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The following week sped swiftly, crowded with innumerable “last things,” as Anne called them. Good-bye calls had to be made and received, being pleasant or otherwise, according to whether callers and called-upon were heartily in sympathy with Anne’s hopes, or thought she was too much puffed-up over going to college and that it was their duty to “take her down a peg or two.”
The A.V.I.S. gave a farewell party in honor of Anne and Gilbert one evening at the home of Josie Pye, choosing that place, partly because Mr. Pye’s house was large and convenient, partly because it was strongly suspected that the Pye girls would have nothing to do with the affair if their offer of the house for the party was not accepted. It was a very pleasant little time, for the Pye girls were gracious, and said and did nothing to mar the harmony of the occasion—which was not according to their wont. Josie was unusually amiable—so much so that she even remarked condescendingly to Anne,
“Your new dress is rather becoming to you, Anne. Really, you look ALMOST PRETTY in it.”
“How kind of you to say so,” responded Anne, with dancing eyes. Her sense of humor was developing, and the speeches that would have hurt her at fourteen were becoming merely food for amusement now. Josie suspected that Anne was laughing at her behind those wicked eyes; but she contented herself with whispering to Gertie, as they went downstairs, that Anne Shirley would put on more airs than ever now that she was going to college—you’d see!
All the “old crowd” was there, full of mirth and zest and youthful lightheartedness. Diana Barry, rosy and dimpled, shadowed by the faithful Fred; Jane Andrews, neat and sensible and plain; Ruby Gillis, looking her handsomest and brightest in a cream silk blouse, with red geraniums in her golden hair; Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane, both trying to keep as near the elusive Anne as possible; Carrie Sloane, looking pale and melancholy because, so it was reported, her father would not allow Oliver Kimball to come near the place; Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, whose round face and objectionable ears were as round and objectionable as ever; and Billy Andrews, who sat in a corner all the evening, chuckled when any one spoke to him, and watched Anne Shirley with a grin of pleasure on his broad, freckled countenance.
Anne had known beforehand of the party, but she had not known that she and Gilbert were, as the founders of the Society, to be presented with a very complimentary “address” and “tokens of respect”—in her case a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, in Gilbert’s a fountain pen. She was so taken by surprise and pleased by the nice things said in the address, read in Moody Spurgeon’s most solemn and ministerial tones, that the tears quite drowned the sparkle of her big gray eyes. She had worked hard and faithfully for the A.V.I.S., and it warmed the cockles of her heart that the members appreciated her efforts so sincerely. And they were all so nice and friendly and jolly—even the Pye girls had their merits; at that moment Anne loved all the world.
She enjoyed the evening tremendously, but the end of it rather spoiled all. Gilbert again made the mistake of saying something sentimental to her as they ate their supper on the moonlit verandah; and Anne, to punish him, was gracious to Charlie Sloane and allowed the latter to walk home with her. She found, however, that revenge hurts nobody quite so much as the one who tries to inflict it. Gilbert walked airily off with Ruby Gillis, and Anne could hear them laughing and talking gaily as they loitered along in the still, crisp autumn air. They were evidently having the best of good times, while she was horribly bored by Charlie Sloane, who talked unbrokenly on, and never, even by accident, said one thing that was worth listening to. Anne gave an occasional absent “yes” or “no,” and thought how beautiful Ruby had looked that night, how very goggly Charlie’s eyes were in the moonlight—worse even than by daylight—and that the world, somehow, wasn’t quite such a nice place as she had believed it to be earlier in the evening.
“I’m just tired out—that is what is the matter with me,” she said, when she thankfully found herself alone in her own room. And she honestly believed it was. But a certain little gush of joy, as from some secret, unknown spring, bubbled up in her heart the next evening, when she saw Gilbert striding down through the Haunted Wood and crossing the old log bridge with that firm, quick step of his. So Gilbert was not going to spend this last evening with Ruby Gillis after all!
“You look tired, Anne,” he said.
