But one evening the news came. Anne was sitting at her open window, for the time forgetful of the woes of examinations and the cares of the world, as she drank in the beauty of the summer dusk, sweet-scented with flower-breaths from the garden below and sibilant and rustling from the stir of poplars. The eastern sky above the firs was flushed faintly pink from the reflection of the west, and Anne was wondering dreamily if the spirit of colour looked like that, when she saw Diana come flying down through the firs, over the log bridge, and up the slope, with a fluttering newspaper in her hand.
Anne sprang to her feet, knowing at once what that paper contained. The pass list was out! Her head whirled and her heart beat until it hurt her. She could not move a step. It seemed an hour to her before Diana came rushing along the hall and burst into the room without even knocking, so great was her excitement.
‘Anne, you’ve passed,’ she cried, ‘passed the very first — you and Gilbert both — you’re ties — but your name is first. Oh, I’m so proud!’
Diana flung the paper on the table and herself on Anne’s bed, utterly breathless and incapable of further speech. Anne lighted the lamp, oversetting the match-safe and using up half a dozen matches before her shaking hands could accomplish the task. Then she snatched up the paper. Yes, she has passed — there was her name at the very top of a list of two hundred! That moment was worth living for.
‘You did just splendidly, Anne,’ puffed Diana, recovering sufficiently to sit up and speak, for Anne, starry-eyed and rapt, had not uttered a word. ‘Father brought the paper home from Bright River not ten minutes ago — it came out on the afternoon train, you know, and won’t be here till tomorrow by mail — and when I saw the pass list I just rushed over like a wild thing. You’ve all passed, every one of you, Moody Spurgeon and all, although he’s conditioned in history. Jane and Ruby did pretty well –they’re half-way up — and so did Charlie. Josie just scraped through with three marks to spare, but you’ll see she’ll put on as many airs as if she’d led. Won’t Miss Stacy be delighted? Oh, Anne, what does it feel like to see your name at the head of a pass list like that? If it were me I know I’d go crazy with joy. I am pretty near crazy as it is, but you’re as calm and cool as a spring evening.’
‘I’m just dazzled inside,’ said Anne. ‘I want to say a hundred things, and I can’t find words to say them in. I never dreamed of this — yes, I did, too, just once! I let myself think once, “What if I should come out first?” quakingly, you know, for it seemed so vain and presumptuous to think I could lead the Island. Excuse me a minute, Diana. I must run right out to the field to tell Matthew. Then we’ll go up the road and tell the good news to the others.’
They hurried to the hayfield below the barn where Matthew was coiling hay, and, as luck would have it, Mrs Lynde was talking to Marilla at the lane fence.
‘Oh, Matthew,’ exclaimed Anne, ‘I’ve passed and I’m first — or one of the first! I’m not vain, but I’m thankful.’
‘Well now, I always said it,’ said Matthew, gazing at the pass list delightedly. ‘I knew you could beat them all easy.’
‘You’ve done pretty well, I must say, Anne,’ said Marilla, trying to hide her extreme pride in Anne from Mrs Rachel’s critical eye. But that good soul said heartily:
‘I just guess she has done well, and far be it from me to be backward in saying it. You’re a credit to your friends, Anne, that’s what, and we’re all proud of you.’
That night Anne, who had wound up a delightful evening by a serious little talk with Mrs Allan at the manse, knelt sweetly by her open window in a great sheen of moonshine and murmured a prayer of gratitude and aspiration that came straight from her heart. There was in it thankfulness for the past and reverent petition for the future; and when she slept on her white pillow her dreams were as fair and bright and beautiful as maidenhood might desire.
33
The Hotel Concert
‘Put on your white organdie, by all means, Anne,’ advised Diana decidedly.
They were together in the east gable chamber; outside it was only twilight — a lovely yellowish-green twilight with a clear blue cloudless sky. A big round moon, slowly deepening from her pallid lustre into burnished silver, hung over the Haunted Wood; the air was full of sweet summer sounds — sleepy birds twittering, freakish breezes, faraway voices and laughter. But in Anne’s room the blind was drawn and the lamp lighted, for an important toilet was being made.
