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CHAPTER XXIV A Prophet in His Own Country
One May day Avonlea folks were mildly excited over some "Avonlea Notes," signed
"Observer," which appeared in the Charlottetown 'Daily Enterprise.'
Gossip ascribed the authorship thereof to Charlie Sloane, partly because the said
Charlie had indulged in similar literary flights in times past, and partly because
one of the notes seemed to embody a sneer at Gilbert Blythe.
Avonlea juvenile society persisted in regarding Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane
as rivals in the good graces of a certain damsel with gray eyes and an imagination.
Gossip, as usual, was wrong.
Gilbert Blythe, aided and abetted by Anne, had written the notes, putting in the one
about himself as a blind. Only two of the notes have any bearing on
this history:
"Rumor has it that there will be a wedding in our village ere the daisies are in
bloom.
A new and highly respected citizen will lead to the hymeneal altar one of our most
popular ladies.
"Uncle Abe, our well-known weather prophet, predicts a violent storm of thunder and
lightning for the evening of the twenty- third of May, beginning at seven o'clock
sharp.
The area of the storm will extend over the greater part of the Province.
People traveling that evening will do well to take umbrellas and mackintoshes with
them."
"Uncle Abe really has predicted a storm for sometime this spring," said Gilbert, "but
do you suppose Mr. Harrison really does go to see Isabella Andrews?"
"No," said Anne, laughing, "I'm sure he only goes to play checkers with Mr.
Harrison Andrews, but Mrs. Lynde says she knows Isabella Andrews must be going to get
married, she's in such good spirits this spring."
Poor old Uncle Abe felt rather indignant over the notes.
He suspected that "Observer" was making fun of him.
He angrily denied having assigned any particular date for his storm but nobody
believed him.
Life in Avonlea continued on the smooth and even tenor of its way.
The "planting" was put in; the Improvers celebrated an Arbor Day.
Each Improver set out, or caused to be set out, five ornamental trees.
As the society now numbered forty members, this meant a total of two hundred young
trees.
Early oats greened over the red fields; apple orchards flung great blossoming arms
about the farmhouses and the Snow Queen adorned itself as a bride for her husband.
Anne liked to sleep with her window open and let the cherry fragrance blow over her
face all night. She thought it very poetical.
Marilla thought she was risking her life.
"Thanksgiving should be celebrated in the spring," said Anne one evening to Marilla,
as they sat on the front door steps and listened to the silver-sweet chorus of the
frogs.
"I think it would be ever so much better than having it in November when everything
is dead or asleep.
Then you have to remember to be thankful; but in May one simply can't help being
thankful... that they are alive, if for nothing else.
I feel exactly as Eve must have felt in the garden of Eden before the trouble began.
IS that grass in the hollow green or golden?
It seems to me, Marilla, that a pearl of a day like this, when the blossoms are out
and the winds don't know where to blow from next for sheer crazy delight must be pretty
near as good as heaven."
Marilla looked scandalized and glanced apprehensively around to make sure the
twins were not within earshot. They came around the corner of the house
just then.
"Ain't it an awful nice-smelling evening?" asked Davy, sniffing delightedly as he
swung a hoe in his grimy hands. He had been working in his garden.
That spring Marilla, by way of turning Davy's passion for reveling in mud and clay
into useful channels, had given him and Dora a small plot of ground for a garden.
Both had eagerly gone to work in a characteristic fashion.
Dora planted, weeded, and watered carefully, systematically, and
dispassionately.
As a result, her plot was already green with prim, orderly little rows of
vegetables and annuals.
Davy, however, worked with more zeal than discretion; he dug and hoed and raked and
watered and transplanted so energetically that his seeds had no chance for their
lives.
"How is your garden coming on, Davy-boy?" asked Anne.
"Kind of slow," said Davy with a sigh. "I don't know why the things don't grow
better.
Milty Boulter says I must have planted them in the dark of the moon and that's the
whole trouble.
He says you must never sow seeds or kill pork or cut your hair or do any 'portant
thing in the wrong time of the moon. Is that true, Anne?
I want to know."
"Maybe if you didn't pull your plants up by the roots every other day to see how
they're getting on 'at the other end,' they'd do better," said Marilla
sarcastically.
"I only pulled six of them up," protested Davy.
"I wanted to see if there was grubs at the roots.
Milty Boulter said if it wasn't the moon's fault it must be grubs.
But I only found one grub. He was a great big juicy curly grub.
I put him on a stone and got another stone and smashed him flat.
He made a jolly SQUISH I tell you. I was sorry there wasn't more of them.
Dora's garden was planted same time's mine and her things are growing all right.
It CAN'T be the moon," Davy concluded in a reflective tone.
"Marilla, look at that apple tree," said Anne.
"Why, the thing is human.
