents.
Miss Anne Shirley,
Green Gables, Avonlea, P.E. Island.
"DEAR MADAM: We have much pleasure in informing you that your charming story
'Averil's Atonement' has won the prize of twenty-five dollars offered in our recent
competition.
We enclose the check herewith.
We are arranging for the publication of the story in several prominent Canadian
newspapers, and we also intend to have it printed in pamphlet form for distribution
among our patrons.
Thanking you for the interest you have shown in our enterprise, we remain,
"Yours very truly, "THE ROLLINGS RELIABLE
"BAKING POWDER Co."
"I don't understand," said Anne, blankly. Diana clapped her hands.
"Oh, I KNEW it would win the prize--I was sure of it.
I sent your story into the competition, Anne."
"Diana--Barry!" "Yes, I did," said Diana gleefully,
perching herself on the bed.
"When I saw the offer I thought of your story in a minute, and at first I thought
I'd ask you to send it in. But then I was afraid you wouldn't--you had
so little faith left in it.
So I just decided I'd send the copy you gave me, and say nothing about it.
Then, if it didn't win the prize, you'd never know and you wouldn't feel badly over
it, because the stories that failed were not to be returned, and if it did you'd
have such a delightful surprise."
Diana was not the most discerning of mortals, but just at this moment it struck
her that Anne was not looking exactly overjoyed.
The surprise was there, beyond doubt--but where was the delight?
"Why, Anne, you don't seem a bit pleased!" she exclaimed.
Anne instantly manufactured a smile and put it on.
"Of course I couldn't be anything but pleased over your unselfish wish to give me
pleasure," she said slowly.
"But you know--I'm so amazed--I can't realize it--and I don't understand.
There wasn't a word in my story about-- about--" Anne choked a little over the
word--"baking powder."
"Oh, I put that in," said Diana, reassured. "It was as easy as wink--and of course my
experience in our old Story Club helped me. You know the scene where Averil makes the
cake?
Well, I just stated that she used the Rollings Reliable in it, and that was why
it turned out so well; and then, in the last paragraph, where PERCEVAL clasps
AVERIL in his arms and says, 'Sweetheart,
the beautiful coming years will bring us the fulfilment of our home of dreams,' I
added, 'in which we will never use any baking powder except Rollings Reliable.'"
"Oh," gasped poor Anne, as if some one had dashed cold water on her.
"And you've won the twenty-five dollars," continued Diana jubilantly.
"Why, I heard Priscilla say once that the Canadian Woman only pays five dollars for a
story!" Anne held out the hateful pink slip in
shaking fingers.
"I can't take it--it's yours by right, Diana.
You sent the story in and made the alterations.
I--I would certainly never have sent it.
So you must take the check." "I'd like to see myself," said Diana
scornfully. "Why, what I did wasn't any trouble.
The honor of being a friend of the prizewinner is enough for me.
Well, I must go. I should have gone straight home from the
post office for we have company.
But I simply had to come and hear the news. I'm so glad for your sake, Anne."
Anne suddenly bent forward, put her arms about Diana, and kissed her cheek.
"I think you are the sweetest and truest friend in the world, Diana," she said, with
a little tremble in her voice, "and I assure you I appreciate the motive of what
you've done."
Diana, pleased and embarrassed, got herself away, and poor Anne, after flinging the
innocent check into her bureau drawer as if it were blood-money, cast herself on her
bed and wept tears of shame and outraged sensibility.
Oh, she could never live this down--never!
Gilbert arrived at dusk, brimming over with congratulations, for he had called at
Orchard Slope and heard the news. But his congratulations died on his lips at
sight of Anne's face.
"Why, Anne, what is the matter? I expected to find you radiant over winning
Rollings Reliable prize. Good for you!"
"Oh, Gilbert, not you," implored Anne, in an ET-TU BRUTE tone.
"I thought YOU would understand. Can't you see how awful it is?"
"I must confess I can't.
WHAT is wrong?" "Everything," moaned Anne.
"I feel as if I were disgraced forever.
What do you think a mother would feel like if she found her child tattooed over with a
baking powder advertisement? I feel just the same.
I loved my poor little story, and I wrote it out of the best that was in me.
And it is SACRILEGE to have it degraded to the level of a baking powder advertisement.
Don't you remember what Professor Hamilton used to tell us in the literature class at
Queen's?
He said we were never to write a word for a low or unworthy motive, but always to cling
to the very highest ideals.
What will he think when he hears I've written a story to advertise Rollings
Reliable? And, oh, when it gets out at Redmond!
Think how I'll be teased and laughed at!"
"That you won't," said Gilbert, wondering uneasily if it were that confounded
Junior's opinion in particular over which Anne was worried.
"The Reds will think just as I thought-- that you, being like nine out of ten of us,
not overburdened with worldly wealth, had taken this way of earning an honest penny
to help yourself through the year.
I don't see that there's anything low or unworthy about that, or anything ridiculous
either.
One would rather write masterpieces of literature no doubt--but meanwhile board
and tuition fees have to be paid." This commonsense, matter-of-fact view of
the case cheered Anne a little.
At least it removed her dread of being laughed at, though the deeper hurt of an
outraged ideal remained.
>
CHAPTER XVI Adjusted Relationships
"It's the homiest spot I ever saw--it's homier than home," avowed Philippa Gordon,
looking about her with delighted eyes.
They were all assembled at twilight in the big living-room at Patty's Place--Anne and
Priscilla, Phil and Stella, Aunt Jamesina, Rusty, Joseph, the Sarah-Cat, and Gog and
Magog.
The firelight shadows were dancing over the walls; the cats were purring; and a huge
bowl of hothouse chrysanthemums, sent to Phil by one of the victims, shone through
the golden gloom like creamy moons.
It was three weeks since they had considered themselves settled, and already
all believed the experiment would be a success.
The first fortnight after their return had been a pleasantly exciting one; they had
been busy setting up their household goods, organizing their little establishment, and
adjusting different opinions.
Anne was not over-sorry to leave Avonlea when the time came to return to college.
The last few days of her vacation had not been pleasant.
Her prize story had been published in the Island papers; and Mr. William Blair had,
upon the counter of his store, a huge pile of pink, green and yellow pamphlets,
containing it, one of which he gave to every customer.
He sent a complimentary bundle to Anne, who promptly dropped them all in the kitchen
stove.
Her humiliation was the consequence of her own ideals only, for Avonlea folks thought
it quite splendid that she should have won the prize.
Her many friends regarded her with honest admiration; her few foes with scornful
envy.
Josie Pye said she believed Anne Shirley had just copied the story; she was sure she
remembered reading it in a paper years before.
The Sloanes, who had found out or guessed that Charlie had been "turned down," said
they didn't think it was much to be proud of; almost any one could have done it, if
she tried.
Aunt Atossa told Anne she was very sorry to hear she had taken to writing novels;
nobody born and bred in Avonlea would do it; that was what came of adopting orphans
from goodness knew where, with goodness knew what kind of parents.
Even Mrs. Rachel Lynde was darkly dubious about the propriety of writing fiction,
though she was almost reconciled to it by that twenty-five dollar check.
"It is perfectly amazing, the price they pay for such lies, that's what," she said,
half-proudly, half-severely. All things considered, it was a relief when
going-away time came.
And it was very jolly to be back at Redmond, a wise, experienced Soph with
hosts of friends to greet on the merry opening day.
Pris and Stella and Gilbert were there, Charlie Sloane, looking more important than
ever a Sophomore looked before, Phil, with the Alec-and-Alonzo question still
unsettled, and Moody Spurgeon MacPherson.
Moody Spurgeon had been teaching school ever since leaving Queen's, but his mother
had concluded it was high time he gave it up and turned his attention to learning how
to be a minister.
Poor Moody Spurgeon fell on hard luck at the very beginning of his college career.
Half a dozen ruthless Sophs, who were among his fellow-boarders, swooped down upon him
one night and shaved half of his head.
In this guise the luckless Moody Spurgeon had to go about until his hair grew again.
He told Anne bitterly that there were times when he had his doubts as to whether he was
really called to be a minister.
Aunt Jamesina did not come until the girls had Patty's Place ready for her.
Miss Patty had sent the key to Anne, with a letter in which she said Gog and Magog were
packed in a box under the spare-room bed, but might be taken out when wanted; in a
postscript she added that she hoped the
girls would be careful about putting up pictures.
