Anne of Windy Willows (2 page)

‘Why not?’ said Rebecca Dew.

‘It would be too much trouble for you, I am afraid,’ said Aunt Chatty.

‘I’m well used to trouble,’ said Rebecca Dew. You
can’t
separate those names, Gilbert. It’s impossible – though the widows do it. They call her ‘Rebecca’ when they speak to her. I don’t know how they manage it.

‘We are rather old to have young people coming and going,’ persisted Aunt Chatty.

‘Speak for yourselves!’ retorted Rebecca Dew. ‘I’m only forty-five, and I still have the use of my faculties. And
I
think it would be nice to have a young person sleeping in the house. A girl would be better than a boy any time.
He’d
be smoking day
and
night; burn us in our beds. If you must take a boarder
my
advice would be to take
her
. But of course it’s
your
house.’

She said and vanished, as Homer was so fond of remarking. I knew the whole thing was settled, but Aunt Chatty said I must go up and see if I was suited with my room.

‘We will give you the tower room, dear. It’s not quite as large as the spare room, but it has a stove-pipe hole for a stove in winter and a much nicer view. You can see the old graveyard from it.’

I knew I would love the room; the very name ‘tower room’ thrilled me. I felt as if we were living in that old song we used to sing in Avonlea school about the maiden who ‘dwelt in a high tower beside a grey sea’. It proved to be the dearest place. We ascended to it by a little flight of corner steps leading up from the stair landing. It was rather small, but not nearly as small as that dreadful hall bedroom I had in my first year at Redmond. It had two windows, a dormer one looking west and a gable one looking north, and in the corner formed by the tower another three-sided window with casements opening outward and shelves underneath for my books. The floor was covered with round braided rugs; the big bed had a canopy top and a ‘wild-goose’ quilt, and looked so perfectly smooth and level that it seemed a shame to spoil it by sleeping in it. And, Gilbert, it is so high that I have to climb into it by a funny little movable set of steps which in daytime are stowed away under it. It seems Captain MacComber bought the whole contraption in some ‘foreign’ place and brought it home.

There was a dear little corner cupboard with shelves trimmed with white scalloped paper and bouquets painted on its door. There was a window-seat in the ‘tower’ with a round blue cushion on it, a cushion with a button deep in the centre, making it look like a fat blue doughnut. And there was a sweet washstand with two shelves, the top one just big enough for a basin and jug of robin’s-egg blue and the under one for a soap-dish and hot-water pitcher. It had a little brass-handled drawer full of towels, and on a shelf over it a white china lady sat, with pink shoes and gilt sash and a red china rose in her golden china hair.

The whole place was engoldened by the light that came through the corn-coloured curtains, and there was the rarest tapestry on the whitewashed walls where the shadow patterns of the willows outside fell – living tapestry, always changing and quivering. Somehow it seemed such a
happy
room. I felt as if I was the richest girl in the world.

‘You’ll be safe there, that’s what,’ said Mrs Lynde as we went away.

‘I expect I’ll find some things a bit cramping after the freedom of Patty’s Place,’ I said, just to tease her.

‘Freedom!’ Mrs Lynde sniffed. ‘Freedom! Don’t talk like a Yankee, Anne.’

I came up today, bag and baggage. Of course, I hated to leave Green Gables. No matter how often and long I’m away from it the minute a vacation comes I’m part of it again, as if I had never been away, and my heart is torn over leaving it. But I know I’ll like it here. And it likes me. I always know whether a house likes me or not.

The views from my windows are lovely – even the old graveyard, which is surrounded by a row of dark fir-trees and reached by a winding, dike-bordered lane. From my west window I can see all over the harbour to distant, misty shores, with the dear little sailing-boats I love and the ships outward bound ‘for ports unknown’ – fascinating phrase! Such ‘scope for imagination’ in it! From the north window I can see into the grove of birch and maple across the road. You know, I’ve always been a treeworshipper. When we studied Tennyson in our English course at Redmond I was always sorrowfully at one with poor Œnone, mourning her ravished pines.

