After Many Years

by Carolyn Strom Collins

  “O,” she said happily. “I’m so glad that I have an Aunt Maggie. She suggested it, you know. It’s a splendid thing to have an Aunt Maggie in a family.”

  “Yes; and it’s a splendid thing to have a little girl with a warm, loving heart in a family, too,” said Miss Edna with a kiss.

  Editors’ note: “Janie’s Bouquet” was published in Western Christian Advocate on June 5, 1907. It is listed in the “Unverified Ledger Titles” in the 1986 bibliography and was found by Alan John Radmore.

  In April 1907, L. M. Montgomery received a letter from L. C. Page and Company that they would publish her novel Anne of Green Gables. In October, she began working on the sequel, Anne of Avonlea.

  Over forty of Montgomery’s stories were published in 1907 along with over twenty poems.

  Jean’s Birthday Party

  (1907)

  It was the afternoon recess at Burnley School and all the third class girls were sitting in a circle under the clump of spruce trees in the corner of Mr. Strong’s field just behind the schoolhouse. This clump of trees was the third class’s own private and particular resort; the fourth and fifth classes respected their claim and the primary grades would never have dared to go there.

  Generally the third class played games and were jolly. Just now they all sat still and looked at each other in perplexity. All? No, not all. Jean Watson wasn’t there. Jean had been there at first and Jean had looked very sober. But nobody had noticed this and Carrie Deane had asked gaily, “Your birthday party is next week, isn’t it, Jean?”

  To the surprise of everybody Jean’s eyes suddenly brimmed up with tears.

  “No-o-o,” she said miserably, “it isn’t. I’m not going to have a birthday party at all.”

  “Why, Jean Watson,” said all the class together. They couldn’t believe their ears. Everybody in the class had had a birthday party that summer and they knew that Jean’s mother had promised her one. To be sure the Watsons were poor and Jean never had very nice clothes and always brought very plain lunches. But then—her mother had promised.

  “No, I can’t have it,” said Jean. “Mother told me so last night. We—we can’t afford it. Bob has been sick so long and there’s such a big doctor’s bill. Mother is awful sorry, but I can’t have the party.”

  At this point Jean broke down altogether and ran away to the schoolhouse; and the rest of the girls sat down to talk the matter over.

  “It’s just too mean,” said Georgia Smith. “Jean is awfully disappointed. She never had a birthday party and she’ll feel so bad to be the only girl in the class who didn’t have one.”

  “Ma says she doesn’t understand how the Watsons manage to get on at all,” said Emily Sharpe. “Jean’s father drinks—everybody knows that—and he doesn’t get much work to do, and they have so much sickness and there is such a lot of them. Ma says she doesn’t know how Mrs. Watson could ever have dreamed of giving Jean a birthday party, anyhow.”

  Nothing more was said about the birthday party by either Jean or the other girls; but the next Monday morning Jennie White came to school with news.

  “Girls, what do you think? Jean has sprained her ankle and she has to lie on the sofa for a whole week. I was in to see her on the way to school this morning and she is feeling dreadfully lonesome. We must all go and see her often and keep her cheered up.”

  “And Thursday is her birthday,” said Georgia. “It is too bad to have to spend one’s birthday lying on a sofa. It’s worse even than not having a birthday party.”

  “Jean is feeling bad about that party yet,” said Jennie. “I know she is, although she never speaks of it. She was dreadfully disappointed.”

  “Girls,” said Carrie Deane, “I have a plan—O, it’s a real nice plan—it just came to me this minute.”

  When Jean’s birthday arrived it was a lovely day, all breeze and sunshine and blue. But to Jean, lying on her sofa, there really didn’t seem much beauty about it. There wasn’t a great deal of fun in a birthday when you had a sprained ankle and didn’t have the party to which you had been looking forward so long. Jean felt that she could never get over the disgrace of not having a birthday party when all the other girls in their class had had one. Jean did not mind having poorer lunches and shabbier dresses than her classmates. But at nine years old Jean thought that her whole life was darkened because she couldn’t have a birthday party.

