Anne of Avonlea
to me everything’s put on the men in this world. Can I have some more
pudding, Marilla?”
“You’ve had as much as was good for you,” said Marilla; but she gave
him a moderate second helping.
“I wish people could live on pudding. Why can’t they, Marilla? I want
to know.”
“Because they’d soon get tired of it.”
“I’d like to try that for myself,” said skeptical Davy. “But I guess
it’s better to have pudding only on fish and company days than none at
all. They never have any at Milty Boulter’s. Milty says when company
comes his mother gives them cheese and cuts it herself . . . one little
bit apiece and one over for manners.”
“If Milty Boulter talks like that about his mother at least you needn’t
repeat it,” said Marilla severely.
“Bless my soul,” . . . Davy had picked this expression up from Mr.
Harrison and used it with great gusto . . . “Milty meant it as a
compelment. He’s awful proud of his mother, cause folks say she could
scratch a living on a rock.”
“I . . . I suppose them pesky hens are in my pansy bed again,” said
Marilla, rising and going out hurriedly.
The slandered hens were nowhere near the pansy bed and Marilla did not
even glance at it. Instead, she sat down on the cellar hatch and
laughed until she was ashamed of herself.
When Anne and Paul reached the stone house that afternoon they found
Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth in the garden, weeding, raking,
clipping, and trimming as if for dear life. Miss Lavendar herself, all
gay and sweet in the frills and laces she loved, dropped her shears and
ran joyously to meet her guests, while Charlotta the Fourth grinned
cheerfully.
“Welcome, Anne. I thought you’d come today. You belong to the afternoon
so it brought you. Things that belong together are sure to come
together. What a lot of trouble that would save some people if they
only knew it. But they don’t . . . and so they waste beautiful energy
moving heaven and earth to bring things together that _don’t_ belong.
And you, Paul . . . why, you’ve grown! You’re half a head taller than
when you were here before.”
“Yes, I’ve begun to grow like pigweed in the night, as Mrs. Lynde
says,” said Paul, in frank delight over the fact. “Grandma says it’s
the porridge taking effect at last. Perhaps it is. Goodness knows . .
.” Paul sighed deeply . . . “I’ve eaten enough to make anyone grow. I
do hope, now that I’ve begun, I’ll keep on till I’m as tall as father.
He is six feet, you know, Miss Lavendar.”
Yes, Miss Lavendar did know; the flush on her pretty cheeks deepened a
little; she took Paul’s hand on one side and Anne’s on the other and
walked to the house in silence.
“Is it a good day for the echoes, Miss Lavendar?” queried Paul
anxiously. The day of his first visit had been too windy for echoes and
Paul had been much disappointed.
“Yes, just the best kind of a day,” answered Miss Lavendar, rousing
herself from her reverie. “But first we are all going to have something
to eat. I know you two folks didn’t walk all the way back here through
those beechwoods without getting hungry, and Charlotta the Fourth and I
can eat any hour of the day . . . we have such obliging appetites. So
we’ll just make a raid on the pantry. Fortunately it’s lovely and full.
I had a presentiment that I was going to have company today and
Charlotta the Fourth and I prepared.”
“I think you are one of the people who always have nice things in their
pantry,” declared Paul. “Grandma’s like that too. But she doesn’t
approve of snacks between meals. I wonder,” he added meditatively, “if
I _ought_ to eat them away from home when I know she doesn’t approve.”
“Oh, I don’t think she would disapprove after you have had a long walk.
That makes a difference,” said Miss Lavendar, exchanging amused glances
with Anne over Paul’s brown curls. “I suppose that snacks _are_
extremely unwholesome. That is why we have them so often at Echo Lodge.
We. . . Charlotta the Fourth and I . . . live in defiance of every
known law of diet. We eat all sorts of indigestible things whenever we
happen to think of it, by day or night; and we flourish like green bay
trees. We are always intending to reform. When we read any article in a
paper warning us against something we like we cut it out and pin it up
on the kitchen wall so that we’ll remember it. But we never can somehow
. . . until after we’ve gone and eaten that very thing. Nothing has
ever killed us yet; but Charlotta the Fourth has been known to have bad
dreams after we had eaten doughnuts and mince pie and fruit cake before
we went to bed.”
“Grandma lets me have a glass of milk and a slice of bread and butter
before I go to bed; and on Sunday nights she puts jam on the bread,”
said Paul. “So I’m always glad when it’s Sunday night . . . for more
reasons than one. Sunday is a very long day on the shore road. Grandma
says it’s all too short for her and that father never found Sundays
tiresome when he was a little boy. It wouldn’t seem so long if I could
talk to my rock people but I never do that because Grandma doesn’t
approve of it on Sundays. I think a good deal; but I’m afraid my
thoughts are worldly. Grandma says we should never think anything but
religious thoughts on Sundays. But teacher here said once that every
really beautiful thought was religious, no matter what it was about, or
what day we thought it on. But I feel sure Grandma thinks that sermons
and Sunday School lessons are the only things you can think truly
religious thoughts about. And when it comes to a difference of opinion
between Grandma and teacher I don’t know what to do. In my heart” . . .
