After Many Years

by Carolyn Strom Collins

  Montgomery’s reference in Chapter II to “Who is Sylvia?” is from Shakespeare’s poem of that title from his play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. She also quotes the famous line in William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” in that same passage: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

  Dorcas’ remark that she had studied domestic science at Macdonald College was a reference to Montgomery’s dearest friend, Fredericka Campbell Macfarlane, who had followed that same path. “Frede,” as she was called, died of pneumonia in 1919.

  In 1923, L. M. Montgomery was involved in lawsuits with her first publisher, L. C. Page and Co., one of which was eventually tried before the US Supreme Court. Montgomery finally won both lawsuits.

  In January 1923, Montgomery had received a letter from the Secretary of the Royal Society of Arts in Great Britain, inviting her to become a Fellow, the first Canadian woman to be so honoured. (In 1935, Montgomery would be made an Officer in the Order of the British Empire.)

  Jim’s House

  (1926)

  “Friend Cat,” said Jim Kennedy, “I am going house-hunting to-day.”

  Friend Cat, sitting on a stool beside Jim, blinked his topaz eyes a trifle insolently and then looked bored. He never condescended to get excited. But Jim was evidently very much excited about something, and Margaret Irwin gazed at him across the breakfast table with shy, friendly interest.

  She had not seen Jim Kennedy excited about anything in the week she had been boarding with his sister-in-law. Excitement became him, she thought. It thrilled his lazy, musical voice with delightful cadences, and lighted illuminating fires in the depths of his golden-brown eyes.

  Margaret Irwin had known Jim only a week, but she felt better acquainted with him than with any man she had ever met—which is not saying a great deal, since she seldom met men, and never got really acquainted with them when she did. It was very pleasant to sit across from Jim at meal times, listening to his gentle, whimsical talk, and watching him smuggle tidbits to Friend Cat when Mrs. Kennedy was not looking.

  “You’ll have an awful job to find a house,” said Mrs. Kennedy placidly. “I don’t know of one in the village either for rent or for sale, except the big Ormsby house. And you don’t seem to care for that.”

  “It is an impossible house,” said Jim solemnly. “Not because of its size, but just because of its impossibility. Miss Irwin, you saw it yesterday. What was your first impression, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “I felt,” Margaret said, responding to the challenge in Jim’s eyes, “as if I wanted to get a broom and sweep off all the gingerbread and frippery and wooden lace.”

  “Exactly! Any sensible woman would feel the same.”

  “It’s an elegant house,” said Mrs. Kennedy, a trifle warmly. Her brother had built it; the matter was slightly personal.

  “It is elegant, with all the term implies,” agreed Jim gravely. “Far too elegant for a humble schoolmaster like me. It would own me, body and soul. I’d have to carry it with me wherever I went—on my back, like a snail. I want a house I can love, and that Friend Cat can boss. O, I’ll find one! I don’t know where, but I feel it in my bones: luck’s just waiting round the corner for me. My house is somewhere, wanting me as badly as I want it. Come, Friend Cat. We’ll walk up the spruce road and talk it over.”

  Jim went out, flinging a smile back from the door. Friend Cat ambled after him. Mrs. Kennedy smiled indulgently.

  “Jim’s in great spirits this morning. I don’t wonder. He had a letter from Isabel Bartlett last night. And at last she’s coming home to marry him. They’ve been engaged five years. That’s why he’s going house-hunting. I must say I’m glad. Jim has been very patient, but the long wait has been hard on him. He’s always been crazy about Isabel. And he’s thirty—it’s time he settled down and had a home of his own. Though I’ll be sorry enough to lose him. He’s boarded with me ever since I came here, and a nicer man never lived, odd as he is.

  “For he is odd, nobody can deny it. You may have noticed the queer things he’s always saying. My husband wasn’t a bit like him. You’d never have thought they were brothers. Still, I’m fond of him, and I’m glad he’s going to be happy. I’ve been worried for fear Isabel would take up with someone else and throw him over—and that would break his heart. I always wondered at her liking him. She’s so pretty and attractive she could marry most anybody. But Jim was her choice, it seems, and she hasn’t changed, and I’m thankful for his sake. She’ll make him a wonderful wife, just the kind he needs.”

