Anne tapped her pointed chin with one finger. She gazed off across the garden, distant in thought. Finally, she said, “Maybe you’re right after all, Diana, and if so, you have fortified me with hope. But I still would like to have hair black as a raven’s wing.”
Suddenly Anne turned to Diana with hands clasped, a radiant burst of emotion shining from her trembling form. “Oh, Diana,” she whispered, “do you think you can like me a little—enough to be my bosom friend?”
Diana laughed again. She found herself laughing often, in the company of this fervent little creature. “Why, I guess so. I’m awfully glad you’ve come to live at Green Gables.”
Anne took a step closer. Her tempestuous gray eyes held Diana with an intensity that fairly took her breath away. “Will you swear to be my friend forever and ever?”
Now it was Diana who trembled. She had the sudden, queasy sensation that her mother was distressingly nearby, and was listening in on every word… but of course that was impossible. If Mrs. Barry and Marilla had come out from the kitchen, Diana would have heard the screened door slam. She resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder toward the house, half fearful that after all she would find her mother standing just there, tense and disapproving on the garden path, waiting with her judgment.
“It’s dreadfully wicked to swear,” Diana said.
“Oh, no.” Anne shook her head. “Not my kind of swearing.”
“I never heard of but one kind.”
“Oh, it isn’t wicked at all,” Anne insisted with a touch of desperation. “This sort of swearing only means vowing and promising solemnly.”
Diana gave a tiny sigh of relief. “Well, I don’t mind doing that. But how do you do it?”
Anne looked around the garden for a moment, her freckled brow furrowed. “We ought to have running water if it’s to be a proper oath. But here… we can imagine the garden path is a stream.”
The girls each stepped into a garden bed, their toes against the cow-hocks, and faced one another.
“Now we must join hands,” Anne said.
She extended her thin hands over the path. Diana took them, surprised at how warm they were. Anne was such a wispy, star-eyed thing that Diana had almost expected her to feel insubstantial and cool, like a spirit of the air.
Anne said, “I’ll repeat the oath first, and then you must say it.”
“All right,” Diana said. Her stomach felt faintly sick with excitement, or maybe with guilt, for the proceedings had a heathenish air about them, and she knew her mother would never approve. But she made no move to withdraw her hands or to call the business off.
“I solemnly swear,” Anne said, “to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon shall endure.” She placed a weight of emphasis on every word. “Now you say it, but put my name in.”
Diana swallowed hard, staring wide-eyed at the other girl, wondering whether she really ought to do it. But at last she shook off her doubts and gave a light-hearted laugh. “I solemnly swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Anne Shirley, for as long as the sun and moon shall endure.”
The oath did sound terribly inspiring, like something one might find in a grand old book of prose, from an age long past. Anne certainly had a knack for words.
When the oath was concluded, Anne broke into a wide grin. Diana couldn’t help but smile back at her. Anne’s volubility, to say nothing of her flights of fancy, were a world away from the proper, ladylike perfection Mrs. Barry strove to cultivate in Diana.
“You’re a queer girl, Anne.” Diana still held her new friend’s hands. “I heard before that you were queer. But I believe I’m going to like you real well.”
“And I believe Mother won’t like it one bit,” Diana added silently, to herself.
All too soon, Marilla’s business at Orchard Slope was concluded, and it was time for Anne to depart. Dusk was settling in, a luscious, velvety-blue twilight that spread thick, fir-scented shadows between the domes of the ancient apple trees. Diana accompanied the visitors down the long, gentle hill, walking with her arm comfortably around Anne’s shoulders. Anne clung to her, too, with a strength that said the orphan girl had found a treasure of immeasurable worth… something long sought, but never truly expected.
The girls parted ways at the log bridge. The brook murmured sleepily between its banks of ferns, and from the nearby pond the frogs had started up their nightly chorus.
“I must go back home now,” Diana said. “If I’m not at the supper table soon, Mother will be cross with me.”