  Somehow the morning dragged by. Jean thought she had never spent such a long morning.

  “I wish the day were over,” she thought. “A birthday like this seems as if it would never end. Maybe when it is yesterday I won’t mind not having a party any more.”

  But Jean’s birthday surprise was already on its way to her. Early in the afternoon a knock came at the door, and when Mrs. Watson opened it, Jean, looking past her, gave a little cry of astonishment. There on the platform stood all the girls of the third class. Every girl was dressed in her very finest dress and every girl carried a big bunch of flowers in one hand and a covered basket in the other.

  “Many happy returns of the day, Jean,” cried Carrie. “We’ve brought your birthday party to you.”

  “O girls,” said Jean, wondering whether she meant to laugh or cry and doing a little of both finally. “O, this is just lovely of you.”

  They had a splendid time that afternoon and every girl there thought it was the very nicest birthday party she had ever been at. They played games galore—such games as Jean could join in, lying on the sofa; and then they had lunch out under the apple trees in the little orchard. Mrs. Watson and Jean’s big brother carried Jean and her sofa right out to it. It was a lovely lunch for every girl had coaxed her mother to make the nicest things possible, and the result was that there hadn’t been a spread at any of the parties equal to the one at Jean’s.

  When evening came and the little girls went home, Jean said to her mother happily, “O Mother, wasn’t it all splendid? And so sweet of the girls? I’m perfectly happy for I’ve had a birthday party after all.”

  That night Carrie Deane said to her mother, “What do you suppose made Jean’s party so much nicer than all the others, Mother? We had a lovely time and nobody got cross or offended or sulky as somebody mostly did at all the other parties.”

  “I think,” said Mrs. Deane with a kiss, “that it was because you were all thinking of Jean and trying to give her a good time and not of yourselves. Unselfishness is the secret of it all, little daughter.”

  Editors’ note: “Jean’s Birthday Party” was published in the Western Christian Advocate, June 12, 1907. It was listed in the “Unverified Ledger Titles” section of the 1986 bibliography and was found by Alan John Radmore.

  The winter of 1906–07 had been a difficult one for L. M. Montgomery. The weather had kept her in much of the time, her grandmother was growing more senile, and her fiancé, Ewan Macdonald, studying in Scotland, wrote depressing and glum letters. But the news from the L. C. Page Company offering to publish Anne of Green Gables heartened her considerably. It would be published in 1908 and proved so popular it has never been out of print since. Montgomery continued to publish stories and poems in a number of magazines and newspapers as well as twenty more novels after Anne of Green Gables.

  Maggie’s Kitten

  (1907)

  It was noon recess at the Plympton School, and Maggie Taylor had slipped away to the brook to eat her lunch alone. She never had anything but bread and butter—not always the butter. Her schoolmates laughed at her for this, and they sometimes made fun of her patched dresses and shabby hats. So she preferred to go away alone.

  She would not have minded this if she could only have had a pet of some kind. She envied those of her schoolmates who had a dog or cat. Maggie was very fond of cats. She thought it would be lovely to have a dear little kitten like Lucy Miller’s.

  There was a small, marshy fen a little distance down the brook from where Ma
ggie sat, and presently she heard a faint cry coming from it. It sounded like a kitten’s cry. Maggie sprang to her feet and picked her way down to the reeds.

  “Pussy, pussy!” she called, peering into the tangled thicket with excited blue eyes. The pitiful cry came again in answer. Maggie stopped and parted a clump of reeds. Underneath them, crouched in a little islet of turf, was a small yellow kitten with shining, famished eyes.

  Maggie caught the poor little creature indignantly from the damp earth. She knew the habit which certain people in Plympton had of leaving kittens they did not want to keep in the woods to die of hunger. This poor little morsel of yellow fur had evidently been cruelly cast away for this purpose. Its bones were almost sticking through its skin.

  Maggie ran with it back to a spot where she had eaten her lunch. She had not been hungry, and there was a slice of bread and butter left. She broke off little bits and fed them to the starving kitten. She felt a sense of delight and satisfaction. This was her pet—her own.