Beyond the grove and the graveyard is a lovable valley with the glossy red ribbon of a road winding through it and white houses dotted along it. Some valleys
are
lovable; you can’t tell why. Just to look at them gives you pleasure. And beyond it again is my blue hill. I’m naming it Storm King – the ruling passion, etc.

I can be so
alone
up here when I want to be. You know, it’s lovely to be alone once in a while. The winds will be my friends. They’ll wail and sigh and croon around my tower: the white winds of winter, the green winds of spring, the blue winds of summer, the crimson winds of autumn, and the wild winds of all seasons – ‘stormy wind, fulfilling his word’. How I’ve always thrilled to that Bible verse, as if each and every wind had a message for me! I’ve always envied the boy who flew with the North Wind in that beautiful old story of George Macdonald’s. Some night, Gilbert, I’ll open my tower casement and just step into the arms of the wind – and Rebecca Dew will never know why my bed wasn’t slept in that night.

I hope when we find our ‘house of dreams’, dearest, that there will be winds around it. I wonder where it is, that unknown house? Shall I love it best by moonlight or dawn? That home of the future where we will have love and friendship and work – and a few funny adventures to bring laughter in our old age. Old age! Can
we
ever be old, Gilbert? It seems impossible.

From the left window in the tower I can see the roofs of the town, this place where I am to live for at least a year. People are living in those houses who will be my friends, though I don’t know them yet. And perhaps my enemies. For the ilk of Pye are found everywhere, under all kinds of names, and I understand the Pringles are to be reckoned with. School begins tomorrow. I shall have to teach geometry! I pray heaven there are no mathematical geniuses among the Pringles.

I’ve been here only for half a day and two, but I feel as if I had known the widows and Rebecca Dew all my life. They’ve asked me to call them ‘aunt’ already, and I’ve asked them to call me ‘Anne’. I called Rebecca Dew ‘Miss Dew’ – once.

‘Miss what?’ quoth she.

‘Dew,’ I said meekly. ‘Isn’t that your name?’

‘Well, yes, it is, but I ain’t been called “Miss Dew” for so long it gave me quite a turn. You’d better not do it any more, Miss Shirley, me not being used to it.’

‘I’ll remember, Rebecca – Dew,’ I said, trying my hardest to leave off the Dew, but not succeeding.

Mrs Braddock was quite right in saying Aunt Chatty was sensitive. I discovered that at supper-time. Aunt Kate had said something about ‘Chatty’s sixty-sixth birthday’. Happening to glance at Aunt Chatty, I saw that she had – no, not
burst
into tears. That is entirely too explosive a term for her performance. She just overflowed. The tears welled up in her big brown eyes and brimmed over, effortlessly and silently.

‘What’s the matter, Chatty?’ asked Aunt Kate rather dourly.

‘It – it was only my sixty-fifth birthday,’ said Aunt Chatty.

‘I beg your pardon, Charlotte,’ said Aunt Kate, and all was sunshine again.

The cat is a lovely big tommy cat with golden eyes, an elegant coat of dusty Maltese, and irreproachable linen. Aunts Kate and Chatty call him Dusty Miller, because that is his name, and Rebecca Dew calls him ‘The Cat’, because she resents him and resents the fact that she has to give him a square inch of liver every morning and evening, clear his hairs off the parlour armchair seat with an old toothbrush whenever he has sneaked in, and hunt him up if he is out late at night.

‘Rebecca Dew has always hated cats,’ Aunt Chatty tells me, ‘and she hates Dusty especially. Old Mrs Campbell’s dog – she kept a dog then – brought him here two years ago in his mouth. I suppose he thought it was no use to take him to Mrs Campbell. Such a poor, miserable little kitten, all wet and cold, with its poor little bones almost sticking through its skin. A heart of stone couldn’t have refused it shelter. So Kate and I adopted it, but Rebecca Dew has never really forgiven us. We were not diplomatic that time. We should have refused to take it in. I don’t know if you’ve noticed’ – Aunt Chatty looked cautiously round at the door between the dining-room and the kitchen – ‘how we manage Rebecca Dew.’

