The Complete Anne of Green (96 page)

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.

I went out and down the harbour road. There was such a nice frosty, Octobery smell in the air, blent with the delightful odour of newly ploughed fields. I walked on and on until twilight had deepened into a moonlit autumn night. I was alone, but not lonely. I held a series of imaginary conversations with imaginary comrades, and thought out so many epigrams that I was agreeably surprised at myself. I couldn’t help enjoying myself in spite of my Pringle worries.

The spirit moves me to utter a few yowls regarding the Pringles. I hate to admit it, but things are not going any too well in Summerside High. There is no doubt that a cabal has been organized against me.

For one thing, homework is never done by any of the Pringles or half-Pringles. And there is no use in appealing to the parents. They are suave, polite, evasive. I know all the pupils who are not Pringles like me, but the Pringle virus of disobedience is undermining the morale of the whole room. One morning I found my desk turned inside out and upside down. Nobody knew who did it, of course. And no one could or would tell who left on it another day the box out of which popped an artificial snake when I opened it. But every Pringle in the school screamed with laughter over my face. I suppose I did look wildly startled.