The east gable was a very different place from what it had been on that night four years before, when Anne had felt its bareness penetrate to the marrow of her spirit with its inhospitable chill. Changes had crept in, Marilla conniving at them resignedly, until it was as sweet and dainty a nest as a young girl could desire.
The velvet carpet with the pink roses and the pink silk curtains of Anne’s early visions had certainly never materialized; but her dreams had kept pace with her growth, and it is not probable she lamented them. The floor was covered with a pretty matting, and the curtains that softened the high window and fluttered in the vagrant breezes were of pale green art muslin. The walls, hung not with gold and silver brocade tapestry, but with a dainty apple-blossom paper, were adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs Allan. Miss Stacy’s photograph occupied the place of honour, and Anne made a sentimental point of keeping fresh flowers on the bracket under it. Tonight a spike of white lilies faintly perfumed the room like the dream of a fragrance. There was no ‘mahogany furniture’, but there was a white-painted bookcase filled with books, a cushioned wicker rocker, a toilet-table befrilled with white muslin, a quaint, gilt-framed mirror with chubby pink cupids and purple grapes painted over its arched top, that used to hang in the spare room, and a low white bed.
Anne was dressing for a concert at the White Sands Hotel. The guests had got it up in aid of the Charlottetown hospital, and had hunted out all the available amateur talent in the surrounding districts to help it along. Bertha Sampson and Pearl Clay of the White Sands Baptist choir had been asked to sing a duet; Milton Clark of Newbridge was to give a violin solo; Winnie Adella Blair of Carmody was to sing a Scotch ballad; and Laura Spencer of Spencervale and Anne Shirley of Avonlea were to recite.
As Anne would have said at one time, it was ‘an epoch in her life’, and she was deliciously athrill with the excitement of it. Matthew was in the seventh heaven of gratified pride over the honour conferred on his Anne, and Marilla was not far behind, although she would have died rather than admit it, and said she didn’t think it was very proper for a lot of young folks to be gadding over to the hotel without any responsible person with them.
Anne and Diana were to drive over with Jane Andrews and her brother Billy in their double-seated buggy; and several other Avonlea girls and boys were going, too. There was a party of visitors expected out from town, and after the concert a supper was to be given to the performers.
‘Do you really think the organdie will be best?’ queried Anne anxiously. ‘I don’t think it’s as pretty as my blue flowered muslin — and it certainly isn’t so fashionable.’
‘But it suits you ever so much better,’ said Diana. ‘It’s so soft and frilly and clinging. The muslin is stiff, and makes you look too dressed up. But the organdie seems as if it grew on you.’
Anne sighed and yielded. Diana was beginning to have a reputation for notable taste in dressing, and her advice on such subjects was much sought after. She was looking very pretty herself on this particular night in a dress of the lovely wild-rose pink, from which Anne was for ever debarred; but she was not to take any part in the concert, so her appearance was of minor importance. All her pains were bestowed upon Anne, who, she vowed, must, for the credit of Avonlea, be dressed and combed and adorned to the queen’s taste.
‘Pull out that frill a little more — so; here, let me tie your sash; now for your slippers. I’m going to braid your hair in two thick braids, and tie them half-way up with big white bows — no, don’t pull out a single curl over your forehead — just
have the soft part. There is no way you do your hair suits you so well, Anne, and Mrs Allan says you look like a Madonna when you part it so. I shall fasten this little white house-rose just behind your ear. There was just one on my bush, and I saved it, for you.’
‘Shall I put my pearl beads on?’ asked Anne. ‘Matthew brought me a string from town last week, and I know he’d like to see them on me.’
Diana pursed up her lips, put her black head on one side critically, and finally pronounced in favour of the beads, which were thereupon tied around Anne’s slim milk-white throat.
‘There’s something so stylish about you, Anne,’ said Diana, with unenvious admiration. ‘You hold your head with such an air. I suppose it’s your figure. I am just a dumpling. I’ve always been afraid of it, and now I know it is so. Well, I suppose I shall just have to resign myself to it.’