I
had
noticed it, and it was beautiful to behold. Summerside and Rebecca Dew may think she rules the roost, but the widows know differently.

‘We didn’t want to take the banker. A young man would have been
so
unsettling, and we would have had to worry so much if he didn’t go to church regularly. But we pretended we did, and Rebecca Dew simply wouldn’t hear of it. I’m so glad we have you, dear. I feel sure you’ll be a very nice person to cook for. I hope you’ll like us all. Rebecca Dew has some very fine qualities. She was not so tidy when she came fifteen years ago as she is now. Once Kate had to write her name, “Rebecca Dew”, right across the parlour mirror to show the dust. But she never had to do it again. Rebecca Dew can take a hint. I hope you’ll find your room comfortable, dear. You may have the window open at night. Kate does not approve of night air, but she knows boarders must have privileges. She and I sleep together, and we have arranged it so that one night the window is shut for her and the next it is open for me. One can always work out little problems like that, don’t you think? Where there is a will there is always a way. Don’t be alarmed if you hear Rebecca prowling a good deal in the night. She is always hearing noises and getting up to investigate them. I think that is why she didn’t want the banker. She was afraid she might run into him in her nightgown. I hope you won’t mind Kate not talking much. It’s just her way. And she must have so many things to talk of: she was all over the world with Amasa MacComber in her young days. I wish I had the subjects for conversation she has, but I’ve never been off P.E. Island. I’ve often wondered why things should be arranged so – me loving to talk, and with nothing to talk about, and Kate with everything and hating to talk. But I suppose Providence knows best.’

Although Aunt Chatty is a talker all right she didn’t say all this without a break. I interjected remarks at suitable intervals, but they were of no importance.

They keep a cow, which is pastured at Mr James Hamilton’s up the road, and Rebecca Dew goes there to milk her. There is any amount of cream, and every morning and evening I understand Rebecca Dew passes a glass of new milk through the opening in the wall gate to Mrs Campbell’s ‘Woman’. It is for ‘little Elizabeth’, who must have it under the doctor’s orders. Who the Woman is or who little Elizabeth is I have yet to discover. Mrs Campbell is the inhabitant and owner of the fortress next door, which is called the Evergreens.

I don’t expect to sleep tonight. I never do sleep my first night in a strange bed, and
this
is the very strangest bed I’ve ever seen. But I won’t mind. I’ve always loved the night, and I’ll like lying awake and thinking over everything in life, past, present, and to come. Especially,
to come
.

This is a merciless letter, Gilbert. I won’t inflict such a long one on you again. But I wanted to tell you everything, so that you could picture my new surroundings for yourself. It has come to an end now, for far up the harbour the moon is ‘sinking into shadow-land’. I must write a letter to Marilla yet. It will reach Green Gables the day after tomorrow, and Davy will bring it home from the post-office, and he and Dora will crowd round Marilla while she opens it, and Mrs Lynde will have both ears open… Ow – w – w! That has made me homesick. Good night, dearest, from one who is now and ever will be,

Fondestly yours,

A
NNE
S
HIRLEY

2

Extracts from various letters from the same to the same
.

Sept. 26

Do you know where I go to read your letters? Across the road into the grove. There is a little dell there where the sun dapples the ferns. A brook meanders through it; there is a twisted, mossy tree-trunk on which I sit, and the most delightful row of young sister birches. After this, when I have a dream of a certain kind – a golden-green, crimson-veined dream, a very dream of dreams – I shall please my fancy with the belief that it came from my secret dell of birches, and was born of some mystic union between the slenderest, airiest of the sisters and the crooning brook. I love to sit there and listen to the silence of the grove. Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods, of the shore, of the meadows, of the night, of the summer afternoon. All different, because all the undertones that thread them are different. I’m sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.

