A NEW INTEREST IN LIFE
The next afternoon Anne, bending over her patchwork at the kitchen
window, happened to glance out and beheld Diana down by the Dryad’s
Bubble beckoning mysteriously. In a trice Anne was out of the house and
flying down to the hollow, astonishment and hope struggling in her
expressive eyes. But the hope faded when she saw Diana’s dejected
countenance.
“Your mother hasn’t relented?” she gasped.
Diana shook her head mournfully.
“No; and oh, Anne, she says I’m never to play with you again. I’ve
cried and cried and I told her it wasn’t your fault, but it wasn’t any
use. I had ever such a time coaxing her to let me come down and say
good-bye to you. She said I was only to stay ten minutes and she’s
timing me by the clock.”
“Ten minutes isn’t very long to say an eternal farewell in,” said Anne
tearfully. “Oh, Diana, will you promise faithfully never to forget me,
the friend of your youth, no matter what dearer friends may caress
thee?”
“Indeed I will,” sobbed Diana, “and I’ll never have another bosom
friend—I don’t want to have. I couldn’t love anybody as I love you.”
“Oh, Diana,” cried Anne, clasping her hands, “do you _love_ me?”
“Why, of course I do. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.” Anne drew a long breath. “I thought you _liked_ me of course, but
I never hoped you _loved_ me. Why, Diana, I didn’t think anybody could
love me. Nobody ever has loved me since I can remember. Oh, this is
wonderful! It’s a ray of light which will forever shine on the darkness
of a path severed from thee, Diana. Oh, just say it once again.”
“I love you devotedly, Anne,” said Diana stanchly, “and I always will,
you may be sure of that.”
“And I will always love thee, Diana,” said Anne, solemnly extending her
hand. “In the years to come thy memory will shine like a star over my
lonely life, as that last story we read together says. Diana, wilt thou
give me a lock of thy jet-black tresses in parting to treasure
forevermore?”
“Have you got anything to cut it with?” queried Diana, wiping away the
tears which Anne’s affecting accents had caused to flow afresh, and
returning to practicalities.
“Yes. I’ve got my patchwork scissors in my apron pocket fortunately,”
said Anne. She solemnly clipped one of Diana’s curls. “Fare thee well,
my beloved friend. Henceforth we must be as strangers though living
side by side. But my heart will ever be faithful to thee.”
Anne stood and watched Diana out of sight, mournfully waving her hand
to the latter whenever she turned to look back. Then she returned to
the house, not a little consoled for the time being by this romantic
parting.
“It is all over,” she informed Marilla. “I shall never have another
friend. I’m really worse off than ever before, for I haven’t Katie
Maurice and Violetta now. And even if I had it wouldn’t be the same.
Somehow, little dream girls are not satisfying after a real friend.
Diana and I had such an affecting farewell down by the spring. It will
be sacred in my memory forever. I used the most pathetic language I
could think of and said ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’ ‘Thou’ and ‘thee’ seem so
much more romantic than ‘you.’ Diana gave me a lock of her hair and I’m
going to sew it up in a little bag and wear it around my neck all my
life. Please see that it is buried with me, for I don’t believe I’ll
live very long. Perhaps when she sees me lying cold and dead before her
Mrs. Barry may feel remorse for what she has done and will let Diana
come to my funeral.”
“I don’t think there is much fear of your dying of grief as long as you
can talk, Anne,” said Marilla unsympathetically.
The following Monday Anne surprised Marilla by coming down from her
room with her basket of books on her arm and her lips primmed up into a
line of determination.
“I’m going back to school,” she announced. “That is all there is left
in life for me, now that my friend has been ruthlessly torn from me. In
school I can look at her and muse over days departed.”
“You’d better muse over your lessons and sums,” said Marilla,
concealing her delight at this development of the situation. “If you’re
going back to school I hope we’ll hear no more of breaking slates over
people’s heads and such carryings-on. Behave yourself and do just what
your teacher tells you.”
“I’ll try to be a model pupil,” agreed Anne dolefully. “There won’t be
much fun in it, I expect. Mr. Phillips said Minnie Andrews was a model
pupil and there isn’t a spark of imagination or life in her. She is
just dull and poky and never seems to have a good time. But I feel so
depressed that perhaps it will come easy to me now. I’m going round by
the road. I couldn’t bear to go by the Birch Path all alone. I should
weep bitter tears if I did.”
Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had
been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing, and her dramatic
ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner hour. Ruby Gillis
smuggled three blue plums over to her during testament reading; Ella
May Macpherson gave her an enormous yellow pansy cut from the covers of
a floral catalogue—a species of desk decoration much prized in Avonlea
school. Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new
pattern of knit lace, _so_ nice for trimming aprons. Katie Boulter gave
her a perfume bottle to keep slate-water in and Julia Bell copied
carefully on a piece of pale pink paper, scalloped on the edges, the
following effusion:
“TO ANNE
“When twilight drops her curtain down
And pins it with a star
Remember that you have a friend
Though she may wander far.”