“Oh,” Anne sighed, “I feel as if I can’t possibly bear to part with you, but I could never forgive myself if I endangered your happiness, dear Diana.”
Marilla Cuthbert tapped the toe of her boot impatiently against the log bridge.
“Let’s play together tomorrow,” Diana suggested.
“Nothing could make me gladder. Good night, my bosom friend.”
Diana stood at the bridge, watching Anne fade into the dusk. “She certainly is an interesting girl,” Diana thought. Anne Shirley fairly brimmed over with adventuresome spirit. She was just like a heroine in a novel, if you disregarded her freckles and her wincey dress. “She’s exactly the kind of girl I want to be.”
Wanted to be… but couldn’t.
Mrs. Barry’s voice rose above the chanting of the frogs. “Diana! Diana, come in now!”
Diana gazed after Anne for a moment longer, then, with a long sigh of surrender to the inevitable, she turned and ran up the hill toward home.
Idylls at Idlewild
“I’ve thought of a name at last,” Anne said. A rhapsodic note was in her voice, a musical quiver of delights anticipated—the sound Diana had grown to recognize over several days of friendship with Anne Shirley.
Anne and Diana walked arm-in-arm through the knee-high grass, pushing through early clusters of milk-white Queen Anne’s Lace. The noon air was full of a bright, greeny smell: new oats growing in Mr. Harmon Andrews’s field, just on the other side of Barry’s Pond. (Or, as Anne had dubbed it, the Lake of Shining Waters.) They made their way along a narrow strip of land that ran beside the brook’s southern bank, exactly between Orchard Slope and Green Gables. The land in question belonged to Mr. William Bell, but Mr. Bell had put it to no particular use and was always welcoming to children, so the girls thought it no great crime to colonize the enchanting stand of birch trees that grew there.
Anne led Diana into the ring of trees, which formed the walls of their secret playhouse. Then the red-haired girl threw her arms wide, taking in the circle of their small, shared world.
“Idlewild,” Anne declared.
Diana gasped. “Oh! It’s perfect, Anne… really perfect!”
The name did fit the place exactly. Diana surveyed their playhouse with a new appreciation of its glories. When they had first explored the birch ring, the girls had been delighted to find a few flat-topped stones already waiting for them, each with a carpet of soft green moss on top. Those served nicely for seats. They had brought down some old boards from the Orchard Slope barn and nailed them up between the birches, then filled those shelves with an array of treasures to delight a magpie. Pieces of broken pottery and cracked plates decorated with gay-colored flowers served as their china—it was the easiest thing in the world to imagine the pieces were whole, and exceedingly elegant—and, of course, the bit of broken crystal Diana had found out behind the hen house had pride of place. Its diamond facets sparkled in the sun with a hundred rainbows. Anne swore it was a glass the fairies had lost after a twilight fairy-ball. Diana knew it was only a bit of an old lamp, but she supposed there was no harm in making believe it was truly a cast-off from Fairyland.
To any outsider, the playhouse would be accounted the roughest, most rustic of camps. But to the girls, it was a realm of elegance and grown-up beauty. Sheltered by the magic circle of the slender white birches, they could be anything, say anything… and share any secret or ambition that hid down in the depths of their
earnest little hearts.
“Idlewild,” Diana repeated. “It’s the perfect name for our house, all right. Anne, you do beat all! I’ve never met anyone who’s better at naming places than you.”
Anne sank down on one of the moss-covered rocks. She gazed up at the tangle of birch branches overhead, listening to the small, pointed leaves rustle and whisper together.
“I tried on one name after another for two days running, Diana, but none of them fit… not a one! It was just like trying on dress after dress, only to realize that each one was more poorly suited than the last.
“Or at least, I imagine it was like trying on dresses. I’ve never done it, myself. I’ve only taken whatever dresses kindly people gave to me, like this one Marilla made for me, and I’ve had to do it without complaint, because orphans generally can’t complain about charity. No one should complain about charity, I suppose. It was awfully good of Marilla to make dresses for me, but I do wish she had more stylish tendencies. Still, I have often imagined what it must be like to be a beautiful princess in a castle that’s generations old, and to face the impossible task of choosing a suitor for marriage, who will inherit the castle and the kingdom… and to try to dress for the occasion. I think it would be necessary to try on a dozen gowns at least, and discard every one of them, for it would be such a momentous occasion, and momentous occasions call for just the right kind of clothing.