School has been ‘keeping’ for two weeks now, and I’ve got things pretty well organized. But Mrs Braddock was right: the Pringles are my problem. And as yet I don’t see exactly how I’m going to solve it in spite of my lucky clovers. As Mrs Braddock says, they are as smooth as cream – and as slippery.

The Pringles are a kind of clan who keep tabs on each other and fight a good bit among themselves, but stand shoulder to shoulder in regard to any outsider. I have come to the conclusion that there are just two kinds of people in Summerside – those who are Pringles and those who aren’t.

My room is full of Pringles, and a good many students who bear another name have Pringle blood in them. The ringleader of them seems to be Jen Pringle, a green-eyed bantling who looks as Becky Sharp must have looked at fourteen. I believe she is deliberately organizing a subtle campaign of insubordination and disrespect, with which I am going to find it hard to cope. She has a knack of making irresistibly comic faces, and when I hear a smothered ripple of laughter running over the room behind my back I know perfectly well what has caused it, but so far I haven’t been able to catch her out in it. She has brains, too – the little wretch! – can write compositions that are fourth cousins to literature, and is quite brilliant in mathematics, woe is me! There is a certain
sparkle
in everything she says or does, and she has a sense of humorous situations which would be a bond of kinship between us if she hadn’t started out by hating me. As it is, I fear it will be a long time before Jen and I can laugh
together
over anything.

Myra Pringle, Jen’s cousin, is the beauty of the school – and appallingly stupid. She does perpetrate some amusing howlers; as, for instance, when she said today in history class that the Indians thought Champlain and his men were gods or ‘something inhuman’.

Socially the Pringles are what Rebecca Dew calls ‘the e-light’ of Summerside. Already I have been invited to two Pringle homes for supper, because it is the proper thing to invite a new teacher to supper, and the Pringles are not going to omit the required gestures. Last night I was at James Pringle’s, the father of the aforesaid Jen. He looks like a college professor, but is in reality stupid and ignorant. He talked a great deal about ‘dis
ci
pline’, tapping the tablecloth with a finger the nail of which was not impeccable, and occasionally doing dreadful things to grammar. The Summerside High had always required a firm hand – an experienced teacher, male preferred. He was afraid I was a
leetle
too young, ‘a fault which time will cure all too soon,’ he said sorrowfully. I didn’t say anything, because if I had said anything I might have said too much. So I was as smooth and creamy as any Pringle of them all could have been, and contented myself with looking limpidly at him and saying inside of myself, ‘You cantankerous, prejudiced old creature!’

Jen must have got her brains from her mother, whom I found myself liking. Jen, in her parents’ presence, was a model of decorum. But though her words were polite her tone was insolent. Every time she said ‘Miss Shirley’ she contrived to make it sound like an insult. And every time she looked at my hair I felt that it was just plain carroty red. No Pringle, I am certain, would ever admit it was auburn.

I liked the Morton Pringles much better, though Morton Pringle never really listens to anything you say. He says something to you, and then while you’re replying he is busy thinking out his next remark.

Mrs Stephen Pringle, the Widow Pringle – Summerside abounds in widows – wrote me a letter yesterday, a nice, polite, poisonous letter. Millie has too much homework. Millie is a delicate child, and must not be overworked. Mr Bell
never
gave her homework. She is sensitive, a child that must be
understood
. Mr Bell understood her so well! Mrs Stephen is sure I will too, if I try!

I do not doubt Mrs Stephen thinks I made Adam Pringle’s nose bleed in class today, by reason of which he had to go home. And I woke up last night and couldn’t go to sleep again because I remembered an
i
I hadn’t dotted in a question I wrote on the board. I’m certain Jen Pringle would notice it, and a whisper will go round the clan about it.

