Lucy Maud Montgomery

“ Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was the handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it. ”

“ Gilbert and Anne loitered a little behind the others, enjoying the calm, still beauty of the autumn afternoon under the pines of the park, on the road that climbed and twisted round the harbor shore.
“The silence here is like a prayer, isn’t it?” said Anne, her face upturned to the shining sky. “How I love the pines! They seem to strike their roots deep into the romance of all the ages. It is so comforting to creep away now and then for a good talk with them. I always feel so happy out here.” ”

“ The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.
That good night in the garden was for all time. Anne never saw Ruby in life again. The next night the A.V.I.S. gave a farewell party to Jane Andrews before her departure for the West. And, while light feet danced and bright eyes laughed and merry tongues chattered, there came a summons to a soul in Avonlea that might not be disregarded or evaded. ”

“ That old spare room has always seemed like a shrine to me. When I was a child I thought it the most wonderful apartment in the world. You remember what a consuming desire I had to sleep in a spare room bed—but not the Green Gables spare room. Oh, no, never there! It would have been too terrible—I couldn’t have slept a wink from awe. I never walked through that room when Marilla sent me in on an errand—no, indeed, I tiptoed through it and held my breath, as if I were in church, and felt relieved when I got out of it. ”

“ When the east wind blows I always think of sorrowful rain on the eaves and sad waves on a gray shore. When I get old I shall have rheumatism when the wind is east.”
“And isn’t it jolly when you discard furs and winter garments for the first time and sally forth, like this, in spring attire?” laughed Priscilla. “Don’t you feel as if you had been made over new?”
“Everything is new in the spring,” said Anne. “Springs themselves are always so new, too. No spring is ever just like any other spring. It always has something of its own to be its own peculiar sweetness. ”

“ Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different—something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. ”

“ But in her sight he was as beautiful as those who bring good tidings on the mountains. Never, as long as she lived, would Anne see Pacifique’s brown, round, black-eyed face without a warm remembrance of the moment when he had given to her the oil of joy for mourning.
Long after Pacifique’s gay whistle had faded into the phantom of music and then into silence far up under the maples of Lover’s Lane Anne stood under the willows, tasting the poignant sweetness of life when some great dread has been removed from it. The morning was a cup filled with mist and glamor. ”

“ For him there was to be no wasting in despair because a woman was fair and cold. Anne, as she listened to the ceaseless badinage that went on between him and Phil, wondered if she had only imagined that look in his eyes when she had told him she could never care for him.
There were not lacking those who would gladly have stepped into Gilbert’s vacant place. But Anne snubbed them without fear and without reproach. If the real Prince Charming was never to come she would have none of a substitute. So she sternly told herself that gray day in the windy park. ”

“ The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.
“I’d go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how,” declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green tips of the pines. “It’s all so wonderful here—this great, white stillness, and those dark trees that always seem to be thinking.”
“‘The woods were God’s first temples,’” quoted Anne softly. “One can’t help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place. I always feel so near Him when I walk among the pines.” ”

“ What is wrong?”
“Everything,” moaned Anne. “I feel as if I were disgraced forever. What do you think a mother would feel like if she found her child tattooed over with a baking powder advertisement? I feel just the same. I loved my poor little story, and I wrote it out of the best that was in me. And it is sacrilege to have it degraded to the level of a baking powder advertisement. Don’t you remember what Professor Hamilton used to tell us in the literature class at Queen’s? He said we were never to write a word for a low or unworthy motive, but always to cling to the very highest ideals. ”

“ Anne had always loved that brook. Many a dream had she spun over its sparkling water in days gone by. She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of “faëry lands forlorn,” where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart’s Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal. ”

“ Those big gray eyes of yours are brimming over with real friendship, Anne. Some day I’ll look the same way at you. You’re going to marry Roy, aren’t you, Anne?”
“My dear Philippa, did you ever hear of the famous Betty Baxter, who ‘refused a man before he’d axed her’? I am not going to emulate that celebrated lady by either refusing or accepting any one before he ‘axes’ me.”
“All Redmond knows that Roy is crazy about you,” said Phil candidly. “And you do love him, don’t you, Anne?” ”

“ I’ve rheumatism in my leg.”
“Only old people should have rheumatism, Aunty.”
“Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her legs, Anne. It’s only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though. Thank goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you might as well go and pick out your coffin.”
It was November—the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul. ”

“ Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.’ Isn’t that worth learning, Aunt Jimsie?”
“Yes, it is, dearie. When you’ve learned to laugh at the things that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn’t, you’ve got wisdom and understanding.”
“What have you got out of your Redmond course, Anne?” murmured Priscilla aside.
“I think,” said Anne slowly, “that I really have learned to look upon each little hindrance as a jest and each great one as the foreshadowing of victory. ”

“ Anne did not answer. At that moment she wished Phil were a thousand miles away.
“I suppose you’ve gone and refused Gilbert Blythe. You are an idiot, Anne Shirley!”
“Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry a man I don’t love?” said Anne coldly, goaded to reply.
“You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that. There, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever said in my life. ”