  Mrs. Kennedy paused for lack of breath, to Margaret’s regret. Jim’s affairs interested her. She had known he was engaged—Mrs. Kennedy had told her, and intimated that there was a romance linked up with it. Margaret loved romance. It had never touched her own life—never would touch it. She wanted quite greedily to hear all about Jim’s.

  “It’s no secret,” Mrs. Kennedy assured her. “Everybody in Glenby knows about Jim and Isabel. It’s a wonder Jim hasn’t told you—he loves to talk about her. I never heard of a man so wrapped up in a girl. That’s why I’ve been worried for fear she wouldn’t come back to him. It began six years ago. Jim was just through college and had been taken on as principal in the High School. Isabel had come to live in Glenby then, with the aunt who brought her up. It was love at first sight with Jim, and no wonder, for she was the prettiest thing: just seventeen and slight as a reed, with the loveliest golden hair—yards of it—and big blue eyes.

  “And such a happy little thing! Her laugh was catching, as Jim said. Everybody liked Isabel and she had dozens of beaux, but from the first it was Jim and nobody else. People wondered—Jim was eight years older and always had been an odd stick. He’s not as handsome as some, but he has a taking way with him, as you may have noticed.”

  Yes, Margaret had noticed it.

  “They were engaged, and meant to be married right off. And then the aunt, Miss Bartlett, got sick and the doctors told her her lungs were affected and she must go to Colorado. And she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go alone, and there wasn’t a soul to go with her except Isabel. Isabel and she were alone in the world, and she was one of the clinging, dependent sort of women.

  “But Isabel said right out she’d go with her, and Jim agreed that it was her duty, though it was mighty hard on him. When they went away they didn’t think she’d be away more’n a year; but here it’s been five years. This spring Miss Bartlett up and married an old widower she’d met out there—no waiting for her once he came to time—and poor Isabel was free at last. That was the news Jim got last night—that, and the fact that she was coming home to him. She’s to be here in September and I s’pose Jim’ll spend the summer hunting up a house for her and talking the ears off his cat. He’s got to talk to someone about her, and the cat’s the only creature that’s willing to listen for hours on end.”

  “I hope he’ll find his house,” said Margaret dreamily.

  “I don’t know why on earth Jim has such a spite against the Ormsby house. He seems to hate it as if was a prison. And it’s such a nice house. Perhaps it’s a little fussy on the outside; I think myself a bay window or two could be spared. But it’s so convenient! Hot and cold water, electric light, hardwood floors, two bathrooms—why, it’s equal to a city apartment. And so near everything: shops and churches and the park. Cassell Street’s the liveliest in Glenby—there’s a string of motors passing all the time on the way to the lake. Perhaps the price staggers Jim, but he has money saved up, and Ormsby would sell it for half its value to settle up the estate.”

  “I don’t think the Ormsby house belongs to Jim,” said Margaret.

  Mrs. Kennedy stared.

  “No, of course it don’t belong to him. It is part of the old Ormsby estate.”

  “It might belong to him for all that,” said Margaret. “Have you never seen houses that you felt belonged to you—no matter who owned th
em?”

  No, Mrs. Kennedy had not, nor had she a glimmer of a notion what Miss Irwin meant. So she got up and began to clear away the dishes and Margaret went out to the garden and lay in a hammock under the trees, doing nothing.

  O, how sweet it was to do nothing in the beautiful silence! Margaret had been working in a department store for twelve years, and she hated it. She always felt that she was in the grip of an octopus that was slowly devouring her, and would never let he go as long as there was a bone left to crack. She had two weeks’ vacation once a year, and had to spend it on a lonely farm with the grouchy old uncle and aunt who had brought her up and who expected her to work hard at weeding and milking and pie-baking, all her little two weeks.