  She knew very well that she would never be allowed to keep the kitten at home. Her mother, overworked and impatient, did not like cats. Often as Maggie had pleaded for a kitten, she had been refused.

  Down the brook, visible from where she sat, was an old mouldering shanty. It was a mere box of a place, which had been used years ago by a party of sportsmen who were accustomed to spend a week or two there in the duck season. Of late years it had remained unused, and was fast going to decay. She decided to keep her kitten there. She could bring it food every day when she came to school.

  When the school bell rang she gave her new-found and now purring pet a regretful hug, then ran with it to the old shooting-box, put it inside with a crust of bread, pulled to the sagging door, and left it.

  She slipped down to see her pet when the school came out. Fluff, as she had decided to call him, seemed quite contented in his new home. It was a good distance from the school and road. Maggie had little fear that anyone would discover her pet. She went home as if she trod on air.

  She had not far to go. The little house in which she lived was only a quarter of a mile from the school. Maggie sat down on the doorstep to eat her supper of bread and milk. In the stuffy little kitchen behind her the pale, tired mother was ironing. In the yard her father was cutting wood. He was a tall, thin, bent man, with slow motions and a brooding, discontented face.

  Maggie ate half her bread and milk. The remainder she poured into a rusty tin pint and hid it under the step. She meant to run up to the old shooting-box with it at dusk.

  From where she sat she could see Aunt Jessie Brewster’s house. She wondered what it must be like to live in a big, roomy house like that, with great orchards and barns.

  Maggie knew very little about her Aunt Jessie beyond the fact that she had never spoken to or noticed her small niece and that nothing made her father so angry as any mention of Aunt Jessie’s name. Maggie did not know why, but everybody else in Plympton knew.

  Years before, when old Mr. Brewster had died, he left all his property to his daughter, completely ignoring his disliked stepson, James Taylor. But Plympton people said that Jessie Brewster had done well by her half-brother at first. He remained with her as overseer, and got on well until he married. Miss Brewster did not approve of his selection of a wife. She told him so plainly, and a bitter quarrel was the result.

  He built a tiny house down by the pond and tried to make a living by all-round jobs. He worked hard and incessantly, but he seemed to be one of those people who are always unlucky. He never got on. Jessie Brewster did not relent. Apparently it mattered nothing to her if her half-brother and his family were to starve on the roadside. He struggled feebly on in his slow, ineffectual way. The little family would more than once have suffered actual want if it had not been for his hard-working wife. By her needle and wash-tub she earned the greater part of their subsistence.

  Of all this—the old quarrels and heart-burnings, the pinching, and the toiling—Maggie was as yet happily ignorant. Her only real trouble had been the lack of playmates and pets. This lack was now supplied, at least in part. She had Fluff.

  On this yellow waif Maggie poured out all the affection of her warm, little heart. Often she denied herself food that Fluff might sup unstintingly. All her spare time she spent at the old box, playing with and chattering to her pet.

  It was in August when she found him. When the chill November days came Maggie began to wonder uneasily how Fluff was to be kept through the winter. He could not live in the old shanty, that was certain; he would freeze to death. Neither could she take him home. She knew quite well that no pleadings would win this privilege.

  One morning a plan darted into her head. It was a gloomy, bitter morning, and there had been hard frost in the night. Fluff mewed with the cold, and crept into her lap for warmth, shaking his chilled paws comically. Maggie patted him softly, and brooded over her plan.

  She knew her Aunt Jessie was very fond of cats. Once she had heard her father say bitterly that Jessie Brewster thought more of her cats than she did of her own flesh and blood.

  “If I go up to Aunt Jessie,” said Maggie tremulously to Fluff, “and tell her what a dear, good kitten you are, “I’m ’most sure she would keep you for the winter. I’d never see you—and O, Fluffy, I don’t know what I’ll do without you. But it’s the only way I can think of. I’ll take you up to-night.”