The living room had been newly papered five years before and she and Miss Maria did not
want any more holes made in that new paper than was absolutely necessary.
For the rest she trusted everything to Anne.
How those girls enjoyed putting their nest in order!
As Phil said, it was almost as good as getting married.
You had the fun of homemaking without the bother of a husband.
All brought something with them to adorn or make comfortable the little house.
Pris and Phil and Stella had knick-knacks and pictures galore, which latter they
proceeded to hang according to taste, in reckless disregard of Miss Patty's new
paper.
"We'll putty the holes up when we leave, dear--she'll never know," they said to
protesting Anne.
Diana had given Anne a pine needle cushion and Miss Ada had given both her and
Priscilla a fearfully and wonderfully embroidered one.
Marilla had sent a big box of preserves, and darkly hinted at a hamper for
Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Lynde gave Anne a patchwork quilt and loaned her five more.
"You take them," she said authoritatively.
"They might as well be in use as packed away in that trunk in the garret for moths
to gnaw."
No moths would ever have ventured near those quilts, for they reeked of mothballs
to such an extent that they had to be hung in the orchard of Patty's Place a full
fortnight before they could be endured indoors.
Verily, aristocratic Spofford Avenue had rarely beheld such a display.
The gruff old millionaire who lived "next door" came over and wanted to buy the
gorgeous red and yellow "tulip-pattern" one which Mrs. Rachel had given Anne.
He said his mother used to make quilts like that, and by Jove, he wanted one to remind
him of her.
Anne would not sell it, much to his disappointment, but she wrote all about it
to Mrs. Lynde.
That highly-gratified lady sent word back that she had one just like it to spare, so
the tobacco king got his quilt after all, and insisted on having it spread on his
bed, to the disgust of his fashionable wife.
Mrs. Lynde's quilts served a very useful purpose that winter.
Patty's Place for all its many virtues, had its faults also.
It was really a rather cold house; and when the frosty nights came the girls were very
glad to snuggle down under Mrs. Lynde's quilts, and hoped that the loan of them
might be accounted unto her for righteousness.
Anne had the blue room she had coveted at sight.
Priscilla and Stella had the large one.
Phil was blissfully content with the little one over the kitchen; and Aunt Jamesina was
to have the downstairs one off the living- room.
Rusty at first slept on the doorstep.
Anne, walking home from Redmond a few days after her return, became aware that the
people that she met surveyed her with a covert, indulgent smile.
Anne wondered uneasily what was the matter with her.
Was her hat crooked? Was her belt loose?
Craning her head to investigate, Anne, for the first time, saw Rusty.
Trotting along behind her, close to her heels, was quite the most forlorn specimen
of the cat tribe she had ever beheld.
The animal was well past kitten-hood, lank, thin, disreputable looking.
Pieces of both ears were lacking, one eye was temporarily out of repair, and one jowl
ludicrously swollen.
As for color, if a once black cat had been well and thoroughly singed the result would
have resembled the hue of this waif's thin, draggled, unsightly fur.
Anne "shooed," but the cat would not "shoo."
As long as she stood he sat back on his haunches and gazed at her reproachfully out
of his one good eye; when she resumed her walk he followed.
Anne resigned herself to his company until she reached the gate of Patty's Place,
which she coldly shut in his face, fondly supposing she had seen the last of him.
But when, fifteen minutes later, Phil opened the door, there sat the rusty-brown
cat on the step.
More, he promptly darted in and sprang upon Anne's lap with a half-pleading, half-
triumphant "miaow." "Anne," said Stella severely, "do you own
that animal?"
"No, I do NOT," protested disgusted Anne. "The creature followed me home from
somewhere. I couldn't get rid of him.
Ugh, get down.
I like decent cats reasonably well; but I don't like beasties of your complexion."
***, however, refused to get down. He coolly curled up in Anne's lap and began
to purr.
"He has evidently adopted you," laughed Priscilla.
"I won't BE adopted," said Anne stubbornly. "The poor creature is starving," said Phil
pityingly.
"Why, his bones are almost coming through his skin."
"Well, I'll give him a square meal and then he must return to whence he came," said
Anne resolutely.
The cat was fed and put out. In the morning he was still on the
doorstep. On the doorstep he continued to sit,
bolting in whenever the door was opened.
No coolness of welcome had the least effect on him; of nobody save Anne did he take the
least notice.
Out of compassion the girls fed him; but when a week had passed they decided that
something must be done. The cat's appearance had improved.
His eye and cheek had resumed their normal appearance; he was not quite so thin; and
he had been seen washing his face. "But for all that we can't keep him," said
Stella.
"Aunt Jimsie is coming next week and she will bring the Sarah-cat with her.
We can't keep two cats; and if we did this Rusty Coat would fight all the time with
the Sarah-cat.
He's a fighter by nature. He had a pitched battle last evening with
the tobacco-king's cat and routed him, horse, foot and artillery."
"We must get rid of him," agreed Anne, looking darkly at the subject of their
discussion, who was purring on the hearth rug with an air of lamb-like meekness.
"But the question is--how?
How can four unprotected females get rid of a cat who won't be got rid of?"
"We must chloroform him," said Phil briskly.
"That is the most humane way."
"Who of us knows anything about chloroforming a cat?" demanded Anne
gloomily. "I do, honey.
It's one of my few--sadly few--useful accomplishments.
I've disposed of several at home. You take the cat in the morning and give
him a good breakfast.
Then you take an old burlap bag--there's one in the back porch--put the cat on it
and turn over him a wooden box.
Then take a two-ounce bottle of chloroform, uncork it, and slip it under the edge of
the box. Put a heavy weight on top of the box and
leave it till evening.
The cat will be dead, curled up peacefully as if he were asleep.
No pain--no struggle." "It sounds easy," said Anne dubiously.
"It IS easy.
Just leave it to me. I'll see to it," said Phil reassuringly.
Accordingly the chloroform was procured, and the next morning Rusty was lured to his
doom.
He ate his breakfast, licked his chops, and climbed into Anne's lap.
Anne's heart misgave her. This poor creature loved her--trusted her.
How could she be a party to this destruction?
"Here, take him," she said hastily to Phil. "I feel like a murderess."
"He won't suffer, you know," comforted Phil, but Anne had fled.
The fatal deed was done in the back porch. Nobody went near it that day.
But at dusk Phil declared that Rusty must be buried.
"Pris and Stella must dig his grave in the orchard," declared Phil, "and Anne must
come with me to lift the box off.
That's the part I always hate." The two conspirators tip-toed reluctantly
to the back porch. Phil gingerly lifted the stone she had put
on the box.
Suddenly, faint but distinct, sounded an unmistakable mew under the box.
"He--he isn't dead," gasped Anne, sitting blankly down on the kitchen doorstep.
"He must be," said Phil incredulously.
Another tiny mew proved that he wasn't. The two girls stared at each other.
"What will we do?" questioned Anne. "Why in the world don't you come?" demanded
Stella, appearing in the doorway.
"We've got the grave ready. 'What silent still and silent all?'" she
quoted teasingly.
"'Oh, no, the voices of the dead Sound like the distant torrent's fall,'" promptly
counter-quoted Anne, pointing solemnly to the box.
A burst of laughter broke the tension.
"We must leave him here till morning," said Phil, replacing the stone.
"He hasn't mewed for five minutes. Perhaps the mews we heard were his dying
groan.
Or perhaps we merely imagined them, under the strain of our guilty consciences."
But, when the box was lifted in the morning, Rusty bounded at one gay leap to
Anne's shoulder where he began to lick her face affectionately.
Never was there a cat more decidedly alive.
"Here's a knot hole in the box," groaned Phil.
"I never saw it. That's why he didn't die.
Now, we've got to do it all over again."
"No, we haven't," declared Anne suddenly. "Rusty isn't going to be killed again.
He's my cat--and you've just got to make the best of it."
"Oh, well, if you'll settle with Aunt Jimsie and the Sarah-cat," said Stella,
with the air of one washing her hands of the whole affair.
From that time Rusty was one of the family.
He slept o'nights on the scrubbing cushion in the back porch and lived on the fat of
the land. By the time Aunt Jamesina came he was plump
and glossy and tolerably respectable.
But, like Kipling's cat, he "walked by himself."
His paw was against every cat, and every cat's paw against him.
One by one he vanquished the aristocratic felines of Spofford Avenue.
As for human beings, he loved Anne and Anne alone.
Nobody else even dared stroke him.
