Anne of Avonlea
both sides. I don’t believe in whipping children _much_. I think, as
you say, Anne, that there are better ways of managing as a rule, and
that corporal punishment should be a last resort. But on the other
hand, as Jane says, I believe there is an occasional child who can’t be
influenced in any other way and who, in short, needs a whipping and
would be improved by it. Corporal punishment as a last resort is to be
my rule.”
Gilbert, having tried to please both sides, succeeded, as is usual and
eminently right, in pleasing neither. Jane tossed her head.
“I’ll whip my pupils when they’re naughty. It’s the shortest and
easiest way of convincing them.”
Anne gave Gilbert a disappointed glance.
“I shall never whip a child,” she repeated firmly. “I feel sure it
isn’t either right or necessary.”
“Suppose a boy sauced you back when you told him to do something?” said
Jane.
“I’d keep him in after school and talk kindly and firmly to him,” said
Anne. “There is some good in every person if you can find it. It is a
teacher’s duty to find and develop it. That is what our School
Management professor at Queen’s told us, you know. Do you suppose you
could find any good in a child by whipping him? It’s far more important
to influence the children aright than it is even to teach them the
three R’s, Professor Rennie says.”
“But the Inspector examines them in the three R’s, mind you, and he
won’t give you a good report if they don’t come up to his standard,”
protested Jane.
“I’d rather have my pupils love me and look back to me in after years
as a real helper than be on the roll of honor,” asserted Anne
decidedly.
“Wouldn’t you punish children at all, when they misbehaved?” asked
Gilbert.
“Oh, yes, I suppose I shall have to, although I know I’ll hate to do
it. But you can keep them in at recess or stand them on the floor or
give them lines to write.”
“I suppose you won’t punish the girls by making them sit with the
boys?” said Jane slyly.
Gilbert and Anne looked at each other and smiled rather foolishly. Once
upon a time, Anne had been made to sit with Gilbert for punishment and
sad and bitter had been the consequences thereof.
“Well, time will tell which is the best way,” said Jane philosophically
as they parted.
Anne went back to Green Gables by way of Birch Path, shadowy, rustling,
fern-scented, through Violet Vale and past Willowmere, where dark and
light kissed each other under the firs, and down through Lover’s Lane .
. . spots she and Diana had so named long ago. She walked slowly,
enjoying the sweetness of wood and field and the starry summer
twilight, and thinking soberly about the new duties she was to take up
on the morrow. When she reached the yard at Green Gables Mrs. Lynde’s
loud, decided tones floated out through the open kitchen window.
“Mrs. Lynde has come up to give me good advice about tomorrow,” thought
Anne with a grimace, “but I don’t believe I’ll go in. Her advice is
much like pepper, I think . . . excellent in small quantities but
rather scorching in her doses. I’ll run over and have a chat with Mr.
Harrison instead.”
This was not the first time Anne had run over and chatted with Mr.
Harrison since the notable affair of the Jersey cow. She had been there
several evenings and Mr. Harrison and she were very good friends,
although there were times and seasons when Anne found the outspokenness
on which he prided himself rather trying. Ginger still continued to
regard her with suspicion, and never failed to greet her sarcastically
as “redheaded snippet.” Mr. Harrison had tried vainly to break him of
the habit by jumping excitedly up whenever he saw Anne coming and
exclaiming,
“Bless my soul, here’s that pretty little girl again,” or something
equally flattering. But Ginger saw through the scheme and scorned it.
Anne was never to know how many compliments Mr. Harrison paid her
behind her back. He certainly never paid her any to her face.
“Well, I suppose you’ve been back in the woods laying in a supply of
switches for tomorrow?” was his greeting as Anne came up the veranda
steps.
“No, indeed,” said Anne indignantly. She was an excellent target for
teasing because she always took things so seriously. “I shall never
have a switch in my school, Mr. Harrison. Of course, I shall have to
have a pointer, but I shall use it for pointing _only_.”
“So you mean to strap them instead? Well, I don’t know but you’re
right. A switch stings more at the time but the strap smarts longer,
that’s a fact.”
“I shall not use anything of the sort. I’m not going to whip my
pupils.”
“Bless my soul,” exclaimed Mr. Harrison in genuine astonishment, “how
do you lay out to keep order then?”
“I shall govern by affection, Mr. Harrison.”
“It won’t do,” said Mr. Harrison, “won’t do at all, Anne. ‘Spare the
rod and spoil the child.’ When I went to school the master whipped me
regular every day because he said if I wasn’t in mischief just then I
was plotting it.”
“Methods have changed since your schooldays, Mr. Harrison.”
“But human nature hasn’t. Mark my words, you’ll never manage the young
fry unless you keep a rod in pickle for them. The thing is impossible.”
“Well, I’m going to try my way first,” said Anne, who had a fairly
strong will of her own and was apt to cling very tenaciously to her
theories.
“You’re pretty stubborn, I reckon,” was Mr. Harrison’s way of putting
it. “Well, well, we’ll see. Someday when you get riled up . . . and
people with hair like yours are desperate apt to get riled . . . you’ll
forget all your pretty little notions and give some of them a whaling.
You’re too young to be teaching anyhow . . . far too young and
childish.”