Paul laid his hand on his breast and raised very serious blue eyes to
Miss Lavendar’s immediately sympathetic face . . . “I agree with
teacher. But then, you see, Grandma has brought father up _her_ way and
made a brilliant success of him; and teacher has never brought anybody
up yet, though she’s helping with Davy and Dora. But you can’t tell how
they’ll turn out till they _are_ grown up. So sometimes I feel as if it
might be safer to go by Grandma’s opinions.”
“I think it would,” agreed Anne solemnly. “Anyway, I daresay that if
your Grandma and I both got down to what we really do mean, under our
different ways of expressing it, we’d find out we both meant much the
same thing. You’d better go by her way of expressing it, since it’s
been the result of experience. We’ll have to wait until we see how the
twins do turn out before we can be sure that my way is equally good.”
After lunch they went back to the garden, where Paul made the
acquaintance of the echoes, to his wonder and delight, while Anne and
Miss Lavendar sat on the stone bench under the poplar and talked.
“So you are going away in the fall?” said Miss Lavendar wistfully. “I
ought to be glad for your sake, Anne . . . but I’m horribly, selfishly
sorry. I shall miss you so much. Oh, sometimes, I think it is of no use
to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a
hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.”
“That sounds like something Miss Eliza Andrews might say but never Miss
Lavendar,” said Anne. “_Nothing_ is worse than emptiness . . . and I’m
not going out of your life. There are such things as letters and
vacations. Dearest, I’m afraid you’re looking a little pale and tired.”
“Oh . . . hoo . . . hoo . . . hoo,” went Paul on the dyke, where he had
been making noises diligently . . . not all of them melodious in the
making, but all coming back transmuted into the very gold and silver of
sound by the fairy alchemists over the river. Miss Lavendar made an
impatient movement with her pretty hands.
“I’m just tired of everything . . . even of the echoes. There is
nothing in my life but echoes . . . echoes of lost hopes and dreams and
joys. They’re beautiful and mocking. Oh Anne, it’s horrid of me to talk
like this when I have company. It’s just that I’m getting old and it
doesn’t agree with me. I know I’ll be fearfully cranky by the time I’m
sixty. But perhaps all I need is a course of blue pills.” At this
moment Charlotta the Fourth, who had disappeared after lunch, returned,
and announced that the northeast corner of Mr. John Kimball’s pasture
was red with early strawberries, and wouldn’t Miss Shirley like to go
and pick some.
“Early strawberries for tea!” exclaimed Miss Lavendar. “Oh, I’m not so
old as I thought . . . and I don’t need a single blue pill! Girls, when
you come back with your strawberries we’ll have tea out here under the
silver poplar. I’ll have it all ready for you with home-grown cream.”
Anne and Charlotta the Fourth accordingly betook themselves back to Mr.
Kimball’s pasture, a green remote place where the air was as soft as
velvet and fragrant as a bed of violets and golden as amber.
“Oh, isn’t it sweet and fresh back here?” breathed Anne. “I just feel
as if I were drinking in the sunshine.”
“Yes, ma’am, so do I. That’s just exactly how I feel too, ma’am,”
agreed Charlotta the Fourth, who would have said precisely the same
thing if Anne had remarked that she felt like a pelican of the
wilderness. Always after Anne had visited Echo Lodge Charlotta the
Fourth mounted to her little room over the kitchen and tried before her
looking glass to speak and look and move like Anne. Charlotta could
never flatter herself that she quite succeeded; but practice makes
perfect, as Charlotta had learned at school, and she fondly hoped that
in time she might catch the trick of that dainty uplift of chin, that
quick, starry outflashing of eyes, that fashion of walking as if you
were a bough swaying in the wind. It seemed so easy when you watched
Anne. Charlotta the Fourth admired Anne wholeheartedly. It was not that
she thought her so very handsome. Diana Barry’s beauty of crimson cheek
and black curls was much more to Charlotta the Fourth’s taste than
Anne’s moonshine charm of luminous gray eyes and the pale, everchanging
roses of her cheeks.
“But I’d rather look like you than be pretty,” she told Anne sincerely.
Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the
sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed. Public opinion
never agreed on Anne’s looks. People who had heard her called handsome
met her and were disappointed. People who had heard her called plain
saw her and wondered where other people’s eyes were. Anne herself would
never believe that she had any claim to beauty. When she looked in the
glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the
nose thereof. Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive,
ever-varying play of feeling that came and went over her features like
a rosy illuminating flame, or the charm of dream and laughter
alternating in her big eyes.
While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word
she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance
that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that
softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt
potentialities. Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that
they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility
surrounding her. . . the power of future development that was in her.
She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.
As they picked, Charlotta the Fourth confided to Anne her fears
regarding Miss Lavendar. The warm-hearted little handmaiden was
honestly worried over her adored mistress’ condition.
“Miss Lavendar isn’t well, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I’m sure she isn’t,
though she never complains. She hasn’t seemed like herself this long
while, ma’am . . . not since that day you and Paul were here together
before. I feel sure she caught cold that night, ma’am. After you and
him had gone she went out and walked in the garden for long after dark