‘But you have such dimples,’ said Anne, smiling affectionately into the pretty, vivacious face so near her own. ‘Lovely dimples, like little dents in cream. I have given up all hope of dimples. My dimple-dream will never come true; but so many of my dreams have that I mustn’t complain. Am I all ready now?’
‘All ready,’ assured Diana, as Marilla appeared in the doorway, a gaunt figure with greyer hair than of yore and no fewer angles, but with a much softer face. ‘Come right in and look at our elocutionist, Marilla; doesn’t she look lovely?’
Marilla emitted a sound between a sniff and grunt.
‘She looks neat and proper. I like that way of fixing her hair. But I expect she’ll ruin that dress driving over there in the dust and dew with it, and it looks most too thin for these damp nights. Organdie’s the most unserviceable stuff in the world anyhow, and I told Matthew so when he got it. But there is no use in saying anything to Matthew nowadays. Time was when he would take my advice, but now he just buys things for Anne regardless, and the clerks at Carmody know they can palm anything off on him. Just let them tell him a thing is pretty and fashionable, and Matthew plunks his money down for it. Mind you keep your skirt clear of the wheel, Anne, and put your warm jacket on.’
Then Marilla stalked downstairs, thinking proudly how sweet Anne looked, with that
One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown
and regretting that she could not go to the concert herself to hear her girl recite.
‘I wonder if it is too damp for my dress,’ said Anne anxiously.
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Diana, pulling up the window blind. ‘It’s a perfect night, and there won’t be any dew. Look at the moonlight.’
‘I’m so glad my window looks east into the sunrising,’ said Anne, going over to Diana. ‘It’s so splendid to see the morning coming up over those long hills and glowing through those sharp fir tops. It’s new every morning, and I feel as if I washed my very soul in that bath of earliest sunshine. Oh, Diana, I love this little room so dearly. I don’t know how I’ll get along without it when I go to town next month.’
‘Don’t speak of your going away tonight,’ begged Diana. ‘I don’t want to think of it, it makes me so miserable, and I do want to have a good time this evening. What are you going to recite, Anne? And are you nervous?’
‘Not a bit. I’ve recited so often in public I don’t mind at all now. I’ve decided to give “The Maiden’s Vow”. It’s so pathetic. Laura Spencer is going to give a comic recitation, but I’d rather make people cry than laugh.’
‘What will you recite if they encore you?’
‘They won’t dream of encoring me,’ scoffed Anne, who was not without her own secret hopes that they would, and already visioned herself telling Matthew all about it at the next morning’s breakfast-table. ‘There are Billy and Jane now — I hear the wheels. Come on.’
Billy Andrews insisted that Anne should ride on the front seat with him, so she unwillingly climbed up. She would have much preferred to sit back with the girls, where she could have laughed and chattered to her heart’s content. There was not much of either laughter or chatter in Billy. He was a big, fat, stolid youth of twenty, with a round, expressionless face, and a painful lack of conversational gifts. But he admired Anne immensely, and was puffed up with pride over the prospect of driving to White Sands with that slim, upright figure beside him.
Anne, by dint of talking over her shoulder to the girls and occasionally passing a sop of civility to Billy — who grinned and chuckled and never could think of any reply until it was too late — contrived to enjoy the drive in spite of all. It was a night for enjoyment. The road was full of buggies, all bound for the hotel, and laughter, silver-clear, echoed and re-echoed along it. When they reached the hotel it was a blaze of light from top to bottom. They were met by the ladies of the concert committee, one of whom took Anne off to the performers’ dressing-room, which was filled with the members of a Charlottetown Symphony Club, among whom Anne felt suddenly shy and frightened and countrified. Her dress, which, in the east gable, had seemed so dainty and pretty, now seemed simple and plain — too simple and plain, she thought, among all the silks and laces that glistened and rustled around her. What were her pearl beads compared to the diamonds of the big, handsome lady near her? And how poor her one wee white rose must look beside all the hothouse flowers the others wore! Anne laid her hat and jacket away, and shrank miserably into a corner. She wished herself back in the white room at Green Gables.
