Lucy Maud Montgomery

“ To me, the strangest of all the strange things since 1914 is how we have all learned to accept things we never thought we could—to go on with life as a matter of course. I know that Jem and Jerry are in the trenches—that Ken and Walter will be soon—that if one of them does not come back my heart will break—yet I go on and work and plan—yes, and even enjoy life by times. There are moments when we have real fun because, just for the moment, we don’t think about things and then—we remember—and the remembering is worse than thinking of it all the time would have been. ”

“ Rilla! Look at those old hills around us—the hills we looked up at as children, wondering what lay for us in the great world beyond them. How calm and strong they are—how patient and changeless—like the heart of a good woman. Rilla-my-Rilla, do you know what you have been to me the past year? I want to tell you before I go. I could not have lived through it if it had not been for you, little loving, believing heart.”
Rilla dared not try to speak. She slipped her hand into Walter’s and pressed it hard. ”

“ The best of the evening was over for Rilla, too. Ever since Jack Elliott’s announcement she had sensed that Kenneth was no longer thinking about her. She felt suddenly lonely and unhappy. It was worse than if he had never noticed her at all. Was life like this—something delightful happening and then, just as you were revelling in it, slipping away from you? Rilla told herself pathetically that she felt years older than when she had left home that evening. Perhaps she did—perhaps she was. Who knows? It does not do to laugh at the pangs of youth. ”

“ Everything that reminded her of Jem was beginning to give intolerable pain. Walter's death had inflicted on her heart a terrible wound. But it had been a clean wound and had healed slowly, as such wounds do, though the scar must remain forever. But the torture of Jem’s disappearance was another thing: there was a poison in it that kept it from healing. The alternations of hope and despair, the endless watching each day for the letter that never came—that might never come—the newspaper tales of ill-usage of prisoners—the bitter wonder as to Jem’s wound—all were increasingly hard to bear. ”

“ Nobody wants any dinner, Susan,” said Mrs. Blythe wildly. “Oh, this thing is unbelievable—it must be a nightmare.”
“Paris is lost—France is lost—the war is lost,” gasped Rilla, amid the utter ruins of hope and confidence and belief.
“Oh God—oh God,’ moaned Gertrude Oliver, walking about the room and wringing her hands. “Oh—God!”
Nothing else—no other words—nothing but that age-old plea—the old, old cry of supreme agony and appeal, from the human heart whose every human staff has failed it. ”

“ No one at Ingleside ever got up in the morning without a sudden piercing wonder over what the day might bring.
“And I used to welcome the mornings so,” thought Rilla.
Yet the round of life and duty went steadily on and every week or so some one else went into khaki from the Glen lads who had just the other day been rollicking schoolboys.
“It is bitter cold out tonight, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan, coming in out of the clear starlit crispness of the Canadian winter twilight. “I wonder if the boys in the trenches are warm.”
“How everything comes back to this war,” cried Gertrude Oliver. ”

“ Joe took his pale little bride in his arms and she lifted her face to his. Rilla choked suddenly. It did not matter that Miranda was insignificant and common-place and flat-featured. It did not matter that she was the daughter of Whiskers-on-the-moon. All that mattered was that rapt, sacrificial look in her eyes—that ever-burning, sacred fire of devotion and loyalty and fine courage that she was mutely promising Joe she and thousands of other women would keep alive at home while their men held the western front. ”

“ There’s bound to be one dunce in every family. I’m quite willing to be a dunce if I can be a pretty, popular, delightful one. I can’t be clever. I have no talent at all, and you can’t imagine how comfortable it is. Nobody expects me to do anything so I’m never pestered to do it. And I can’t be a housewifely, cookly creature, either. I hate sewing and dusting, and when Susan couldn’t teach me to make biscuits nobody could. Father says I toil not neither do I spin. Therefore, I must be a lily of the field,” concluded Rilla, with another laugh. ”

“ Walter looked at her and had one of his odd visitations of prophecy.
“Before this war is over,” he said—or something said through his lips—“every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it—you, Mary, will feel it—feel it to your heart’s core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come—and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over—years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.” ”