It is reaching out long arms to pick its own pink skirts daintily up and provoke us
to admiration." "Those Yellow Duchess trees always bear
well," said Marilla complacently.
"That tree'll be loaded this year. I'm real glad...they're great for pies."
But neither Marilla nor Anne nor anybody else was fated to make pies out of Yellow
Duchess apples that year.
The twenty-third of May came...an unseasonably warm day, as none realized
more keenly than Anne and her little beehive of pupils, sweltering over
fractions and syntax in the Avonlea schoolroom.
A hot breeze blew all the forenoon; but after noon hour it died away into a heavy
stillness.
At half past three Anne heard a low rumble of thunder.
She promptly dismissed school at once, so that the children might get home before the
storm came.
As they went out to the playground Anne perceived a certain shadow and gloom over
the world in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining brightly.
Annetta Bell caught her hand nervously.
"Oh, teacher, look at that awful cloud!" Anne looked and gave an exclamation of
dismay.
In the northwest a mass of cloud, such as she had never in all her life beheld
before, was rapidly rolling up.
It was dead black, save where its curled and fringed edges showed a ghastly, livid
white.
There was something about it indescribably menacing as it gloomed up in the clear blue
sky; now and again a bolt of lightning shot across it, followed by a savage growl.
It hung so low that it almost seemed to be touching the tops of the wooded hills.
Mr. Harmon Andrews came clattering up the hill in his truck wagon, urging his team of
grays to their utmost speed.
He pulled them to a halt opposite the school.
"Guess Uncle Abe'*** it for once in his life, Anne," he shouted.
"His storm's coming a leetle ahead of time.
Did ye ever see the like of that cloud?
Here, all you young ones, that are going my way, pile in, and those that ain't scoot
for the post office if ye've more'n a quarter of a mile to go, and stay there
till the shower's over."
Anne caught Davy and Dora by the hands and flew down the hill, along the Birch Path,
and past Violet Vale and Willowmere, as fast as the twins' fat legs could go.
They reached Green Gables not a moment too soon and were joined at the door by
Marilla, who had been hustling her ducks and chickens under shelter.
As they dashed into the kitchen the light seemed to vanish, as if blown out by some
mighty breath; the awful cloud rolled over the sun and a darkness as of late twilight
fell across the world.
At the same moment, with a crash of thunder and a blinding glare of lightning, the hail
swooped down and blotted the landscape out in one white fury.
Through all the clamor of the storm came the thud of torn branches striking the
house and the sharp crack of breaking glass.
In three minutes every pane in the west and north windows was broken and the hail
poured in through the apertures covering the floor with stones, the smallest of
which was as big as a hen's egg.
For three quarters of an hour the storm raged unabated and no one who underwent it
ever forgot it.
Marilla, for once in her life shaken out of her composure by sheer terror, knelt by her
rocking chair in a corner of the kitchen, gasping and sobbing between the deafening
thunder peals.
Anne, white as paper, had dragged the sofa away from the window and sat on it with a
twin on either side. Davy at the first crash had howled, "Anne,
Anne, is it the Judgment Day?
Anne, Anne, I never meant to be naughty," and then had buried his face in Anne's lap
and kept it there, his little body quivering.
Dora, somewhat pale but quite composed, sat with her hand clasped in Anne's, quiet and
motionless. It is doubtful if an earthquake would have
disturbed Dora.
Then, almost as suddenly as it began, the storm ceased.
The hail stopped, the thunder rolled and muttered away to the eastward, and the sun
burst out merry and radiant over a world so changed that it seemed an absurd thing to
think that a scant three quarters of an
hour could have effected such a transformation.
Marilla rose from her knees, weak and trembling, and dropped on her rocker.
Her face was haggard and she looked ten years older.
"Have we all come out of that alive?" she asked solemnly.
"You bet we have," piped Davy cheerfully, quite his own man again.
"I wasn't a bit scared either...only just at the first.
It come on a fellow so sudden.
I made up my mind quick as a wink that I wouldn't fight Teddy Sloane Monday as I'd
promised; but now maybe I will. Say, Dora, was you scared?"
"Yes, I was a little scared," said Dora primly, "but I held tight to Anne's hand
and said my prayers over and over again."
"Well, I'd have said my prayers too if I'd have thought of it," said Davy; "but," he
added triumphantly, "you see I came through just as safe as you for all I didn't say
them."
Anne got Marilla a glassful of her potent currant wine...HOW potent it was Anne, in
her earlier days, had had all too good reason to know ...and then they went to the
door to look out on the strange scene.
Far and wide was a white carpet, knee deep, of hailstones; drifts of them were heaped
up under the eaves and on the steps.
When, three or four days later, those hailstones melted, the havoc they had
wrought was plainly seen, for every green growing thing in the field or garden was
cut off.