  She always felt more tired when she went back to work than when she had left it. But she had never rebelled. There was nothing of the revolutionary in her. She was a little brown thing; her dark brown eyes were too soft and shadowy to be black, and apart from her eyes she was neither pretty nor ugly, just insignificant. She had had two chances of marriage; but though in the abstract she had thought she would marry anybody who would take her out of that horrible transfer and change department, when it came to the concrete she found she couldn’t do it. Nobody would ever marry her now. She must go on at her counter and her little wicket forever and ever and ever, until she got too old to work.

  Her uncle and aunt had died in the winter. Margaret was not very sorry and did not blame herself because she wasn’t. They had always been tyrants—cruel, selfish tyrants. She was too gentle and sweet to hate anyone, or she would have hated them. They did not leave her anything—everything went to their own daughter. But Margaret had an odd, stifled feeling of freedom. She would have a real vacation—the first she had ever had.

  It was to be a longer vacation than she had counted on, for she felt so miserable in the spring she was obliged to go to a doctor. He told her that she must take three months off or a worse thing would befall her. Margaret didn’t see how she could. Then she suddenly made up her mind to do it, even if she lost her place. But the manager of the transfer department became human for five minutes, and told her he would keep her place for her, so she decided to make one wild, reckless plunge. She would take enough of her small savings and find a nice boarding house in some quiet place where there was no noise, and no abominable cabbage-y smells. O, to be where there was no noise!

  For the transfer and change department, in the middle of the big hardware basement, was the noisiest place in the great hive. There were all kinds of noises—ceaseless, meaningless noises that hammered on her tired brain and numbed her soul. The other girls in the transfer got used to the noises—never noticed them, so they said. Margaret didn’t believe them—it seemed so impossible to her. But now, for the whole golden, blissful summer she was going to forget them.

  Jim did not come home to dinner. Somehow it seemed a rather flat meal. But he was there at supper time, radiating triumph.

  “I told you it was my lucky day,” he said. “I’ve found my house and bought it; paid cash down for it before Jack Petersen could change his mind. I wouldn’t take any risks on that house. It’s mine—mine this blessed minute. Why, it’s such good luck as to be almost uncanny.”

  “Jack Peterson?” said Mrs. Kennedy. “You don’t mean to say—”

  “I do. I mean to say it all. I’ve bought Jack’s house—or rather the house he owned by a legal quibble. It’s always been really my house, you know: built for me, predestined for me. But I had no hope of ever getting my own. I thought he wanted it for himself and his bride. I couldn’t believe any man who owned that house could dream of selling it. And to-day has literally flung it into my hands.”

  “That little Petersen house!” said Mrs. Kennedy, aghast. “Why it’s old and shabby and so small, and out of the world!”

  “You’ve said it! It’s most gloriously out of the world. That’s one reason I love it. And it is old and shabby; that’s why I can afford it. I’m going to fix it up. I’ve got two months to work at it. I mean to do everything with my own hands.”

  “Do you think Isabel will like to live away up in that lonely place?” demanded Mrs. Kennedy.

  Jim looked at Margaret and smiled. “Do you think she will?” he asked.

  “She can’t help it,” said Margaret.

  Mrs. Kennedy snorted.

  “Well, I suppose it’s no use saying anything—”

  “Not a bit. The fatal deed is done. I, Jim Kennedy, am a landed proprietor, owning a house, a garden, and a spruce wood an acre in extent. I, who this morning hadn’t a square inch of this big earth to call my own. Friend Cat, be excited for once, I implore you—that’s a duck of a cat.”

  Friend Cat still refused to be excited. He purred placidly and winked one eye at Margaret.

  “I want you to do me a favor, Miss Irwin,” Jim went on, when Mrs. Kennedy had gone out. “I want you to come up to my house—my house, my house!—excuse me, I have to say it—I have to try how it sounds every way—and look it over; tell me what you think of it. I want to make it convenient for Isabel, for I’m not such a fool as to imagine that a woman can keep on loving a man who doesn’t provide her with proper cupboards.”

  “I’ll be delighted!” said Margaret sincerely. Jim looked grateful.

  “You’re too good to be true—almost,” he said. “What nice things women are! Women and dear little houses with kind, quiet trees about them! Hurry up and finish eating. I want to take you right up to mine. There’s a short cut to it up the hill. Never mind a hat—you don’t want a hat on an evening like this. I like the thought of that smooth brown head of yours slipping through the gray-green trunks and the long green boughs. Your hair is just the brown that belongs to the woods.”