“ Always home has seemed so far away,—so hopelessly far away from this hideous welter of filth and blood. But tonight it is quite close to me—it seems to me I can almost see you—hear you speak. And I can see the moonlight shining white and still on the old hills of home. It has seemed to me ever since I came here that it was impossible that there could be calm gentle nights and unshattered moonlight anywhere in the world. But tonight somehow, all the beautiful things I have always loved seem to have become possible again—and this is good, and makes me feel a deep, certain, exquisite happiness. ”

“ At least,” said poor Susan, forcing a grim smile in a desperate effort to recover lost standing, “at least flying is a clean job. He will not get so dirty and messed up as he would in the trenches, and that is well for he has always been a tidy child.”
So Shirley went—not radiantly, as to a high adventure, like Jem, not in a white flame of sacrifice, like Walter, but in a cool, business-like mood, as of one doing something, rather dirty and disagreeable, that had just got to be done. He kissed Susan for the first time since he was five years old, and said “ Good-bye, Susan,—mother Susan.” ”

“ It is November—and the Glen is all grey and brown, except where the Lombardy poplars stand up here and there like great golden torches in the sombre landscape, although every other tree has shed its leaves. It has been very hard to keep our courage alight of late. The Caporetto disaster is a dreadful thing and not even Susan can extract much consolation out of the present state of affairs. The rest of us don’t try. Gertrude keeps saying desperately, ‘They must not get Venice—they must not get Venice,’ as if by saying it often enough she can prevent them. ”

“ Pryor, running as stout, pompous Mr. Pryor had not run for years, with terror imprinted on every lineament,—a terror quite justifiable, for behind him, like an avenging fate, came Susan, with a huge, smoking iron pot grasped in her hands, and an expression in her eye that boded ill to the object of her indignation, if she should overtake him. Pursuer and pursued tore across the lawn. Mr. Pryor reached the gate a few feet ahead of Susan, wrenched it open, and fled down the road, without a glance at the transfixed lady of Ingleside. ”

“ Blythe does not approve of little girls dressing like grown-up ones,” said Susan stiffly, intending merely a snub to Cousin Sophia. But Rilla felt insulted. A little girl indeed! She whisked out of the kitchen in high dudgeon. Another time she wouldn’t go down to show herself off to Susan—Susan, who thought nobody was grown up until she was sixty! And that horrid Cousin Sophia with her digs about freckles and legs! What business had an old—an old beanpole like that to talk of anybody else being long and thin? Rilla felt all her pleasure in herself and her evening clouded and spoiled. ”

“ What was it mother had said, looking, with her white lips and stricken eyes, as Rilla had never seen her mother look before,
“‘When our women fail in courage,
Shall our men be fearless still?’”
Yes, that was it. She must be brave—like mother—and Nan—and Faith—Faith, who had cried with flashing eyes, “Oh, if I were only a man, to go too!” Only, when her eyes ached and her throat burned like this she had to hide herself in Rainbow Valley for a little, just to think things out and remember that she wasn’t a child any longer—she was grown-up and women had to face things like this. ”

“ Now the Germans were again at the Marne, pressing nearer and nearer Paris; now rumours were coming of another Austrian offensive against the Piave line. Rilla turned away from the new star, sick at heart. It was one of the moments when hope and courage failed her utterly,—when it seemed impossible to go on even one more day. If only they knew what had happened to Jem—you can face anything you know. But a beleaguerement of fear and doubt and suspense is a hard thing for the morale. Surely, if Jem were alive, some word would have come through. He must be dead. ”

“ Jem and Faith moved on out of hearing. Gertrude Oliver suddenly shivered. Rilla pressed her arm sympathetically.
“Wasn't it dreadful, Miss Oliver? I don’t wonder it made you shiver. I don’t know why Jem tells such gruesome things at a time like this when we're all out for fun.”
“Do you think it dreadful, Rilla? I thought it wonderful—beautiful. Such a story makes one ashamed of ever doubting human nature. That man’s action was god-like. And how humanity responds to the ideal of self-sacrifice! As for my shiver, I don’t know what caused it. The evening is certainly warm enough. ”