An angry spit and something that sounded much like very improper language greeted
any one who did. "The airs that cat puts on are perfectly
intolerable," declared Stella.
"Him was a nice old pussens, him was," vowed Anne, cuddling her pet defiantly.
"Well, I don't know how he and the Sarah- cat will ever make out to live together,"
said Stella pesimistically.
"Cat-fights in the orchard o'nights are bad enough.
But cat-fights here in the livingroom are unthinkable."
In due time Aunt Jamesina arrived.
Anne and Priscilla and Phil had awaited her advent rather dubiously; but when Aunt
Jamesina was enthroned in the rocking chair before the open fire they figuratively
bowed down and worshipped her.
Aunt Jamesina was a tiny old woman with a little, softly-triangular face, and large,
soft blue eyes that were alight with unquenchable youth, and as full of hopes as
a girl's.
She had pink cheeks and snow-white hair which she wore in quaint little puffs over
her ears.
"It's a very old-fashioned way," she said, knitting industriously at something as
dainty and pink as a sunset cloud. "But I am old-fashioned.
My clothes are, and it stands to reason my opinions are, too.
I don't say they're any the better of that, mind you.
In fact, I daresay they're a good deal the worse.
But they've worn nice and easy. New shoes are smarter than old ones, but
the old ones are more comfortable.
I'm old enough to indulge myself in the matter of shoes and opinions.
I mean to take it real easy here.
I know you expect me to look after you and keep you proper, but I'm not going to do
it. You're old enough to know how to behave if
you're ever going to be.
So, as far as I am concerned," concluded Aunt Jamesina, with a twinkle in her young
eyes, "you can all go to destruction in your own way."
"Oh, will somebody separate those cats?" pleaded Stella, shudderingly.
Aunt Jamesina had brought with her not only the Sarah-cat but Joseph.
Joseph, she explained, had belonged to a dear friend of hers who had gone to live in
Vancouver. "She couldn't take Joseph with her so she
begged me to take him.
I really couldn't refuse. He's a beautiful cat--that is, his
disposition is beautiful. She called him Joseph because his coat is
of many colors."
It certainly was. Joseph, as the disgusted Stella said,
looked like a walking rag-bag. It was impossible to say what his ground
color was.
His legs were white with black spots on them.
His back was gray with a huge patch of yellow on one side and a black patch on the
other.
His tail was yellow with a gray tip. One ear was black and one yellow.
A black patch over one eye gave him a fearfully rakish look.
In reality he was meek and inoffensive, of a sociable disposition.
In one respect, if in no other, Joseph was like a lily of the field.
He toiled not neither did he spin or catch mice.
Yet Solomon in all his glory slept not on softer cushions, or feasted more fully on
fat things.
Joseph and the Sarah-cat arrived by express in separate boxes.
After they had been released and fed, Joseph selected the cushion and corner
which appealed to him, and the Sarah-cat gravely sat herself down before the fire
and proceeded to wash her face.
She was a large, sleek, gray-and-white cat, with an enormous dignity which was not at
all impaired by any consciousness of her plebian origin.
She had been given to Aunt Jamesina by her washerwoman.
"Her name was Sarah, so my husband always called *** the Sarah-cat," explained Aunt
Jamesina.
"She is eight years old, and a remarkable mouser.
Don't worry, Stella. The Sarah-cat NEVER fights and Joseph
rarely."
"They'll have to fight here in self- defense," said Stella.
At this juncture Rusty arrived on the scene.
He bounded joyously half way across the room before he saw the intruders.
Then he stopped short; his tail expanded until it was as big as three tails.
The fur on his back rose up in a defiant arch; Rusty lowered his head, uttered a
fearful shriek of hatred and defiance, and launched himself at the Sarah-cat.
The stately animal had stopped washing her face and was looking at him curiously.
She met his onslaught with one contemptuous sweep of her capable paw.
Rusty went rolling helplessly over on the rug; he picked himself up dazedly.
What sort of a cat was this who had boxed his ears?
He looked dubiously at the Sarah-cat.
Would he or would he not? The Sarah-cat deliberately turned her back
on him and resumed her toilet operations. Rusty decided that he would not.
He never did.
From that time on the Sarah-cat ruled the roost.
Rusty never again interfered with her. But Joseph rashly sat up and yawned.
Rusty, burning to avenge his disgrace, swooped down upon him.
Joseph, pacific by nature, could fight upon occasion and fight well.
The result was a series of drawn battles.
Every day Rusty and Joseph fought at sight. Anne took Rusty's part and detested Joseph.
Stella was in despair. But Aunt Jamesina only laughed.
"Let them fight it out," she said tolerantly.
"They'll make friends after a bit. Joseph needs some exercise--he was getting
too fat.
And Rusty has to learn he isn't the only cat in the world."
Eventually Joseph and Rusty accepted the situation and from sworn enemies became
sworn friends.
They slept on the same cushion with their paws about each other, and gravely washed
each other's faces. "We've all got used to each other," said
Phil.
"And I've learned how to wash dishes and sweep a floor."
"But you needn't try to make us believe you can chloroform a cat," laughed Anne.
"It was all the fault of the knothole," protested Phil.
"It was a good thing the knothole was there," said Aunt Jamesina rather severely.
"Kittens HAVE to be drowned, I admit, or the world would be overrun.
But no decent, grown-up cat should be done to death--unless he sucks eggs."
"You wouldn't have thought Rusty very decent if you'd seen him when he came
here," said Stella. "He positively looked like the Old Nick."
"I don't believe Old Nick can be so very, ugly" said Aunt Jamesina reflectively.
"He wouldn't do so much harm if he was. I always think of him as a rather handsome
gentleman."
>
CHAPTER XVII A Letter from Davy
"It's beginning to snow, girls," said Phil, coming in one November evening, "and there
are the loveliest little stars and crosses all over the garden walk.
I never noticed before what exquisite things snowflakes really are.
One has time to notice things like that in the simple life.
Bless you all for permitting me to live it.
It's really delightful to feel worried because butter has gone up five cents a
pound." "Has it?" demanded Stella, who kept the
household accounts.
"It has--and here's your butter. I'm getting quite expert at marketing.
It's better fun than flirting," concluded Phil gravely.
"Everything is going up scandalously," sighed Stella.
"Never mind. Thank goodness air and salvation are still
free," said Aunt Jamesina.
"And so is laughter," added Anne. "There's no tax on it yet and that is well,
because you're all going to laugh presently.
I'm going to read you Davy's letter.
His spelling has improved immensely this past year, though he is not strong on
apostrophes, and he certainly possesses the gift of writing an interesting letter.
Listen and laugh, before we settle down to the evening's study-grind."
"Dear Anne," ran Davy's letter, "I take my pen to tell you that we are all pretty well
and hope this will find you the same.
It's snowing some today and Marilla says the old woman in the sky is shaking her
feather beds. Is the old woman in the sky God's wife,
Anne?
I want to know. "Mrs. Lynde has been real sick but she is
better now. She fell down the cellar stairs last week.
When she fell she grabbed hold of the shelf with all the milk pails and stewpans on it,
and it gave way and went down with her and made a splendid crash.
Marilla thought it was an earthquake at first.
"One of the stewpans was all dinged up and Mrs. Lynde straned her ribs.
The doctor came and gave her medicine to rub on her ribs but she didn't under stand
him and took it all inside instead.
The doctor said it was a wonder it dident kill her but it dident and it cured her
ribs and Mrs. Lynde says doctors dont know much anyhow.
But we couldent fix up the stewpan.
Marilla had to throw it out. Thanksgiving was last week.
There was no school and we had a great dinner.
I et mince pie and rost turkey and frut cake and donuts and cheese and jam and
choklut cake. Marilla said I'd die but I dident.
Dora had earake after it, only it wasent in her ears it was in her stummick.
I dident have earake anywhere. "Our new teacher is a man.
He does things for jokes.
Last week he made all us third-class boys write a composishun on what kind of a wife
we'd like to have and the girls on what kind of a husband.
He laughed fit to kill when he read them.
This was mine. I thought youd like to see it.
"'The kind of a wife I'd like to Have.
"'She must have good manners and get my meals on time and do what I tell her and
always be very polite to me. She must be fifteen yers old.
She must be good to the poor and keep her house tidy and be good tempered and go to
church regularly. She must be very handsome and have curly
hair.
If I get a wife that is just what I like Ill be an awful good husband to her.