It was still worse on the platform of the big concert hall of the hotel, where she presently found herself. The electric lights dazzled her eyes, the perfume and hum bewildered her. She wished she were sitting down in the audience with Diana and Jane, who seemed to be having a splendid time away at the back. She was wedged in between a stout lady in pink silk and a tall, scornful-looking girl in a white lace dress. The stout lady occasionally turned her head squarely round and surveyed Anne through her eyeglasses until Anne, acutely sensitive of being so scrutinized, felt that she must scream aloud; and the white-lace girl kept talking audibly to her next neighbour about the ‘country bumpkins’ and ‘rustic belles’ in the audience, languidly anticipating ‘such fun’ from the displays of local talent on the programme. Anne believed that she would hate that white-lace girl to the end of life.
Unfortunately for Anne, a professional elocutionist was staying at the hotel and had consented to recite. She was a lithe, dark-eyed woman in a wonderful gown of shimmering grey stuff like woven moonbeams, with gems on her neck and in her dark hair. She had a marvellously flexible voice and wonderful power of expression; the audience went wild over her selection. Anne, forgetting all about herself and her troubles for the time, listened with rapt and shining eyes; but when the recitation ended she suddenly put her hands over her face. She could never get up and recite after that — never. Had she ever thought she could recite? Oh, if she were only back at Green Gables!
At this unpropitious moment her name was called. Somehow, Anne — who did not notice the rather guilty little start of surprise the white-lace girl gave, and would not have understood the subtle compliment implied therein if she had — got on her feet, and moved dizzily out to the front. She was so pale that Diana and Jane, down in the audience, clasped each other’s hands in nervous sympathy.
Anne was the victim of an overwhelming attack of stage fright. Often as she had recited in public, she had never before faced such an audience as this, and the sight of it paralysed her energies completely. Everything was so strange, so brilliant, so bewildering — the rows of ladies in evening dress, the critical faces, the whole atmosphere of wealth and culture about her. Very different this from the plain benches at the Debating Club, filled with the homely, sympathetic faces of friends and neighbours. These people, she thought, would be merciless critics. Perhaps, like the white-lace girl, they anticipated amusement from her ‘rustic’ efforts. She felt hopelessly, helplessly ashamed and miserable. Her knees trembled, her heart fluttered, a horrible faintness came over her; not a word could she utter, and the next moment she would have fled from the platform despite the humiliation which
, she felt, must ever after be her portion if she did so.
But suddenly, as her dilated, frightened eyes gazed out over the audience, she saw Gilbert Blythe away at the back of the room, bending forward with a smile on his face –a smile which seemed to Anne at once triumphant and taunting. In reality it was nothing of the kind. Gilbert was merely smiling with appreciation of the whole affair in general, and of the effect produced by Anne’s slender white form and spiritual face against a background of palms in particular. Josie Pye, whom he had driven over, sat beside him, and her face certainly was both triumphant and taunting. But Anne did not see Josie, and would not have cared if she had. She drew a long breath and flung her head up proudly, courage and determination tingling over her like an electric shock. She would not fail before Gilbert Blythe — he should never be able to laugh at her, never, never! Her fright and nervousness vanished; and she began her recitation, her clear, sweet voice reaching to the farthest corner of the room without a tremor or a break. Self-possession was fully restored to her, and in the reaction from that horrible moment of powerlessness she recited as she had never done before. When she finished there were bursts of honest applause. Anne, stepping back to her seat, blushing with shyness and delight, found her hand vigorously clasped and shaken by the stout lady in pink silk.
‘My dear, you did splendidly,’ she puffed. ‘I’ve been crying like a baby, actually I have. There, they’re encoring you — they’re bound to have you back!’
‘Oh, I can’t go,’ said Anne confusedly. ‘But yet — I must, or Matthew will be disappointed. He said they would encore me.’
‘Then don’t disappoint Matthew,’ said the pink lady, laughing.
Smiling, blushing, limpid-eyed, Anne tripped back and gave a quaint, funny little selection that captivated her audience still further. The rest of the evening was quite a little triumph for her.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 27