  As they went out, Margaret remembered that this was the first compliment she had ever received—if it were a compliment. Yes it was—Jim’s eyes told her that. She tasted it all the way up the long hill. The little, winding path was so narrow they had to walk in single file. Margaret went first and Friend Cat followed, waving his tail, and Jim brought up the rear. It was a lovely path; ferns grew all along it and the dew-moist air was pungent with the aroma of young, sun-steeped firs. Before the last turn Jim overtook her with one long stride and put his hands over her eyes.

  “Go on like this” he commanded, “and don’t open your eyes till I say you can.”

  Margaret obeyed delightedly. A few more steps and Jim took his hands away.

  “O!” gasped Margaret. “O!” Something seemed to sweep over her soul. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. It hurt her to look at Jim’s house, yet she liked the hurt.

  It was a little gray house that looked as if it had never been built, but had just grown up in that wild, ferny, woodsy corner like a toadstool. It was low-eaved, with odd, little diamond-paned windows. Its gray roof was mottled with fat cushions of moss like green velvet mice. Two big pine trees joined their branches right over it. There was a porch over the front door, covered with honeysuckle. Behind it tall spires of fir stood out against gray-pink shades of evening. Robins were whistling wildly in the firs. The woods were all around the house except on the south sides, where the land fell away in a long hill, looking down on Glenby. Between the house and the view, but not hiding it, was a row of wonderful Lombardy poplars. And between their trunks, far away through the crystal-clear evening air, rose a great, round, full moon.

  “Girl, you’re crying!” said Jim.

  “It’s all so lovely—it hurts,” said Margaret.

  “I knew you’d like it, but I didn’t expect you’d like it as much as that,” said Jim. “You don’t know half its charms yet, either. Wait until it gets dark and you see the lights of Glenby twinkling out down there and all over that hill. And this hill is full of squirrels—I love squirrels, don’t you? Friend Cat likes them, too. He catches them—I’ve got to break him of it. There are any number of shy rabbits, too.
And bats! It’s a great place for bats. I like ’em—nice, queer, creepy, mysterious creatures, coming out of nowhere. There’s one now—s-s-woop! And there’s a little mossy hollow behind those young firs that’s full of violets in spring—violets! ‘Sweeter than the lids of Isabel’s eyes, or Isabel’s breath.’

  “Isabel’s a nicer name than Cytherea or Juno, isn’t it? And I want you to notice especially that little gate over yonder. It isn’t really needed; it opens only into the woods. But isn’t it a gate? I love a gate like that; it’s full of promise. There may be something wonderful beyond. A gate is always a mystery anyhow: it lures, it is a symbol. That’s a nice bit of garden, too, don’t you think? Of course I haven’t much land, but the sky is all mine.”

  Margaret thought she could have stood there forever listening to Jim’s lazy, laughing voice at her shoulder. But Friend Cat flew through the garden after a bat and Jim led her into the house. It was as dear and lovable inside as out. It was a house where there had been brides and mothers, and their happiness seemed to linger in it like a perfume. Margaret fancied she saw Isabel there—lovely, golden-haired Isabel—flitting through the little rooms, laughing under the firs, sitting hand in hand with Jim before the fireplace.

  “Will you let me help you fix this house up for you, for Isabel?” she said softly.

  “O, will you?” he cried. “How I wanted to ask you, and I was afraid you’d hate to be bothered. I need a woman’s help in heaps of ways. My brother’s wife is a jewel, but certain things are holden from her eyes. You’ll know just what Isabel would like—I was sure of that the moment I saw you. And you’ll help me! O, you nice little thing! You nice little thing!”

  He was squeezing her hands so hard that he hurt her, but she did not flinch. She had never been so happy in her life. What a joy it would be to help fix up this darling place for beautiful Isabel. Margaret felt she loved Isabel herself, for her beauty, her charm, her loyalty, her laughter. She would do her very best to make this house, where Isabel would be queen, perfect in its way.