Rebecca Dew says that all the Pringles will invite me to supper, except the old ladies at Maplehurst, and then ignore me for ever afterwards. As they are the ‘e-light’ this may mean that socially I may be banned in Summerside. Well, we’ll see. The battle is on, but it is not yet either won or lost. Still, I feel rather unhappy over it all. You can’t reason with prejudice. I’m still just as I used to be in my childhood: I can’t bear to have people not liking me. It isn’t pleasant to think that the families of half my pupils hate me. And for no fault of my own. It is the
injustice
that stings me. There go more italics! But a few italics really do relieve your feelings.

Apart from the Pringles, I like my pupils very much. There are some clever, ambitious, hard-working ones who are really interested in getting an education. Lewis Allen is paying for his board by doing
housework
at his boarding-house, and isn’t a bit ashamed of it. And Sophy Sinclair rides bareback on her father’s old grey mare six miles in and six miles out every day. There’s pluck for you! If I can help a girl like that am I to mind the Pringles?

The trouble is, if I can’t win the Pringles I won’t have much chance of helping anybody.

But I love Windy Willows. It isn’t a boarding-house; it’s a home! And they like me. Even Dusty Miller likes me, though he sometimes disapproves of me, and shows it by deliberately sitting with his back turned towards me, occasionally cocking a golden eye over his shoulder at me to see how I’m taking it. I don’t pet him much when Rebecca Dew is around, because it really does annoy her. By day he is a homely, comfortable, meditative animal, but he is decidedly a weird creature at night. Rebecca says it is because he is never allowed to stay out after dark. She hates to stand in the backyard and call him. She says the neighbours will all be laughing at her. She calls in such fierce, stentorian tones that she really can be heard all over the town on a still night shouting for ‘Puss…
puss
…
PUSS
!’ The widows would have a conniption if Dusty Miller wasn’t in when they went to bed.

‘Nobody knows what I’ve gone through on account of That Cat –
nobody
!’ Rebecca has assured me.

The widows are going to wear well. Every day I like them better. Aunt Kate doesn’t believe in reading novels, but informs me that she does not propose to censor my reading matter. Aunt Chatty loves novels. She has a ‘hidy-hole’ where she keeps them – she smuggles them in from the town library – together with a pack of cards for solitaire and anything else she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to see. It is in a chair seat which nobody but Aunt Chatty knows is more than a chair seat. She has shared the secret with me, because, I strongly suspect, she wants me to aid and abet her in the aforesaid smuggling. There shouldn’t really be any need for hidy-holes at Windy Willows, for I never saw a house with so many mysterious cupboards, though, to be sure, Rebecca Dew won’t let them
be
mysterious. She is always cleaning them out ferociously. ‘A house can’t keep itself clean,’ she says sorrowfully, when either of the widows protests. I am sure she would make short work of a novel or a pack of cards if she found them. They are both a horror to her orthodox soul. Rebecca Dew says cards are the devil’s books, and novels even worse. The only things Rebecca ever reads, apart from her Bible, are the Society columns of the Montreal
Guardian
. She loves to pore over the houses and furniture and doings of millionaires.

‘Just fancy soaking in a golden bath-tub, Miss Shirley!’ she said wistfully.

But she’s really an old duck. She has produced from somewhere a comfortable old wing chair of faded brocade that just fits my kinks, and says, ‘This is
your
chair. We’ll keep it for
you
.’ And she won’t let Dusty Miller sleep on it, lest I get hairs on my school skirt, and give the Pringles something to talk about.

The whole three are very much interested in my circlet of pearls, and what it signifies. Aunt Kate showed me her engagement ring set with turquoises. She can’t wear it because it has grown too small. But poor Aunt Chatty owned to me with tears in her eyes that she had never had an engagement ring. Her husband thought it ‘an unnecessary expenditure’. She was in my room at the time, giving her face a bath in buttermilk. She does it every night to preserve her complexion, and has sworn me to secrecy because she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to know it.

‘She would think it ridiculous in a woman of my age. And I am sure Rebecca Dew thinks that no Christian woman should try to be beautiful. I used to slip down to the kitchen to do it after Kate had gone to sleep, but I was always afraid of Rebecca Dew coming down. She has ears like a cat’s even when she is asleep. If I could just slip in here every night and do it… Oh, thank you, my dear.’