I think a woman ought to be awful good to her husband.
Some poor women haven't any husbands.
"'THE END.'" "I was at Mrs. Isaac Wrights funeral at
White Sands last week. The husband of the corpse felt real sorry.
Mrs. Lynde says Mrs. Wrights grandfather stole a sheep but Marilla says we mustent
speak ill of the dead. Why mustent we, Anne?
I want to know.
It's pretty safe, ain't it? "Mrs. Lynde was awful mad the other day
because I asked her if she was alive in Noah's time.
I dident mean to hurt her feelings.
I just wanted to know. Was she, Anne?
"Mr. Harrison wanted to get rid of his dog.
So he hunged him once but he come to life and scooted for the barn while Mr. Harrison
was digging the grave, so he hunged him again and he stayed dead that time.
Mr. Harrison has a new man working for him.
He's awful okward. Mr. Harrison says he is left handed in both
his feet. Mr. Barry's hired man is lazy.
Mrs. Barry says that but Mr. Barry says he aint lazy exactly only he thinks it easier
to pray for things than to work for them. "Mrs. Harmon Andrews prize pig that she
talked so much of died in a fit.
Mrs. Lynde says it was a judgment on her for pride.
But I think it was *** the pig. Milty Boulter has been sick.
The doctor gave him medicine and it tasted horrid.
I offered to take it for him for a quarter but the Boulters are so mean.
Milty says he'd rather take it himself and save his money.
I asked Mrs. Boulter how a person would go about catching a man and she got awful mad
and said she dident know, shed never chased men.
"The A.V.I.S. is going to paint the hall again.
They're tired of having it blue. "The new minister was here to tea last
night.
He took three pieces of pie. If I did that Mrs. Lynde would call me
piggy.
And he et fast and took big bites and Marilla is always telling me not to do
that. Why can ministers do what boys can't?
I want to know.
"I haven't any more news. Here are six kisses. xxxxxx.
Dora sends one. Heres hers. x.
"Your loving friend DAVID KEITH"
"P.S. Anne, who was the devils father? I want to know."
>
CHAPTER XVIII Miss Josepine Remembers the Anne-girl
When Christmas holidays came the girls of Patty's Place scattered to their respective
homes, but Aunt Jamesina elected to stay where she was.
"I couldn't go to any of the places I've been invited and take those three cats,"
she said.
"And I'm not going to leave the poor creatures here alone for nearly three
weeks.
If we had any decent neighbors who would feed them I might, but there's nothing
except millionaires on this street. So I'll stay here and keep Patty's Place
warm for you."
Anne went home with the usual joyous anticipations--which were not wholly
fulfilled.
She found Avonlea in the grip of such an early, cold, and stormy winter as even the
"oldest inhabitant" could not recall. Green Gables was literally hemmed in by
huge drifts.
Almost every day of that ill-starred vacation it stormed fiercely; and even on
fine days it drifted unceasingly. No sooner were the roads broken than they
filled in again.
It was almost impossible to stir out.
The A.V.I.S. tried, on three evenings, to have a party in honor of the college
students, and on each evening the storm was so wild that nobody could go, so they gave
up the attempt in despair.
Anne, despite her love of and loyalty to Green Gables, could not help thinking
longingly of Patty's Place, its cosy open fire, Aunt Jamesina's mirthful eyes, the
three cats, the merry chatter of the girls,
the pleasantness of Friday evenings when college friends dropped in to talk of grave
and gay.
Anne was lonely; Diana, during the whole of the holidays, was imprisoned at home with a
bad attack of bronchitis.
She could not come to Green Gables and it was rarely Anne could get to Orchard Slope,
for the old way through the Haunted Wood was impassable with drifts, and the long
way over the frozen Lake of Shining Waters was almost as bad.
Ruby Gillis was sleeping in the white- heaped graveyard; Jane Andrews was teaching
a school on western prairies.
Gilbert, to be sure, was still faithful, and waded up to Green Gables every possible
evening. But Gilbert's visits were not what they
once were.
Anne almost dreaded them.
It was very disconcerting to look up in the midst of a sudden silence and find
Gilbert's hazel eyes fixed upon her with a quite unmistakable expression in their
grave depths; and it was still more
disconcerting to find herself blushing hotly and uncomfortably under his gaze,
just as if--just as if--well, it was very embarrassing.
Anne wished herself back at Patty's Place, where there was always somebody else about
to take the edge off a delicate situation.
At Green Gables Marilla went promptly to Mrs. Lynde's domain when Gilbert came and
insisted on taking the twins with her. The significance of this was unmistakable
and Anne was in a helpless fury over it.
Davy, however, was perfectly happy. He reveled in getting out in the morning
and shoveling out the paths to the well and henhouse.
He gloried in the Christmas-tide delicacies which Marilla and Mrs. Lynde vied with each
other in preparing for Anne, and he was reading an enthralling tale, in a school
library book, of a wonderful hero who
seemed blessed with a miraculous faculty for getting into scrapes from which he was
usually delivered by an earthquake or a volcanic explosion, which blew him high and
dry out of his troubles, landed him in a
fortune, and closed the story with proper ECLAT.
"I tell you it's a bully story, Anne," he said ecstatically.
"I'd ever so much rather read it than the Bible."
"Would you?" smiled Anne. Davy peered curiously at her.
"You don't seem a bit shocked, Anne.
Mrs. Lynde was awful shocked when I said it to her."
"No, I'm not shocked, Davy.
I think it's quite natural that a nine- year-old boy would sooner read an adventure
story than the Bible.
But when you are older I hope and think that you will realize what a wonderful book
the Bible is." "Oh, I think some parts of it are fine,"
conceded Davy.
"That story about Joseph now--it's bully. But if I'd been Joseph I wouldn't have
forgive the brothers. No, siree, Anne.
I'd have cut all their heads off.
Mrs. Lynde was awful mad when I said that and shut the Bible up and said she'd never
read me any more of it if I talked like that.
So I don't talk now when she reads it Sunday afternoons; I just think things and
say them to Milty Boulter next day in school.
I told Milty the story about Elisha and the bears and it scared him so he's never made
fun of Mr. Harrison's bald head once. Are there any bears on P.E. Island, Anne?
I want to know."
"Not nowadays," said Anne, absently, as the wind blew a scud of snow against the
window. "Oh, dear, will it ever stop storming."
"God knows," said Davy airily, preparing to resume his reading.
Anne WAS shocked this time. "Davy!" she exclaimed reproachfully.
"Mrs. Lynde says that," protested Davy.
"One night last week Marilla said 'Will Ludovic Speed and Theodora Dix EVER get
married?" and Mrs. Lynde said, "'God knows'--just like that."
"Well, it wasn't right for her to say it," said Anne, promptly deciding upon which
horn of this dilemma to empale herself. "It isn't right for anybody to take that
name in vain or speak it lightly, Davy.
Don't ever do it again." "Not if I say it slow and solemn, like the
minister?" queried Davy gravely. "No, not even then."
"Well, I won't.
Ludovic Speed and Theodora Dix live in Middle Grafton and Mrs. Rachel says he has
been courting her for a hundred years. Won't they soon be too old to get married,
Anne?
I hope Gilbert won't court YOU that long. When are you going to be married, Anne?
Mrs. Lynde says it's a sure thing." "Mrs. Lynde is a--" began Anne hotly; then
stopped.
"Awful old gossip," completed Davy calmly. "That's what every one calls her.
But is it a sure thing, Anne? I want to know."
"You're a very silly little boy, Davy," said Anne, stalking haughtily out of the
room.
The kitchen was deserted and she sat down by the window in the fast falling wintry
twilight. The sun had set and the wind had died down.
A pale chilly moon looked out behind a bank of purple clouds in the west.
The sky faded out, but the strip of yellow along the western horizon grew brighter and
fiercer, as if all the stray gleams of light were concentrating in one spot; the
distant hills, rimmed with priest-like
firs, stood out in dark distinctness against it.
Anne looked across the still, white fields, cold and lifeless in the harsh light of
that grim sunset, and sighed.
She was very lonely; and she was sad at heart; for she was wondering if she would
be able to return to Redmond next year. It did not seem likely.
The only scholarship possible in the Sophomore year was a very small affair.
She would not take Marilla's money; and there seemed little prospect of being able
to earn enough in the summer vacation.
"I suppose I'll just have to drop out next year," she thought drearily, "and teach a
district school again until I earn enough to finish my course.