“I am tired, and, worse than that, I’m disgruntled. I’m tired because I’ve been packing my trunk and sewing all day. But I’m disgruntled because six women have been here to say good-bye to me, and every one of the six managed to say something that seemed to take the color right out of life and leave it as gray and dismal and cheerless as a November morning.”
“Spiteful old cats!” was Gilbert’s elegant comment.
“Oh, no, they weren’t,” said Anne seriously. “That is just the trouble. If they had been spiteful cats I wouldn’t have minded them. But they are all nice, kind, motherly souls, who like me and whom I like, and that is why what they said, or hinted, had such undue weight with me. They let me see they thought I was crazy going to Redmond and trying to take a B.A., and ever since I’ve been wondering if I am. Mrs. Peter Sloane sighed and said she hoped my strength would hold out till I got through; and at once I saw myself a hopeless victim of nervous prostration at the end of my third year; Mrs. Eben Wright said it must cost an awful lot to put in four years at Redmond; and I felt all over me that it was unpardonable of me to squander Marilla’s money and my own on such a folly. Mrs. Jasper Bell said she hoped I wouldn’t let college spoil me, as it did some people; and I felt in my bones that the end of my four Redmond years would see me a most insufferable creature, thinking I knew it all, and looking down on everything and everybody in Avonlea; Mrs. Elisha Wright said she understood that Redmond girls, especially those who belonged to Kingsport, were ‘dreadful dressy and stuck-up,’ and she guessed I wouldn’t feel much at home among them; and I saw myself, a snubbed, dowdy, humiliated country girl, shuffling through Redmond’s classic halls in coppertoned boots.”
Anne ended with a laugh and a sigh commingled. With her sensitive nature all disapproval had weight, even the disapproval of those for whose opinions she had scant respect. For the time being life was savorless, and ambition had gone out like a snuffed candle.
“You surely don’t care for what they said,” protested Gilbert. “You know exactly how narrow their outlook on life is, excellent creatures though they are. To do anything THEY have never done is anathema maranatha. You are the first Avonlea girl who has ever gone to college; and you know that all pioneers are considered to be afflicted with moonstruck madness.”
“Oh, I know. But FEELING is so different from KNOWING. My common sense tells me all you can say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul. Really, after Mrs. Elisha went away I hardly had the heart to finish packing.”
“You’re just tired, Anne. Come, forget it all and take a walk with me—a ramble back through the woods beyond the marsh. There should be something there I want to show you.”
“Should be! Don’t you know if it is there?”
“No. I only know it should be, from something I saw there in spring. Come on. We’ll pretend we are two children again and we’ll go the way of the wind.”
They started gaily off. Anne, remembering the unpleasantness of the preceding evening, was very nice to Gilbert; and Gilbert, who was learning wisdom, took care to be nothing save the schoolboy comrade again. Mrs. Lynde and Marilla watched them from the kitchen window.
“That’ll be a match some day,” Mrs. Lynde said approvingly.
Marilla winced slightly. In her heart she hoped it would, but it went against her grain to hear the matter spoken of in Mrs. Lynde’s gossipy matter-of-fact way.
“They’re only children yet,” she said shortly.
Mrs. Lynde laughed good-naturedly.
“Anne is eighteen; I was married when I was that age. We old folks, Marilla, are too much given to thinking children never grow up, that’s what. Anne is a young woman and Gilbert’s a man, and he worships the ground she walks on, as any one can see. He’s a fine fellow, and Anne can’t do better. I hope she won’t get any romantic nonsense into her head at Redmond. I don’t approve of them coeducational places and never did, that’s what. I don’t believe,” concluded Mrs. Lynde solemnly, “that the students at such colleges ever do much else than flirt.”
“They must study a little,” said Marilla, with a smile.
“Precious little,” sniffed Mrs. Rachel. “However, I think Anne will. She never was flirtatious. But she doesn’t appreciate Gilbert at his full value, that’s what. Oh, I know girls! Charlie Sloane is wild about her, too, but I’d never advise her to marry a Sloane. The Sloanes are good, honest, respectable people, of course. But when all’s said and done, they’re SLOANES.”