“Anyway, I kept testing out names but none of them fit our playhouse. I was beginning to despair over it, and thought I’d never find a name to suit us… but then last night, as I was lying in bed and fighting against sleep so I could continue to ponder over the dilemma, ‘Idlewild’ just came to me. And I knew straight off that it was the right name, and that you’d love it, too. After that I fell asleep straight away, and slept so deeply the whole night through, for my heart was at last relieved of its burden.”
“I’m having a new dress made this week,” Diana confided. “Mother said it’s time for a new one, since I’m growing so big. Only I’m growing out, not up. Oh, Anne, I wish I weren’t so fat!”
Diana settled on the stone beside her friend, and Anne promptly threw her arm around Diana’s shoulders.
“But Diana, you aren’t fat. That word applies only to pigs and dumplings. You are plump, just like the girls in Charlotte Morgan’s novels, and plumpness is ever so much more romantic than skinniness.”
“Charlotte Morgan’s heroines are all tall and willowy, Anne, like you.”
“They are not, indeed! Not all of them. I’ve read at least two of her books that had heroines who were ‘round and rosy and beaming.’ Or they weren’t in Charlotte Morgan’s stories, they were in other books, equally as good. That’s how I think of you, Diana: rosy and beaming. You’re just like a rose, in fact, with your pink cheeks and your gay smiles. Oh, if only I could be as pretty as you! But with red hair, I never shall be, even if I were to succeed in getting plump. It’s a sorrow I must resign myself to, for there’s no way to change my fate.”
Anne jumped up and took a cracked teacup down from the shelf. She presented it to Diana with a grand flourish; Diana sipped her imaginary tea with exaggerated good manners.
“But tell me about your new dress,” Anne said. “I want to hear every last glorious detail.”
Diana laughed as Anne took her seat again, sipping from a broken teacup of her own. “I don’t know that there’s much to tell you as yet. It hasn’t been made yet. But the seamstress is coming over tomorrow morning to take my measurements.”
“You must have lace at the throat and sleeves,” Anne said, wide-eyed. “And seed pearls all along the bodice.”
“Mother would never permit anything so fancy. But it is to be a nice dress… one I can wear to church and to parties.”
“What color will it be? Oh, you must choose pink! I can never wear pink because it doesn’t suit my hair, but how I have longed to, Diana! Let me live my dream through you. Please tell the seamstress to make it out of pink silk.”
“I don’t think Mother will pay for silk, either,” Diana said doubtfully. “But perhaps some sateen, or maybe a very good cotton. Anyway, I know it’s to have elbow sleeves. Mother was very firm on that point. They’re so fashionable just now, and she wants me to look my best.”
“You’re lucky,” Anne sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to look fashionable. Marilla thinks fashion is the height of foolishness. She has strictly forbidden me to wear puffed sleeves!”
Diana set her china cup aside and all but wailed in despair. “No, I’m not lucky, Anne! Oh, how can I make you understand? Mother is impossible… simply impossible! I don’t know what I ought to do!”
Anne transferred herself again to Diana’s side. “Dear Diana! Whatever do you mean?”
“Mother has everything all planned out… my whole life. But I’m still a girl, Anne! And that’s all I want to be, for now. Oh, I like to imagine with you that we’re grand ladies living in a beautiful mansion, but I don’t want to be a lady… not yet.”
For once, Anne had nothing to say. She looked steadily at Diana, waiting, her gray eyes widened by sympathy, her cheeks flushed pink with feeling.
“All Mother can think about is my marriage,” Diana went on, her chin quivering with misery. “My marriage, my prospects, my reputation. It’s all she ever talks about! And I know it’s because she’s so resentful, secretly. She would never tell a soul that she regrets becoming a farmer’s wife, but I know… I know.”