And by that time all my old class will have graduated and Patty's Place will be out of
the question. But there!
I'm not going to be a coward.
I'm thankful I can earn my way through if necessary."
"Here's Mr. Harrison wading up the lane," announced Davy, running out.
"I hope he's brought the mail.
It's three days since we got it. I want to see what them pesky Grits are
doing. I'm a Conservative, Anne.
And I tell you, you have to keep your eye on them Grits."
Mr. Harrison had brought the mail, and merry letters from Stella and Priscilla and
Phil soon dissipated Anne's blues.
Aunt Jamesina, too, had written, saying that she was keeping the hearth-fire
alight, and that the cats were all well, and the house plants doing fine.
"The weather has been real cold," she wrote, "so I let the cats sleep in the
house--Rusty and Joseph on the sofa in the living-room, and the Sarah-cat on the foot
of my bed.
It's real company to hear her purring when I wake up in the night and think of my poor
daughter in the foreign field.
If it was anywhere but in India I wouldn't worry, but they say the snakes out there
are terrible. It takes all the Sarah-cats's purring to
drive away the thought of those snakes.
I have enough faith for everything but the snakes.
I can't think why Providence ever made them.
Sometimes I don't think He did.
I'm inclined to believe the Old Harry had a hand in making THEM."
Anne had left a thin, typewritten communication till the last, thinking it
unimportant.
When she had read it she sat very still, with tears in her eyes.
"What is the matter, Anne?" asked Marilla. "Miss Josephine Barry is dead," said Anne,
in a low tone.
"So she has gone at last," said Marilla. "Well, she has been sick for over a year,
and the Barrys have been expecting to hear of her death any time.
It is well she is at rest for she has suffered dreadfully, Anne.
She was always kind to you." "She has been kind to the last, Marilla.
This letter is from her lawyer.
She has left me a thousand dollars in her will."
"Gracious, ain't that an awful lot of money," exclaimed Davy.
"She's the woman you and Diana lit on when you jumped into the spare room bed, ain't
she? Diana told me that story.
Is that why she left you so much?"
"Hush, Davy," said Anne gently. She slipped away to the porch gable with a
full heart, leaving Marilla and Mrs. Lynde to talk over the news to their hearts'
content.
"Do you s'pose Anne will ever get married now?" speculated Davy anxiously.
"When Dorcas Sloane got married last summer she said if she'd had enough money to live
on she'd never have been bothered with a man, but even a widower with eight children
was better'n living with a sister-in-law."
"Davy Keith, do hold your tongue," said Mrs. Rachel severely.
"The way you talk is scandalous for a small boy, that's what."
>
CHAPTER XIX An Interlude
"To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I've left my teens
behind me forever," said Anne, who was curled up on the hearth-rug with Rusty in
her lap, to Aunt Jamesina who was reading in her pet chair.
They were alone in the living room.
Stella and Priscilla had gone to a committee meeting and Phil was upstairs
adorning herself for a party. "I suppose you feel kind of, sorry" said
Aunt Jamesina.
"The teens are such a nice part of life. I'm glad I've never gone out of them
myself." Anne laughed.
"You never will, Aunty.
You'll be eighteen when you should be a hundred.
Yes, I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well.
Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be
formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be.
It's full of flaws."
"So's everybody's," said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully.
"Mine's cracked in a hundred places.
Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got
its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that
line.
Don't worry over it, Anne. Do your duty by God and your neighbor and
yourself, and have a good time. That's my philosophy and it's always worked
pretty well.
Where's Phil off to tonight?" "She's going to a dance, and she's got the
sweetest dress for it--creamy yellow silk and cobwebby lace.
It just suits those brown tints of hers."
"There's magic in the words 'silk' and 'lace,' isn't there?" said Aunt Jamesina.
"The very sound of them makes me feel like skipping off to a dance.
And YELLOW silk.
It makes one think of a dress of sunshine. I always wanted a yellow silk dress, but
first my mother and then my husband wouldn't hear of it.
The very first thing I'm going to do when I get to heaven is to get a yellow silk
Amid Anne's peal of laughter Phil came downstairs, trailing clouds of glory, and
surveyed herself in the long oval mirror on the wall.
"A flattering looking glass is a promoter of amiability," she said.
"The one in my room does certainly make me green.
Do I look pretty nice, Anne?"
"Do you really know how pretty you are, Phil?" asked Anne, in honest admiration.
"Of course I do. What are looking glasses and men for?
That wasn't what I meant.
Are all my ends tucked in? Is my skirt straight?
And would this rose look better lower down? I'm afraid it's too high--it will make me
look lop-sided.
But I hate things tickling my ears." "Everything is just right, and that
southwest dimple of yours is lovely." "Anne, there's one thing in particular I
like about you--you're so ungrudging.
There isn't a particle of envy in you." "Why should she be envious?" demanded Aunt
Jamesina. "She's not quite as goodlooking as you,
maybe, but she's got a far handsomer nose."
"I know it," conceded Phil. "My nose always has been a great comfort to
me," confessed Anne. "And I love the way your hair grows on your
forehead, Anne.
And that one wee curl, always looking as if it were going to drop, but never dropping,
is delicious. But as for noses, mine is a dreadful worry
to me.
I know by the time I'm forty it will be Byrney.
What do you think I'll look like when I'm forty, Anne?"
"Like an old, matronly, married woman," teased Anne.
"I won't," said Phil, sitting down comfortably to wait for her escort.
"Joseph, you calico beastie, don't you dare jump on my lap.
I won't go to a dance all over cat hairs. No, Anne, I WON'T look matronly.
But no doubt I'll be married."
"To Alec or Alonzo?" asked Anne. "To one of them, I suppose," sighed Phil,
"if I can ever decide which." "It shouldn't be hard to decide," scolded
Aunt Jamesina.
"I was born a see-saw Aunty, and nothing can ever prevent me from teetering."
"You ought to be more levelheaded, Philippa."
"It's best to be levelheaded, of course," agreed Philippa, "but you miss lots of fun.
As for Alec and Alonzo, if you knew them you'd understand why it's difficult to
choose between them.
They're equally nice." "Then take somebody who is nicer" suggested
Aunt Jamesina. "There's that Senior who is so devoted to
you--Will Leslie.
He has such nice, large, mild eyes." "They're a little bit too large and too
mild--like a cow's," said Phil cruelly. "What do you say about George Parker?"
"There's nothing to say about him except that he always looks as if he had just been
starched and ironed." "Marr Holworthy then.
You can't find a fault with him."
"No, he would do if he wasn't poor. I must marry a rich man, Aunt Jamesina.
That--and good looks--is an indispensable qualification.
I'd marry Gilbert Blythe if he were rich."
"Oh, would you?" said Anne, rather viciously.
"We don't like that idea a little bit, although we don't want Gilbert ourselves,
oh, no," mocked Phil.
"But don't let's talk of disagreeable subjects.
I'll have to marry sometime, I suppose, but I shall put off the evil day as long as I
can."
"You mustn't marry anybody you don't love, Phil, when all's said and done," said Aunt
Jamesina.
"'Oh, hearts that loved in the good old way Have been out o' the fashion this many a
day.'" trilled Phil mockingly. "There's the carriage.
I fly--Bi-bi, you two old-fashioned darlings."
When Phil had gone Aunt Jamesina looked solemnly at Anne.
"That girl is pretty and sweet and goodhearted, but do you think she is quite
right in her mind, by spells, Anne?"
"Oh, I don't think there's anything the matter with Phil's mind," said Anne, hiding
a smile. "It's just her way of talking."
Aunt Jamesina shook her head.
"Well, I hope so, Anne. I do hope so, because I love her.
But I can't understand her--she beats me. She isn't like any of the girls I ever
knew, or any of the girls I was myself."
"How many girls were you, Aunt Jimsie?" "About half a dozen, my dear."
>
CHAPTER XX Gilbert Speaks
"This has been a dull, prosy day," yawned Phil, stretching herself idly on the sofa,
having previously dispossessed two exceedingly indignant cats.
Anne looked up from Pickwick Papers.
Now that spring examinations were over she was treating herself to Dickens.
"It has been a prosy day for us," she said thoughtfully, "but to some people it has
been a wonderful day.
Some one has been rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done
somewhere today--or a great poem written-- or a great man born.
And some heart has been broken, Phil."