“ From out the gusty pine,’”
quoted Gilbert.
“They make our little ambitions seem rather petty, don’t they, Anne?”
“I think, if ever any great sorrow came to me, I would come to the pines for comfort,” said Anne dreamily.
“I hope no great sorrow ever will come to you, Anne,” said Gilbert, who could not connect the idea of sorrow with the vivid, joyous creature beside him, unwitting that those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths, and that the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply. ”

“ Aunt Jamesina was a tiny old woman with a little, softly-triangular face, and large, soft blue eyes that were alight with unquenchable youth, and as full of hopes as a girl’s. She had pink cheeks and snow-white hair which she wore in quaint little puffs over her ears.
“It’s a very old-fashioned way,” she said, knitting industriously at something as dainty and pink as a sunset cloud. “But I am old-fashioned. My clothes are, and it stands to reason my opinions are, too. I don’t say they’re any the better of that, mind you. In fact, I daresay they’re a good deal the worse. ”

“ There is a book of Revelation in every one’s life, as there is in the Bible. Anne read hers that bitter night, as she kept her agonized vigil through the hours of storm and darkness. She loved Gilbert—had always loved him! She knew that now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her. ”

“ I always wondered how Marilla dared houseclean that room. And now it’s not only cleaned but stripped bare. George Whitefield and the Duke have been relegated to the upstairs hall. ‘So passes the glory of this world,’” concluded Anne, with a laugh in which there was a little note of regret. It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.
“I’ll be so lonesome when you go,” moaned Diana for the hundredth time. “And to think you go next week!”
“But we’re together still,” said Anne cheerily. “We mustn’t let next week rob us of this week’s joy. ”

“ Roy despises me—and you despise me—and I despise myself.”
“You poor darling,” said Phil, melting. “Just come here and let me comfort you. I’ve no right to scold you. I’d have married Alec or Alonzo if I hadn’t met Jo. Oh, Anne, things are so mixed-up in real life. They aren’t clear-cut and trimmed off, as they are in novels.”
“I hope that no one will ever again ask me to marry him as long as I live,” sobbed poor Anne, devoutly believing that she meant it. ”

“ No mortal can ever see how fair she is. She is fleeter than a deer, and that mocking voice of hers is all we can know of her. You can hear her calling at night; you can hear her laughing under the stars. But you can never see her. She flies afar if you follow her, and laughs at you always just over the next hill.”
“Is that true, Anne? Or is it a whopper?” demanded Davy staring.
“Davy,” said Anne despairingly, “haven’t you sense enough to distinguish between a fairytale and a falsehood?” ”

“ “I wouldn’t give up altogether,” said Mr. Harrison reflectively. “I’d write a story once in a while, but I wouldn’t pester editors with it. I’d write of people and places like I knew, and I’d make my characters talk everyday English; and I’d let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I’d give them a chance, Anne—I’d give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you’d have to go a long piece to find them—though Mrs. Lynde believes we’re all bad. ”

“ Diana, pleased and embarrassed, got herself away, and poor Anne, after flinging the innocent check into her bureau drawer as if it were blood-money, cast herself on her bed and wept tears of shame and outraged sensibility. Oh, she could never live this down—never!
Gilbert arrived at dusk, brimming over with congratulations, for he had called at Orchard Slope and heard the news. But his congratulations died on his lips at sight of Anne’s face.
“Why, Anne, what is the matter? I expected to find you radiant over winning Rollings Reliable prize. Good for you!” ”

“ Anne devoted herself to English, Priscilla pored over classics, and Philippa pounded away at Mathematics. Sometimes they grew tired, sometimes they felt discouraged, sometimes nothing seemed worth the struggle for it. In one such mood Stella wandered up to the blue room one rainy November evening. Anne sat on the floor in a little circle of light cast by the lamp beside her, amid a surrounding snow of crumpled manuscript. ”

“ Sometimes I feel as if being grown-up just frightened me—and then I would give anything to be a little girl again.”
“I suppose we’ll get used to being grown-up in time,” said Anne cheerfully. “There won’t be so many unexpected things about it by and by—though, after all, I fancy it’s the unexpected things that give spice to life. We’re eighteen, Diana. In two more years we’ll be twenty. When I was ten I thought twenty was a green old age. In no time you’ll be a staid, middle-aged matron, and I shall be nice, old maid Aunt Anne, coming to visit you on vacations. ”

“ Stella always vowed she never could write anything unless she threw each sheet down as she completed it. Anne, in her flannel blouse and serge skirt, with her hair rather blown from her windy walk home, was sitting squarely in the middle of the floor, teasing the Sarah-cat with a wishbone. Joseph and Rusty were both curled up in her lap. A warm plummy odor filled the whole house, for Priscilla was cooking in the kitchen. ”