Marilla nodded. To an outsider, the statement that Sloanes were Sloanes might not be very illuminating, but she understood. Every village has such a family; good, honest, respectable people they may be, but SLOANES they are and must ever remain, though they speak with the tongues of men and angels.
Gilbert and Anne, happily unconscious that their future was thus being settled by Mrs. Rachel, were sauntering through the shadows of the Haunted Wood. Beyond, the harvest hills were basking in an amber sunset radiance, under a pale, aerial sky of rose and blue. The distant spruce groves were burnished bronze, and their long shadows barred the upland meadows. But around them a little wind sang among the fir tassels, and in it there was the note of autumn.
“This wood really is haunted now—by old memories,” said Anne, stooping to gather a spray of ferns, bleached to waxen whiteness by frost. “It seems to me that the little girls Diana and I used to be play here still, and sit by the Dryad’s Bubble in the twilights, trysting with the ghosts. Do you know, I can never go up this path in the dusk without feeling a bit of the old fright and shiver? There was one especially horrifying phantom which we created—the ghost of the murdered child that crept up behind you and laid cold fingers on yours. I confess that, to this day, I cannot help fancying its little, furtive footsteps behind me when I come here after nightfall. I’m not afraid of the White Lady or the headless man or the skeletons, but I wish I had never imagined that baby’s ghost into existence. How angry Marilla and Mrs. Barry were over that affair,” concluded Anne, with reminiscent laughter.
The woods around the head of the marsh were full of purple vistas, threaded with gossamers. Past a dour plantation of gnarled spruces and a maple-fringed, sun-warm valley they found the “something” Gilbert was looking for.
“Ah, here it is,” he said with satisfaction.
“An apple tree—and away back here!” exclaimed Anne delightedly.
“Yes, a veritable apple-bearing apple tree, too, here in the very midst of pines and beeches, a mile away from any orchard. I was here one day last spring and found it, all white with blossom. So I resolved I’d come again in the fall and see if it had been apples. See, it’s loaded. They look good, too—tawny as russets but with a dusky red cheek. Most wild seedlings are green and uninviting.”
“I suppose it sprang years ago from some chance-sown seed,” said Anne dreamily. “And how it has grown and flourished and held its own here all alone among aliens, the brave determined thing!”
“Here’s a fallen tree with a cushion of moss. Sit down, Anne—it will serve for a woodland throne. I’ll climb for some apples. They all grow high—the tree had to reach up to the sunlight.”
The apples proved to be delicious. Under the tawny skin was a white, white flesh, faintly veined with red; and, besides their own proper apple taste, they had a certain wild, delightful tang no orchard-grown apple ever possessed.
“The fatal apple of Eden couldn’t have had a rarer flavor,” commented Anne. “But it’s time we were going home. See, it was twilight three minutes ago and now it’s moonlight. What a pity we couldn’t have caught the moment of transformation. But such moments never are caught, I suppose.”
“Let’s go back around the marsh and home by way of Lover’s Lane. Do you feel as disgruntled now as when you started out, Anne?”
“Not I. Those apples have been as manna to a hungry soul. I feel that I shall love Redmond and have a splendid four years there.”
“And after those four years—what?”
“Oh, there’s another bend in the road at their end,” answered Anne lightly. “I’ve no idea what may be around it—I don’t want to have. It’s nicer not to know.”
Lover’s Lane was a dear place that night, still and mysteriously dim in the pale radiance of the moonlight. They loitered through it in a pleasant chummy silence, neither caring to talk.
“If Gilbert were always as he has been this evening how nice and simple everything would be,” reflected Anne.
Gilbert was looking at Anne, as she walked along. In her light dress, with her slender delicacy, she made him think of a white iris.
“I wonder if I can ever make her care for me,” he thought, with a pang of self-distrust.