Not only was every blossom stripped from the apple trees but great boughs and
branches were wrenched away.
And out of the two hundred trees set out by the Improvers by far the greater number
were snapped off or torn to shreds. "Can it possibly be the same world it was
an hour ago?" asked Anne, dazedly.
"It MUST have taken longer than that to play such havoc."
"The like of this has never been known in Prince Edward Island," said Marilla,
"never.
I remember when I was a girl there was a bad storm, but it was nothing to this.
We'll hear of terrible destruction, you may be sure."
"I do hope none of the children were caught out in it," murmured Anne anxiously.
As it was discovered later, none of the children had been, since all those who had
any distance to go had taken Mr. Andrews' excellent advice and sought refuge at the
post office.
"There comes John Henry Carter," said Marilla.
John Henry came wading through the hailstones with a rather scared grin.
"Oh, ain't this awful, Miss Cuthbert?
Mr. Harrison sent me over to see if yous had come out all right."
"We're none of us killed," said Marilla grimly, "and none of the buildings was
struck.
I hope you got off equally well." "Yas'm.
Not quite so well, ma'am. We was struck.
The lightning knocked over the kitchen chimbly and come down the flue and knocked
over Ginger's cage and tore a hole in the floor and went into the sullar.
Yas'm."
"Was Ginger hurt?" queried Anne. "Yas'm.
He was hurt pretty bad. He was killed."
Later on Anne went over to comfort Mr. Harrison.
She found him sitting by the table, stroking Ginger's gay dead body with a
trembling hand.
"Poor Ginger won't call you any more names, Anne," he said mournfully.
Anne could never have imagined herself crying on Ginger's account, but the tears
came into her eyes.
"He was all the company I had, Anne...and now he's dead.
Well, well, I'm an old fool to care so much.
I'll let on I don't care.
I know you're going to say something sympathetic as soon as I stop talking...but
don't. If you did I'd cry like a baby.
Hasn't this been a terrible storm?
I guess folks won't laugh at Uncle Abe's predictions again.
Seems as if all the storms that he's been prophesying all his life that never
happened came all at once.
Beats all how he struck the very day though, don't it?
Look at the mess we have here. I must hustle round and get some boards to
patch up that hole in the floor."
Avonlea folks did nothing the next day but visit each other and compare damages.
The roads were impassable for wheels by reason of the hailstones, so they walked or
rode on horseback.
The mail came late with ill tidings from all over the province.
Houses had been struck, people killed and injured; the whole telephone and telegraph
system had been disorganized, and any number of young stock exposed in the fields
had perished.
Uncle Abe waded out to the blacksmith's forge early in the morning and spent the
whole day there. It was Uncle Abe's hour of triumph and he
enjoyed it to the full.
It would be doing Uncle Abe an injustice to say that he was glad the storm had
happened; but since it had to be he was very glad he had predicted it...to the very
day, too.
Uncle Abe forgot that he had ever denied setting the day.
As for the trifling discrepancy in the hour, that was nothing.
Gilbert arrived at Green Gables in the evening and found Marilla and Anne busily
engaged in nailing strips of oilcloth over the broken windows.
"Goodness only knows when we'll get glass for them," said Marilla.
"Mr. Barry went over to Carmody this afternoon but not a pane could he get for
love or money.
Lawson and Blair were cleaned out by the Carmody people by ten o'clock.
Was the storm bad at White Sands, Gilbert?" "I should say so.
I was caught in the school with all the children and I thought some of them would
go mad with fright.
Three of them fainted, and two girls took hysterics, and Tommy Blewett did nothing
but shriek at the top of his voice the whole time."
"I only squealed once," said Davy proudly.
"My garden was all smashed flat," he continued mournfully, "but so was Dora's,"
he added in a tone which indicated that there was yet balm in Gilead.
Anne came running down from the west gable.
"Oh, Gilbert, have you heard the news? Mr. Levi Boulter's old house was struck and
burned to the ground.
It seems to me that I'm dreadfully wicked to feel glad over THAT, when so much damage
has been done. Mr. Boulter says he believes the A.V.I.S.
magicked up that storm on purpose."
"Well, one thing is certain," said Gilbert, laughing, "'Observer' has made Uncle Abe's
reputation as a weather prophet. 'Uncle Abe's storm' will go down in local
history.
It is a most extraordinary coincidence that it should have come on the very day we
selected. I actually have a half guilty feeling, as
if I really had 'magicked' it up.
We may as well rejoice over the old house being removed, for there's not much to
rejoice over where our young trees are concerned.
Not ten of them have escaped."
"Ah, well, we'll just have to plant them over again next spring," said Anne
philosophically.
"That is one good thing about this world...there are always sure to be more
springs."