“Your father is the dearest, kindest man,” Anne said. “Except for Matthew. And Mr. Barry is almost as nice Matthew, so really I don’t see much to choose between them.”
Diana sniffed and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Father is a dear, sweet thing. I don’t think Mother resents him… I think she loves him just as much as I do. But you know, Anne, Mother is awfully proud. She came from Charlottetown, and all her family lives there, and in Carmody. She even has cousins in Halifax, and they are highly regarded in the city… or so she has told me. I think Mother always felt she was destined for a better life, but here she is, in an old farmhouse in Avonlea. She’s determined to see that I don’t meet the same fate. She has never told me so, but I know I’m right.”
Anne, sensing that their game was over, picked up the china teacups and returned them to the birch-tree shelves. “What fate do you want, Diana? What is your lifelong dream?”
Diana sat in silence for a moment, scuffing the heels of her boots against the mossy stone. At length, she said, “I don’t know. I don’t think I have a lifelong dream.”
“Of course you do!” Anne insisted. “Everyone has at least one dream. Maybe a dozen! Haven’t you ever closed your eyes and imagined out just exactly how your life should go?”
“No,” Diana said honestly. “I suppose I’ve always been too busy trying to please Mother to spend much time imagining. But she’s impossible to please, Anne! No matter what I do or how perfectly I behave, she always finds some fault with me. She’s so determined that I shall be a perfect lady someday, and make the most successful match for a husband, I feel I can never catch my breath around her. There’s no time for dreaming.”
Anne took Diana’s hands in her own, just as she had done when they swore their oath of friendship. “There’s always time for dreaming. Why, sometimes there’s too much time for it. I was forever getting into trouble with Mrs. Hammond for imagining too often, and letting it interfere with my work. Mrs. Hammond was one of the ladies I lived with, you know, just before I went to the asylum at Hopeton. I suppose I do let dreams and imaginings intrude on my duties, and I want to be good—really I do, especially for Marilla, who has been so kind to me—but sometimes the temptation is more than any mortal soul can resist.”
Diana smiled tremulously, despite her tears. “I wish I had an imagination half as grand as yours, Anne. It might make life a little jollier, if I could imagine Mother was… was…”
“An elegant countess,” Anne suggested with a half-wicked gleam in her eye,
“sinking inevitably into old age, and you are her step-daughter, left alone to her care after your father, a gallant knight, died tragically. Not that I would hope for your real father to meet such a fate,” she amended hastily. “But the countess… oh! She seethes with envy over your delicate, youthful beauty.”
Diana laughed aloud at that; it seemed so absurd, to imagine a country girl like herself as a ‘delicate’ and beautiful aristocrat.
“And she plots to wed you to a horrible old scoundrel, who’s balding and has warts on his nose. But you would rather marry…”
“A real hero, like the ones in my favorite books,” Diana broke in. Her heart pounded with surprise when she realized that her imagination had sprouted wings. It seemed to respond to Anne’s infectious presence, flourishing under her magic touch, as flowers bloom brighter near fairy-rings. “He’ll be tall and serious—but not so serious that he can never laugh—with dark, curling hair and eyes like… like…”
“The tempest winds,” Anne whispered.
A chill raced up Diana’s spine. Anne did have such a knack for words. “Yes, exactly like that. And he’ll seem cool and unapproachable, as if he has a secret he must guard, or as if he has some dark thought that follows him around all the time, which he can never be rid of. But he’ll always be sweet to me.”
“Oh,” Anne sighed. She sank down beside Diana, drooping with the weight of awe. “That does sound so romantic. You see, Diana? You do have dreams after all.”
“I suppose so,” Diana said. Her cheeks felt very hot. “But my dreams will never matter to Mother. She’ll have her way, whether I like it or not. And I must always be the perfect lady, like some society girl of Charlottetown. Always, even when I feel like being just a farm girl… just Diana of Orchard Slope.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 3