  That evening at dusk Maggie set off. Her heart beat painfully at the thought of facing Aunt Jessie’s keen eyes and grim face. But Fluff’s precious life was a stake.

  Fluff ran out to meet her; he was cold and hungry. Maggie put down the milk she had brought for him, and cried softly as he lapped it up.

  “I’ll be so lonesome without you, Fluffy. And p’raps in the spring you won’t know me and won’t come back to me. And, O Fluffy, dear, I’m so afraid of Aunt Jessie! P’raps she won’t take you in at all, and then I don’t know what we’ll do, you poor, dear, little thing!”

  Fluff purred hopefully. Maggie tucked him away under her shawl, and set her little blue lips firmly. She must lose no time. There was a shortcut up through the woods to the brown house. It seemed very short to Maggie. And it was a very trembling, small figure that crept up to the front door with Fluff cuddled invisibly under her shawl. The warmth from his little body and his deep-toned purr alone gave her courage. But when she heard steps in the hall, after she had knocked, she would have run if her feet would have carried her. The door opened, and Miss Brewster stood on the threshold, looking down with questioning surprise at the small, shrinking figure on her doorstep.

  Miss Brewster was a tall, handsome woman, with keen, dark eyes. She looked like an obstinate woman, but not quite an unkind one.

  “What little girl are you?” she said, quite gently for her had Maggie but known it. But to the frightened child her voice sounded cold and forbidding.

  “Maggie Taylor, ma’am,” she whispered tremulously.

  A change came over Miss Brewster’s face at once.

  “What do you want?” she demanded coldly.

  Maggie felt the change. She was in dire distress, lest all hope for Fluff were gone. Every word of the little pleading she had thought out so carefully vanished from her mind. Yet she must say something before Aunt Jessie would step back and shut the door in her face. In desperation she held forth Fluff, warm and frightened and squirming, to Miss Brewster.

  “Please, ma’am,” stammered poor Maggie, “I thought maybe you’d take Fluffy; I’m afraid he’ll freeze and he’s an awful good cat. O, I’m ’most sure he won’t be any trouble. Please, please, take him—he’s such a good cat, and he can’t live in the old shanty all winter, and they won’t let me take him home.”

  The tears came then, and rolled down her cheeks. Fluff had ceased to squirm, evidently realizing that his fate hung in the balance. His head and tail hung down forlornly.

  Miss Brewster had listene
d in blank amazement. Something like amusement now dawned on her face; but she still spoke suspiciously.

  “Who told you to come here?”

  “Nobody, ma’am,” sobbed Maggie. “I heard you were good to cats, and I couldn’t bear to see Fluffy freeze to death; so I just thought I’d come and ask you to take him. I didn’t mean any harm. And I know he will be good. He doesn’t eat much—truly, he doesn’t eat much.”

  “Come in,” said Miss Brewster briefly.

  Maggie followed her timidly into the sitting-room. Miss Brewster placed a chair before the fire and motioned Maggie to sit down.

  “Now, Maggie, if that’s your name, tell me all about this. Don’t be afraid, child. I’m not going to eat either you or your cat.”

  Maggie drew a long breath and told her aunt it all unhesitatingly: how she had found Fluff starving in the woods and had kept him in the old shanty; how he had grown fat and cunning and so good; how fond she was of him; how she was so afraid he would freeze or get lost when winter came; and how the only way she could think of to save him was to bring him to her Aunt Jessie, who was fond of cats, and might be good to him just for the winter.

  “I suppose,” said Miss Brewster severely when the little plaintive voice eased, “that you would be wanting to run up here every day to see him.”

  “O, no,” said Maggie quickly, “I know I could not do that; but I thought perhaps I might come to the edge of the woods just once or twice in the whole winter, and you might let Fluffy come down to see me.”

  “Well, I’ll keep him for you,” said Miss Brewster, looking meditatively into the glow of the fire.

  Maggie stood up, feeling both glad and sorry. She kissed Fluff’s head and whispered a tearful good-bye into his yellow ear before she let him slip to the rug.