“It’s so nice to be appreciated,” sighed Anne rapturously to Marilla
that night.
The girls were not the only scholars who “appreciated” her. When Anne
went to her seat after dinner hour—she had been told by Mr. Phillips to
sit with the model Minnie Andrews—she found on her desk a big luscious
“strawberry apple.” Anne caught it up all ready to take a bite, when
she remembered that the only place in Avonlea where strawberry apples
grew was in the old Blythe orchard on the other side of the Lake of
Shining Waters. Anne dropped the apple as if it were a red-hot coal and
ostentatiously wiped her fingers on her handkerchief. The apple lay
untouched on her desk until the next morning, when little Timothy
Andrews, who swept the school and kindled the fire, annexed it as one
of his perquisites. Charlie Sloane’s slate pencil, gorgeously bedizened
with striped red and yellow paper, costing two cents where ordinary
pencils cost only one, which he sent up to her after dinner hour, met
with a more favourable reception. Anne was graciously pleased to accept
it and rewarded the donor with a smile which exalted that infatuated
youth straightway into the seventh heaven of delight and caused him to
make such fearful errors in his dictation that Mr. Phillips kept him in
after school to rewrite it.
But as,
“The Cæsar’s pageant shorn of Brutus’ bust
Did but of Rome’s best son remind her more,”
so the marked absence of any tribute or recognition from Diana Barry,
who was sitting with Gertie Pye, embittered Anne’s little triumph.
“Diana might just have smiled at me once, I think,” she mourned to
Marilla that night. But the next morning a note, most fearfully and
wonderfully twisted and folded, and a small parcel, were passed across
to Anne.
“Dear Anne,” ran the former, “Mother says I’m not to play with you or
talk to you even in school. It isn’t my fault and don’t be cross at me,
because I love you as much as ever. I miss you awfully to tell all my
secrets to and I don’t like Gertie Pye one bit. I made you one of the
new bookmarkers out of red tissue paper. They are awfully fashionable
now and only three girls in school know how to make them. When you look
at it remember
“Your true friend,
“Diana Barry.”
Anne read the note, kissed the bookmark, and despatched a prompt reply
back to the other side of the school.
“My own darling Diana:—
“Of course I am not cross at you because you have to obey your mother.
Our spirits can comune. I shall keep your lovely present forever.
Minnie Andrews is a very nice little girl—although she has no
imagination—but after having been Diana’s busum friend I cannot be
Minnie’s. Please excuse mistakes because my spelling isn’t very good
yet, although much improoved.
“Yours until death us do part,
“Anne or Cordelia Shirley.
“P. S. I shall sleep with your letter under my pillow to-night.
“A. or C. S.”
Marilla pessimistically expected more trouble since Anne had again
begun to go to school. But none developed. Perhaps Anne caught
something of the “model” spirit from Minnie Andrews; at least she got
on very well with Mr. Phillips thenceforth. She flung herself into her
studies heart and soul, determined not to be outdone in any class by
Gilbert Blythe. The rivalry between them was soon apparent; it was
entirely good-natured on Gilbert’s side; but it is much to be feared
that the same thing cannot be said of Anne, who had certainly an
unpraiseworthy tenacity for holding grudges. She was as intense in her
hatreds as in her loves. She would not stoop to admit that she meant to
rival Gilbert in school work, because that would have been to
acknowledge his existence which Anne persistently ignored; but the
rivalry was there and honours fluctuated between them. Now Gilbert was
head of the spelling class; now Anne, with a toss of her long red
braids, spelled him down. One morning Gilbert had all his sums done
correctly and had his name written on the blackboard on the roll of
honour; the next morning Anne, having wrestled wildly with decimals the
entire evening before, would be first. One awful day they were ties and
their names were written up together. It was almost as bad as a
“take-notice” and Anne’s mortification was as evident as Gilbert’s
satisfaction. When the written examinations at the end of each month
were held the suspense was terrible. The first month Gilbert came out
three marks ahead. The second Anne beat him by five. But her triumph
was marred by the fact that Gilbert congratulated her heartily before
the whole school. It would have been ever so much sweeter to her if he
had felt the sting of his defeat.
Mr. Phillips might not be a very good teacher; but a pupil so
inflexibly determined on learning as Anne was could hardly escape
making progress under any kind of a teacher. By the end of the term
Anne and Gilbert were both promoted into the fifth class and allowed to
begin studying the elements of “the branches”—by which Latin, geometry,
French and algebra were meant. In geometry Anne met her Waterloo.
“It’s perfectly awful stuff, Marilla,” she groaned. “I’m sure I’ll
never be able to make head or tail of it. There is no scope for
imagination in it at all. Mr. Phillips says I’m the worst dunce he ever
saw at it. And Gil—I mean some of the others are so smart at it. It is
extremely mortifying, Marilla. Even Diana gets along better than I do.
But I don’t mind being beaten by Diana. Even although we meet as
strangers now I still love her with an _inextinguishable_ love. It
makes me very sad at times to think about her. But really, Marilla, one
can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”