"Why did you spoil your pretty thought by tagging that last sentence on, honey?"
grumbled Phil. "I don't like to think of broken hearts--or
anything unpleasant."
"Do you think you'll be able to shirk unpleasant things all your life, Phil?"
"Dear me, no. Am I not up against them now?
You don't call Alec and Alonzo pleasant things, do you, when they simply plague my
life out?" "You never take anything seriously, Phil."
"Why should I?
There are enough folks who do. The world needs people like me, Anne, just
to amuse it.
It would be a terrible place if EVERYBODY were intellectual and serious and in deep,
deadly earnest. MY mission is, as Josiah Allen says, 'to
charm and allure.'
Confess now. Hasn't life at Patty's Place been really
much brighter and pleasanter this past winter because I've been here to leaven
you?"
"Yes, it has," owned Anne. "And you all love me--even Aunt Jamesina,
who thinks I'm stark mad. So why should I try to be different?
Oh, dear, I'm so sleepy.
I was awake until one last night, reading a harrowing ghost story.
I read it in bed, and after I had finished it do you suppose I could get out of bed to
put the light out?
No! And if Stella had not fortunately come in late that lamp would have burned good
and bright till morning.
When I heard Stella I called her in, explained my predicament, and got her to
put out the light.
If I had got out myself to do it I knew something would grab me by the feet when I
was getting in again. By the way, Anne, has Aunt Jamesina decided
what to do this summer?"
"Yes, she's going to stay here. I know she's doing it for the sake of those
blessed cats, although she says it's too much trouble to open her own house, and she
hates visiting."
"What are you reading?" "Pickwick."
"That's a book that always makes me hungry," said Phil.
"There's so much good eating in it.
The characters seem always to be reveling on ham and eggs and milk punch.
I generally go on a cupboard rummage after reading Pickwick.
The mere thought reminds me that I'm starving.
Is there any tidbit in the pantry, Queen Anne?"
"I made a lemon pie this morning.
You may have a piece of it." Phil dashed out to the pantry and Anne
betook herself to the orchard in company with Rusty.
It was a moist, pleasantly-odorous night in early spring.
The snow was not quite all gone from the park; a little dingy bank of it yet lay
under the pines of the harbor road, screened from the influence of April suns.
It kept the harbor road muddy, and chilled the evening air.
But grass was growing green in sheltered spots and Gilbert had found some pale,
sweet arbutus in a hidden corner.
He came up from the park, his hands full of it.
Anne was sitting on the big gray boulder in the orchard looking at the poem of a bare,
birchen bough hanging against the pale red sunset with the very perfection of grace.
She was building a castle in air--a wondrous mansion whose sunlit courts and
stately halls were steeped in Araby's perfume, and where she reigned queen and
chatelaine.
She frowned as she saw Gilbert coming through the orchard.
Of late she had managed not to be left alone with Gilbert.
But he had caught her fairly now; and even Rusty had deserted her.
Gilbert sat down beside her on the boulder and held out his Mayflowers.
"Don't these remind you of home and our old schoolday picnics, Anne?"
Anne took them and buried her face in them. "I'm in Mr. Silas Sloane's barrens this
very minute," she said rapturously.
"I suppose you will be there in reality in a few days?"
"No, not for a fortnight. I'm going to visit with Phil in Bolingbroke
before I go home.
You'll be in Avonlea before I will." "No, I shall not be in Avonlea at all this
summer, Anne. I've been offered a job in the Daily News
office and I'm going to take it."
"Oh," said Anne vaguely. She wondered what a whole Avonlea summer
would be like without Gilbert. Somehow she did not like the prospect.
"Well," she concluded flatly, "it is a good thing for you, of course."
"Yes, I've been hoping I would get it. It will help me out next year."
"You mustn't work too HARD," said Anne, without any very clear idea of what she was
saying. She wished desperately that Phil would come
out.
"You've studied very constantly this winter.
Isn't this a delightful evening?
Do you know, I found a cluster of white violets under that old twisted tree over
there today? I felt as if I had discovered a gold mine."
"You are always discovering gold mines," said Gilbert--also absently.
"Let us go and see if we can find some more," suggested Anne eagerly.
"I'll call Phil and--"
"Never mind Phil and the violets just now, Anne," said Gilbert quietly, taking her
hand in a clasp from which she could not free it.
"There is something I want to say to you."
"Oh, don't say it," cried Anne, pleadingly. "Don't--PLEASE, Gilbert."
"I must. Things can't go on like this any longer.
Anne, I love you.
You know I do. I--I can't tell you how much.
Will you promise me that some day you'll be my wife?"
"I--I can't," said Anne miserably.
"Oh, Gilbert--you--you've spoiled everything."
"Don't you care for me at all?" Gilbert asked after a very dreadful pause,
during which Anne had not dared to look up.
"Not--not in that way. I do care a great deal for you as a friend.
But I don't love you, Gilbert." "But can't you give me some hope that you
will--yet?"
"No, I can't," exclaimed Anne desperately. "I never, never can love you--in that way--
Gilbert. You must never speak of this to me again."
There was another pause--so long and so dreadful that Anne was driven at last to
look up. Gilbert's face was white to the lips.
And his eyes--but Anne shuddered and looked away.
There was nothing romantic about this. Must proposals be either grotesque or--
horrible?
Could she ever forget Gilbert's face? "Is there anybody else?" he asked at last
in a low voice. "No--no," said Anne eagerly.
"I don't care for any one like THAT--and I LIKE you better than anybody else in the
world, Gilbert. And we must--we must go on being friends,
Gilbert gave a bitter little laugh. "Friends!
Your friendship can't satisfy me, Anne. I want your love--and you tell me I can
never have that."
"I'm sorry. Forgive me, Gilbert," was all Anne could
say.
Where, oh, where were all the gracious and graceful speeches wherewith, in
imagination, she had been wont to dismiss rejected suitors?
Gilbert released her hand gently.
"There isn't anything to forgive. There have been times when I thought you
did care. I've deceived myself, that's all.
Goodbye, Anne."
Anne got herself to her room, sat down on her window seat behind the pines, and cried
bitterly. She felt as if something incalculably
precious had gone out of her life.
It was Gilbert's friendship, of course. Oh, why must she lose it after this
fashion? "What is the matter, honey?" asked Phil,
coming in through the moonlit gloom.
Anne did not answer. At that moment she wished Phil were a
thousand miles away. "I suppose you've gone and refused Gilbert
Blythe.
You are an idiot, Anne Shirley!" "Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry
a man I don't love?" said Anne coldly, goaded to reply.
"You don't know love when you see it.
You've tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you
expect the real thing to look like that. There, that's the first sensible thing I've
ever said in my life.
I wonder how I managed it?" "Phil," pleaded Anne, "please go away and
leave me alone for a little while. My world has tumbled into pieces.
I want to reconstruct it."
"Without any Gilbert in it?" said Phil, going.
A world without any Gilbert in it! Anne repeated the words drearily.
Would it not be a very lonely, forlorn place?
Well, it was all Gilbert's fault. He had spoiled their beautiful comradeship.
She must just learn to live without it.
>
CHAPTER XXI Roses of Yesterday
The fortnight Anne spent in Bolingbroke was a very pleasant one, with a little under
current of vague pain and dissatisfaction running through it whenever she thought
about Gilbert.
There was not, however, much time to think about him.
"Mount Holly," the beautiful old Gordon homestead, was a very gay place, overrun by
Phil's friends of both sexes.
There was quite a bewildering succession of drives, dances, picnics and boating
parties, all expressively lumped together by Phil under the head of "jamborees"; Alec
and Alonzo were so constantly on hand that
Anne wondered if they ever did anything but dance attendance on that will-o'-the-wisp
of a Phil.
They were both nice, manly fellows, but Anne would not be drawn into any opinion as
to which was the nicer.
"And I depended so on you to help me make up my mind which of them I should promise
to marry," mourned Phil. "You must do that for yourself.
You are quite expert at making up your mind as to whom other people should marry,"
retorted Anne, rather caustically. "Oh, that's a very different thing," said
Phil, truly.
But the sweetest incident of Anne's sojourn in Bolingbroke was the visit to her
birthplace--the little shabby yellow house in an out-of-the-way street she had so
often dreamed about.
She looked at it with delighted eyes, as she and Phil turned in at the gate.
"It's almost exactly as I've pictured it," she said.
"There is no honeysuckle over the windows, but there is a lilac tree by the gate, and-
-yes, there are the muslin curtains in the windows.