I have found out a little about our neighbours at the Evergreens. Mrs Campbell (who was a Pringle!) is eighty. I haven’t seen her, but from what I can gather she is a very grim old lady. She has a maid, Martha Monkman, almost as ancient and grim as herself, who is generally referred to as ‘Mrs Campbell’s Woman’. And she has her great-granddaughter, little Elizabeth Grayson, living with her. Elizabeth – on whom I have never laid eyes in spite of my two weeks’ sojourn – is eight years old, and goes to the public school by the ‘back way’, a short cut through the backyards, so I never encounter her going or coming. Her mother, who is dead, was a granddaughter of Mrs Campbell, who brought her up also,
her
parents being dead. She married a certain Pierce Grayson, a ‘Yankee’, as Mrs Rachel Lynde would say. She died when Elizabeth was born, and as Pierce Grayson had to leave America at once to take charge of a branch of his firm’s business in Paris the baby was sent home to old Mrs Campbell. The story goes that he couldn’t bear the sight of her because she had cost her mother her life, and has never taken any notice of her. This, of course, may be sheer gossip, because neither Mrs Campbell or the Woman ever opens her lips about him.

Rebecca Dew says they are far too strict with little Elizabeth, and she hasn’t much of a time of it with them.

‘She isn’t like other children; far too old for eight years. The things that she says sometimes! “Rebecca,” she sez to me one day, “suppose just as you were ready to get into bed you felt your ankle
nipped
?” No wonder she’s afraid to go to bed in the dark. And they make her do it. Mrs Campbell says there are to be no cowards in
her
house. They watch her like two cats watching a mouse, and boss her within an inch of her life. If she makes a speck of noise they nearly pass out. It’s “Hush! Hush!” all the time. I tell you that child is being hush-hushed to death. And what is to be done about it?’

What, indeed! I feel that I’d like to see her. She seems to me a bit pathetic. Aunt Kate says she is well looked after from a physical point of view. What Aunt Kate really said was, ‘They feed and dress her well’ – but a child can’t live by bread alone. I can never forget what my own life was like before I came to Green Gables.

I’m going home next Friday evening to spend two beautiful days in Avonlea. The only drawback will be that everybody I see will ask me how I like teaching in Summerside.

But think of Green Gables now, Gilbert – the Lake of Shining Waters with a blue mist on it, the maples across the brook beginning to turn scarlet, the ferns golden brown in the Haunted Wood, and the sunset shadows in Lovers’ Lane, darling spot! I find it in my heart to wish I were there now with – with – Guess whom?

Do you know, Gilbert, there are times when I strongly suspect that I love you!

Windy Willows

Spook’s Lane

S’side

October 10

H
ONOURED AND
R
ESPECTED
S
IR
,

That is how a love-letter of Aunt Chatty’s grandmother’s began. Isn’t it delicious? What a thrill of superiority it must have given the grandfather! Wouldn’t you really prefer it to ‘Gilbert darling’, etc.? But, on the whole, I think I’m glad you’re not the grandfather – or
a
grandfather. It’s wonderful to think we’re young and have our whole lives before us –
together
– isn’t it?

(Several pages omitted, Anne’s pen evidently not being sharp, stub, or rusty)

I am sitting on the window-seat in the tower looking out into the trees waving against an amber sky and beyond them to the harbour. Last night I had such a lovely walk with myself. I really had to go somewhere, for it was just a trifle dismal at Windy Willows. Aunt Chatty was crying in the sitting-room because her feelings had been hurt, and Aunt Kate was crying in her bedroom because it was the anniversary of Captain Amasa’s death, and Rebecca Dew was crying in the kitchen for no reason that I could discover. I’ve never seen Rebecca Dew cry before. But when I tried tactfully to find out what was wrong she pettishly wanted to know if a body couldn’t enjoy a cry when she felt like it. So I folded my tent and stole away, leaving her to her enjoyment.