“ I am like old Mr. William Pollock of the Harbour Head. He is very old and has been ill for a long time, and one night last week he was so low that his daughter-in-law whispered to some one that she thought he was dead. ‘Darn it, I ain’t,’ he called right out—only, Miss Oliver, dear, he did not use so mild a word as ‘darn’—‘darn it, I ain’t, and I don’t mean to die until the Kaiser is well licked.’ Now, that, Miss Oliver, dear,” concluded Susan, “is the kind of spirit I admire.” ”

“ After being fed for four years on horrors and fears, terrible reverses, amazing victories, won't anything less be tame and uninteresting? How strange—and blessed—and dull it will be not to dread the coming of the mail every day.”
“We must dread it for a little while yet, I suppose,” said Rilla, “Peace won’t come—can’t come—for some weeks yet. And in those weeks dreadful things may happen. My excitement is over. We have won the victory—but oh, what a price we have paid!” ”

“ Rilla repressed tear and sigh, but she could not repress a little shiver, and Walter knew that he had said enough. After a moment of silence, in which each made an unworded promise to each other, he said,
“Now we won’t be sober any more. We'll look beyond the years—to the time when the war will be over and Jem and Jerry and I will come marching home and we'll all be happy again.”
“We won’t be—happy—in the same way,” said Rilla.
“No, not in the same way. Nobody whom this war has touched will ever be happy again in quite the same way. ”

“ I shall never be afraid of anything again—not of death—nor of life, if, after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face,—for it could never be beautiful for me again. There would always be such horrible things to remember—things that would make life ugly and painful always for me. I could never forget them. But whether it’s life or death, I’m not afraid, Rilla-my-Rilla, and I am not sorry that I came. ”

“ All my life I’ve liked going to bed, to have a gay, mad, splendid half hour of imagining things before sleeping. Now I imagine them still. But such different things.”
“I am rather glad when the time comes to go to bed,” said Miss Oliver. “I like the darkness because I can be myself in it—I needn't smile or talk bravely. But sometimes my imagination gets out of hand, too, and I see what you do—terrible things—terrible years to come.”
“Tam very thankful that I never had any imagination to speak of,” said Susan. ”

“ But what is to prevent them from getting Venice I cannot see. Yet, as Susan fails not to point out, there was seemingly nothing to prevent them from getting to Paris in 1914, yet they did not get it, and she affirms they shall not get Venice either. Oh, how I hope and pray they will not—Venice the beautiful Queen of the Adriatic. Although I’ve never seen it I feel about it just as Byron did—I’ve always loved it—it has always been to me ‘a fairy city of the heart.’ Perhaps I caught my love of it from Walter, who worshipped it. It was always one of his dreams to see Venice. ”

“ Una took the letter and when Rilla had gone she pressed it against her lonely lips. Una knew that love would never come into her life now—it was buried for ever under the blood-stained soil “Somewhere in France.” No one but herself—and perhaps Rilla—knew it—would ever know it. She had no right in the eyes of her world to grieve. She must hide and bear her long pain as best she could—alone. ”

“ Susan Has a Proposal of Marriage AN aeroplane was flying over Glen St. Mary, like a great bird poised against the western sky,—a sky so clear and of such a pale, silvery yellow, that it gave an impression of a vast, wind-freshened space of freedom. The little group on the Ingleside lawn looked up at it with fascinated eyes, although it was by no means an unusual thing to see an occasional hovering plane that summer. Susan was always intensely excited. ”

“ In the big living room at Ingleside Susan Baker sat down with a certain grim satisfaction hovering about her like an aura; it was four o’clock and Susan, who had been working incessantly since six that morning, felt that she had fairly earned an hour of repose and gossip. Susan just then was perfectly happy; everything had gone almost uncannily well in the kitchen that day. Dr. Jekyll had not been Mr. Hyde and so had not grated on her nerves; from where she sat she could see the pride of her heart—the bed of peonies of her own planting and culture, blooming as no other peony plot in Glen St. ”

“ Dew of Morning OUTSIDE, the Ingleside lawn was full of golden pools of sunshine and plots of alluring shadows. Rilla Blythe was swinging in the hammock under the big Scotch pine, Gertrude Oliver sat at its roots beside her, and Walter was stretched at full length on the grass, lost in a romance of chivalry wherein old heroes and beauties of dead and gone centuries lived vividly again for him. ”