Altogether, Anne went to bed that night in a rather pessimistic mood.
She slept poorly and was so pale and tragic at breakfast next morning
that Marilla was alarmed and insisted on making her take a cup of
scorching ginger tea. Anne sipped it patiently, although she could not
imagine what good ginger tea would do. Had it been some magic brew,
potent to confer age and experience, Anne would have swallowed a quart
of it without flinching.
“Marilla, what if I fail!”
“You’ll hardly fail completely in one day and there’s plenty more days
coming,” said Marilla. “The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’ll
expect to teach those children everything and reform all their faults
right off, and if you can’t you’ll think you’ve failed.”
V
A Full-fledged Schoolma’am
When Anne reached the school that morning . . . for the first time in
her life she had traversed the Birch Path deaf and blind to its
beauties . . . all was quiet and still. The preceding teacher had
trained the children to be in their places at her arrival, and when
Anne entered the schoolroom she was confronted by prim rows of “shining
morning faces” and bright, inquisitive eyes. She hung up her hat and
faced her pupils, hoping that she did not look as frightened and
foolish as she felt and that they would not perceive how she was
trembling.
She had sat up until nearly twelve the preceding night composing a
speech she meant to make to her pupils upon opening the school. She had
revised and improved it painstakingly, and then she had learned it off
by heart. It was a very good speech and had some very fine ideas in it,
especially about mutual help and earnest striving after knowledge. The
only trouble was that she could not now remember a word of it.
After what seemed to her a year . . . about ten seconds in reality . .
. she said faintly, “Take your Testaments, please,” and sank
breathlessly into her chair under cover of the rustle and clatter of
desk lids that followed. While the children read their verses Anne
marshalled her shaky wits into order and looked over the array of
little pilgrims to the Grownup Land.
Most of them were, of course, quite well known to her. Her own
classmates had passed out in the preceding year but the rest had all
gone to school with her, excepting the primer class and ten newcomers
to Avonlea. Anne secretly felt more interest in these ten than in those
whose possibilities were already fairly well mapped out to her. To be
sure, they might be just as commonplace as the rest; but on the other
hand there _might_ be a genius among them. It was a thrilling idea.
Sitting by himself at a corner desk was Anthony Pye. He had a dark,
sullen little face, and was staring at Anne with a hostile expression
in his black eyes. Anne instantly made up her mind that she would win
that boy’s affection and discomfit the Pyes utterly.
In the other corner another strange boy was sitting with Arty Sloane. .
. a jolly looking little chap, with a snub nose, freckled face, and
big, light blue eyes, fringed with whitish lashes . . . probably the
Don_nell_ boy; and if resemblance went for anything, his sister was
sitting across the aisle with Mary Bell. Anne wondered what sort of
mother the child had, to send her to school dressed as she was. She
wore a faded pink silk dress, trimmed with a great deal of cotton lace,
soiled white kid slippers, and silk stockings. Her sandy hair was
tortured into innumerable kinky and unnatural curls, surmounted by a
flamboyant bow of pink ribbon bigger than her head. Judging from her
expression she was very well satisfied with herself.
A pale little thing, with smooth ripples of fine, silky, fawn-colored
hair flowing over her shoulders, must, Anne thought, be Annetta Bell,
whose parents had formerly lived in the Newbridge school district, but,
by reason of hauling their house fifty yards north of its old site were
now in Avonlea. Three pallid little girls crowded into one seat were
certainly Cottons; and there was no doubt that the small beauty with
the long brown curls and hazel eyes, who was casting coquettish looks
at Jack Gills over the edge of her Testament, was Prillie Rogerson,
whose father had recently married a second wife and brought Prillie
home from her grandmother’s in Grafton. A tall, awkward girl in a back
seat, who seemed to have too many feet and hands, Anne could not place
at all, but later on discovered that her name was Barbara Shaw and that
she had come to live with an Avonlea aunt. She was also to find that if
Barbara ever managed to walk down the aisle without falling over her
own or somebody else’s feet the Avonlea scholars wrote the unusual fact
up on the porch wall to commemorate it.
But when Anne’s eyes met those of the boy at the front desk facing her
own, a queer little thrill went over her, as if she had found her
genius. She knew this must be Paul Irving and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde
had been right for once when she prophesied that he would be unlike the
Avonlea children. More than that, Anne realized that he was unlike
other children anywhere, and that there was a soul subtly akin to her
own gazing at her out of the very dark blue eyes that were watching her
so intently.
She knew Paul was ten but he looked no more than eight. He had the most
beautiful little face she had ever seen in a child . . . features of
exquisite delicacy and refinement, framed in a halo of chestnut curls.
His mouth was delicious, being full without pouting, the crimson lips
just softly touching and curving into finely finished little corners
that narrowly escaped being dimpled. He had a sober, grave, meditative
expression, as if his spirit was much older than his body; but when
Anne smiled softly at him it vanished in a sudden answering smile,
which seemed an illumination of his whole being, as if some lamp had
suddenly kindled into flame inside of him, irradiating him from top to
toe. Best of all, it was involuntary, born of no external effort or
motive, but simply the outflashing of a hidden personality, rare and
fine and sweet. With a quick interchange of smiles Anne and Paul were