How glad I am it is still painted yellow."
A very tall, very thin woman opened the door.
"Yes, the Shirleys lived here twenty years ago," she said, in answer to Anne's
question.
"They had it rented. I remember 'em.
They both died of fever at onct. It was turrible sad.
They left a baby.
I guess it's dead long ago. It was a sickly thing.
Old Thomas and his wife took it--as if they hadn't enough of their own."
"It didn't die," said Anne, smiling.
"I was that baby." "You don't say so!
Why, you have grown," exclaimed the woman, as if she were much surprised that Anne was
not still a baby.
"Come to look at you, I see the resemblance.
You're complected like your pa. He had red hair.
But you favor your ma in your eyes and mouth.
She was a nice little thing. My darter went to school to her and was
nigh crazy about her.
They was buried in the one grave and the School Board put up a tombstone to them as
a reward for faithful service. Will you come in?"
"Will you let me go all over the house?" asked Anne eagerly.
"Laws, yes, you can if you like. 'Twon't take you long--there ain't much of
it.
I keep at my man to build a new kitchen, but he ain't one of your hustlers.
The parlor's in there and there's two rooms upstairs.
Just prowl about yourselves.
I've got to see to the baby. The east room was the one you were born in.
I remember your ma saying she loved to see the sunrise; and I mind hearing that you
was born just as the sun was rising and its light on your face was the first thing your
ma saw."
Anne went up the narrow stairs and into that little east room with a full heart.
It was as a shrine to her.
Here her mother had dreamed the exquisite, happy dreams of anticipated motherhood;
here that red sunrise light had fallen over them both in the sacred hour of birth; here
her mother had died.
Anne looked about her reverently, her eyes with tears.
It was for her one of the jeweled hours of life that gleam out radiantly forever in
memory.
"Just to think of it--mother was younger than I am now when I was born," she
whispered. When Anne went downstairs the lady of the
house met her in the hall.
She held out a dusty little packet tied with faded blue ribbon.
"Here's a bundle of old letters I found in that closet upstairs when I came here," she
said.
"I dunno what they are--I never bothered to look in 'em, but the address on the top one
is 'Miss Bertha Willis,' and that was your ma's maiden name.
You can take 'em if you'd keer to have 'em."
"Oh, thank you--thank you," cried Anne, clasping the packet rapturously.
"That was all that was in the house," said her hostess.
"The furniture was all sold to pay the doctor bills, and Mrs. Thomas got your ma's
clothes and little things.
I reckon they didn't last long among that drove of Thomas youngsters.
They was destructive young animals, as I mind 'em."
"I haven't one thing that belonged to my mother," said Anne, chokily.
"I--I can never thank you enough for these letters."
"You're quite welcome.
Laws, but your eyes is like your ma's. She could just about talk with hers.
Your father was sorter homely but awful nice.
I mind hearing folks say when they was married that there never was two people
more in love with each other--Pore creatures, they didn't live much longer;
but they was awful happy while they was
alive, and I s'pose that counts for a good deal."
Anne longed to get home to read her precious letters; but she made one little
pilgrimage first.
She went alone to the green corner of the "old" Bolingbroke cemetery where her father
and mother were buried, and left on their grave the white flowers she carried.
Then she hastened back to Mount Holly, shut herself up in her room, and read the
letters. Some were written by her father, some by
her mother.
There were not many--only a dozen in all-- for Walter and Bertha Shirley had not been
often separated during their courtship. The letters were yellow and faded and dim,
blurred with the touch of passing years.
No profound words of wisdom were traced on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only
lines of love and trust.
The sweetness of forgotten things clung to them--the far-off, fond imaginings of those
long-dead lovers.
Bertha Shirley had possessed the gift of writing letters which embodied the charming
personality of the writer in words and thoughts that retained their beauty and
fragrance after the lapse of time.
The letters were tender, intimate, sacred. To Anne, the sweetest of all was the one
written after her birth to the father on a brief absence.
It was full of a proud young mother's accounts of "baby"--her cleverness, her
brightness, her thousand sweetnesses.
"I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake," Bertha
Shirley had written in the postscript. Probably it was the last sentence she had
ever penned.
The end was very near for her. "This has been the most beautiful day of my
life," Anne said to Phil that night. "I've FOUND my father and mother.
Those letters have made them REAL to me.
I'm not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened a book and found
roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves."
>
CHAPTER XXII Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables
The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen walls at Green Gables, for the
spring evening was chilly; through the open east window drifted in the subtly sweet
voices of the night.
Marilla was sitting by the fire--at least, in body.
In spirit she was roaming olden ways, with feet grown young.
Of late Marilla had thus spent many an hour, when she thought she should have been
knitting for the twins. "I suppose I'm growing old," she said.
Yet Marilla had changed but little in the past nine years, save to grow something
thinner, and even more angular; there was a little more gray in the hair that was still
twisted up in the same hard knot, with two
hairpins--WERE they the same hairpins?-- still stuck through it.
But her expression was very different; the something about the mouth which had hinted
at a sense of humor had developed wonderfully; her eyes were gentler and
milder, her smile more frequent and tender.
Marilla was thinking of her whole past life, her cramped but not unhappy
childhood, the jealously hidden dreams and the blighted hopes of her girlhood, the
long, gray, narrow, monotonous years of dull middle life that followed.
And the coming of Anne--the vivid, imaginative, impetuous child with her heart
of love, and her world of fancy, bringing with her color and warmth and radiance,
until the wilderness of existence had blossomed like the rose.
Marilla felt that out of her sixty years she had lived only the nine that had
followed the advent of Anne.
And Anne would be home tomorrow night. The kitchen door opened.
Marilla looked up expecting to see Mrs. Lynde.
Anne stood before her, tall and starry- eyed, with her hands full of Mayflowers and
violets. "Anne Shirley!" exclaimed Marilla.
For once in her life she was surprised out of her reserve; she caught her girl in her
arms and crushed her and her flowers against her heart, kissing the bright hair
and sweet face warmly.
"I never looked for you till tomorrow night.
How did you get from Carmody?" "Walked, dearest of Marillas.
Haven't I done it a score of times in the Queen's days?
The mailman is to bring my trunk tomorrow; I just got homesick all at once, and came a
day earlier.
And oh!
I've had such a lovely walk in the May twilight; I stopped by the barrens and
picked these Mayflowers; I came through Violet-Vale; it's just a big bowlful of
violets now--the dear, sky-tinted things.
Smell them, Marilla--drink them in." Marilla sniffed obligingly, but she was
more interested in Anne than in drinking violets.
"Sit down, child.
You must be real tired. I'm going to get you some supper."
"There's a darling moonrise behind the hills tonight, Marilla, and oh, how the
frogs sang me home from Carmody!
I do love the music of the frogs. It seems bound up with all my happiest
recollections of old spring evenings. And it always reminds me of the night I
came here first.
Do you remember it, Marilla?" "Well, yes," said Marilla with emphasis.
"I'm not likely to forget it ever." "They used to sing so madly in the marsh
and brook that year.
I would listen to them at my window in the dusk, and wonder how they could seem so
glad and so sad at the same time. Oh, but it's good to be home again!
Redmond was splendid and Bolingbroke delightful--but Green Gables is HOME."
"Gilbert isn't coming home this summer, I hear," said Marilla.
"No."
Something in Anne's tone made Marilla glance at her sharply, but Anne was
apparently absorbed in arranging her violets in a bowl.
"See, aren't they sweet?" she went on hurriedly.
"The year is a book, isn't it, Marilla?
Spring's pages are written in Mayflowers and violets, summer's in roses, autumn's in
red maple leaves, and winter in holly and evergreen."
"Did Gilbert do well in his examinations?" persisted Marilla.
"Excellently well. He led his class.
But where are the twins and Mrs. Lynde?"
"Rachel and Dora are over at Mr. Harrison's.
Davy is down at Boulters'. I think I hear him coming now."
Davy burst in, saw Anne, stopped, and then hurled himself upon her with a joyful yell.
"Oh, Anne, ain't I glad to see you! Say, Anne, I've grown two inches since last
fall.
Mrs. Lynde measured me with her tape today, and say, Anne, see my front tooth.
It's gone.
Mrs. Lynde tied one end of a string to it and the other end to the door, and then
shut the door. I sold it to Milty for two cents.
Milty's collecting teeth."
"What in the world does he want teeth for?" asked Marilla.
"To make a necklace for playing Indian Chief," explained Davy, climbing upon
Anne's lap.
"He's got fifteen already, and everybody's else's promised, so there's no use in the
rest of us starting to collect, too. I tell you the Boulters are great business
people."
"Were you a good boy at Mrs. Boulter's?" asked Marilla severely.
"Yes; but say, Marilla, I'm tired of being good."
"You'd get tired of being bad much sooner, Davy-boy," said Anne.
"Well, it'd be fun while it lasted, wouldn't it?" persisted Davy.
"I could be sorry for it afterwards, couldn't I?"
"Being sorry wouldn't do away with the consequences of being bad, Davy.
Don't you remember the Sunday last summer when you ran away from Sunday School?
You told me then that being bad wasn't worth while.
What were you and Milty doing today?"
"Oh, we fished and chased the cat, and hunted for eggs, and yelled at the echo.
There's a great echo in the bush behind the Boulter barn.
Say, what is echo, Anne; I want to know."
"Echo is a beautiful nymph, Davy, living far away in the woods, and laughing at the
world from among the hills." "What does she look like?"
"Her hair and eyes are dark, but her neck and arms are white as snow.
No mortal can ever see how fair she is.
She is fleeter than a deer, and that mocking voice of hers is all we can know of
her. You can hear her calling at night; you can
hear her laughing under the stars.
But you can never see her. She flies afar if you follow her, and
laughs at you always just over the next hill."
"Is that true, Anne?
Or is it a whopper?" demanded Davy staring. "Davy," said Anne despairingly, "haven't
you sense enough to distinguish between a fairytale and a falsehood?"
"Then what is it that sasses back from the Boulter bush?
I want to know," insisted Davy. "When you are a little older, Davy, I'll
explain it all to you."
The mention of age evidently gave a new turn to Davy's thoughts for after a few
moments of reflection, he whispered solemnly:
"Anne, I'm going to be married."
"When?" asked Anne with equal solemnity. "Oh, not until I'm grown-up, of course."
"Well, that's a relief, Davy. Who is the lady?"
"Stella Fletcher; she's in my class at school.
And say, Anne, she's the prettiest girl you ever saw.
If I die before I grow up you'll keep an eye on her, won't you?"
"Davy Keith, do stop talking such nonsense," said Marilla severely.
"'Tisn't nonsense," protested Davy in an injured tone.
"She's my promised wife, and if I was to die she'd be my promised widow, wouldn't
she?
And she hasn't got a soul to look after her except her old grandmother."
"Come and have your supper, Anne," said Marilla, "and don't encourage that child in
his absurd talk."
>
CHAPTER XXIII Paul Cannot Find the Rock People
Life was very pleasant in Avonlea that summer, although Anne, amid all her
vacation joys, was haunted by a sense of "something gone which should be there."
She would not admit, even in her inmost reflections, that this was caused by
Gilbert's absence.
But when she had to walk home alone from prayer meetings and A.V.I.S. pow-wows,
while Diana and Fred, and many other gay couples, loitered along the dusky, starlit
country roads, there was a ***, lonely
ache in her heart which she could not explain away.
Gilbert did not even write to her, as she thought he might have done.
She knew he wrote to Diana occasionally, but she would not inquire about him; and
Diana, supposing that Anne heard from him, volunteered no information.
Gilbert's mother, who was a gay, frank, light-hearted lady, but not overburdened
with tact, had a very embarrassing habit of asking Anne, always in a painfully distinct
voice and always in the presence of a
crowd, if she had heard from Gilbert lately.
Poor Anne could only blush horribly and murmur, "not very lately," which was taken
by all, Mrs. Blythe included, to be merely a maidenly evasion.
Apart from this, Anne enjoyed her summer.
Priscilla came for a merry visit in June; and, when she had gone, Mr. and Mrs.
Irving, Paul and Charlotta the Fourth came "home" for July and August.
Echo Lodge was the scene of gaieties once more, and the echoes over the river were
kept busy mimicking the laughter that rang in the old garden behind the spruces.
"Miss Lavendar" had not changed, except to grow even sweeter and prettier.
Paul adored her, and the companionship between them was beautiful to see.
"But I don't call her 'mother' just by itself," he explained to Anne.
"You see, THAT name belongs just to my own little mother, and I can't give it to any
one else.
You know, teacher. But I call her 'Mother Lavendar' and I love
her next best to father. I--I even love her a LITTLE better than
you, teacher."
"Which is just as it ought to be," answered Anne.
Paul was thirteen now and very tall for his years.
His face and eyes were as beautiful as ever, and his fancy was still like a prism,
separating everything that fell upon it into rainbows.
He and Anne had delightful rambles to wood and field and shore.
Never were there two more thoroughly "kindred spirits."
Charlotta the Fourth had blossomed out into young ladyhood.
She wore her hair now in an enormous pompador and had discarded the blue ribbon
bows of auld lang syne, but her face was as freckled, her nose as snubbed, and her
mouth and smiles as wide as ever.
"You don't think I talk with a Yankee accent, do you, Miss Shirley, ma'am?" she
demanded anxiously. "I don't notice it, Charlotta."
"I'm real glad of that.
They said I did at home, but I thought likely they just wanted to aggravate me.
I don't want no Yankee accent. Not that I've a word to say against the
Yankees, Miss Shirley, ma'am.
They're real civilized. But give me old P.E. Island every time."
Paul spent his first fortnight with his grandmother Irving in Avonlea.
Anne was there to meet him when he came, and found him wild with eagerness to get to
the shore--Nora and the Golden Lady and the Twin Sailors would be there.
He could hardly wait to eat his supper.
Could he not see Nora's elfin face peering around the point, watching for him
wistfully? But it was a very sober Paul who came back
from the shore in the twilight.
"Didn't you find your Rock People?" asked Anne.
Paul shook his chestnut curls sorrowfully. "The Twin Sailors and the Golden Lady never
came at all," he said.
"Nora was there--but Nora is not the same, teacher.
She is changed." "Oh, Paul, it is you who are changed," said
Anne.
"You have grown too old for the Rock People.
They like only children for playfellows.
I am afraid the Twin Sailors will never again come to you in the pearly, enchanted
boat with the sail of moonshine; and the Golden Lady will play no more for you on
her golden harp.
Even Nora will not meet you much longer. You must pay the penalty of growing-up,
Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you."
"You two talk as much foolishness as ever you did," said old Mrs. Irving, half-
indulgently, half-reprovingly. "Oh, no, we don't," said Anne, shaking her
head gravely.
"We are getting very, very wise, and it is such a pity.
We are never half so interesting when we have learned that language is given us to
enable us to conceal our thoughts."
"But it isn't--it is given us to exchange our thoughts," said Mrs. Irving seriously.
She had never heard of Tallyrand and did not understand epigrams.
Anne spent a fortnight of halcyon days at Echo Lodge in the golden prime of August.
While there she incidentally contrived to hurry Ludovic Speed in his leisurely
courting of Theodora Dix, as related duly in another chronicle of her history.(1)
Arnold Sherman, an elderly friend of the
Irvings, was there at the same time, and added not a little to the general
pleasantness of life. (1 Chronicles of Avonlea.)
"What a nice play-time this has been," said Anne.
"I feel like a giant refreshed.
And it's only a fortnight more till I go back to Kingsport, and Redmond and Patty's
Place. Patty's Place is the dearest spot, Miss
I feel as if I had two homes--one at Green Gables and one at Patty's Place.
But where has the summer gone? It doesn't seem a day since I came home
that spring evening with the Mayflowers.
When I was little I couldn't see from one end of the summer to the other.
It stretched before me like an unending season.
Now, ''tis a handbreadth, 'tis a tale.'"
"Anne, are you and Gilbert Blythe as good friends as you used to be?" asked Miss
Lavendar quietly. "I am just as much Gilbert's friend as ever
I was, Miss Lavendar."
Miss Lavendar shook her head. "I see something's gone wrong, Anne.
I'm going to be impertinent and ask what. Have you quarrelled?"
"No; it's only that Gilbert wants more than friendship and I can't give him more."
"Are you sure of that, Anne?" "Perfectly sure."
"I'm very, very sorry."
"I wonder why everybody seems to think I ought to marry Gilbert Blythe," said Anne
petulantly. "Because you were made and meant for each
other, Anne--that is why.
You needn't toss that young head of yours. It's a fact."
>