All at once, Anne wrapped both her thin little arms around Diana, hugging her tightly. “I solemnly vow to you, dearest Diana, that you can always be Diana with me. And I will always adore you, exactly as you are.”
“Will you really, Anne?”
“That’s what it means to be bosom friends. I took our oath seriously, you see. I am yours forever.”
The girls broke from their embrace and gazed shyly at each other. Both felt as if they had found something rare in the world, and neither quite knew what to do or say next. What does one say when one has found a treasure of immeasurable worth? But at last Anne scrambled up from the mossy stone.
“I do have to return to Green Gables now. Marilla is expecting me. I’m to do patchwork this afternoon. I hate sewing, but I guess it’s an unavoidable task.” She sighed deeply, pressing a hand to her heart. “There are so many unpleasant duties in this world, but I learned in Sunday school that all duties can be borne, no matter how unpleasant, if we but pray for patience. I will pray for it the whole time I’m doing my patchwork, I’m sure.”
Diana sprang up, too, her tears drying in the warmth of her new excitement. “Oh, Sunday school! That reminds me: You are going to the picnic, aren’t you?”
Anne stared at her blankly.
“There’s to be a picnic next Wednesday! Just across the pond, in Mr. Harmon Andrews’s big back field. He’s mowing it down on Monday for the occasion. I expect nearly everyone in the whole church will be there.”
“A picnic!” Anne clasped her hands before her, gazing far beyond the ring of birch trees to a glorious vista only she could see. “Oh, Diana, you don’t know how often I’ve dreamed of attending a picnic. It has been one of my lifelong ambitions. I’ve never thought I’d be fortunate enough to actually go to one!”
“It’s going to be ever so much fun,” Diana said. “Some of the ladies are making ice cream, and—”
“Ice cream!” After that single, half-choked utterance, Anne fell silent with awe.
“And there will be games and prizes and the Avonlea brass band will play, too. I suppose that’s one good thing about Mother insisting I have a new, more grown-up-looking dress: I’ll be able to show it off to the Pye girls and make them positively sick with jealousy. I know I shouldn’t flaunt any good fortune—it’s terribly wicked—but sometimes I can’t help myself where the Pye girls are concerned. I’ll bet neither of them has elbow sleeves yet!”
Anne gave a little shiver, as if waking from a trance. “Thou hast given me a beautiful dream to guide me through the darkest night.”
Diana nearly giggled at Anne’s affected speech. She managed to stop herself by biting her lip as hard as she dared.
“I’ll just run home now and tell Marilla,” Anne said, reverting to a more prosaic mode. “Oh, what a thrill, just to think of a picnic! Nothing will keep me from it, Diana. Nothing!”
“Let’s play again tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow and every day, for the rest of our lives,” Anne promised. “Well… except for Sundays. I suppose that wouldn’t be reverent. And remember, dear Diana, you are always Diana to me, no matter what your mother may think or say or do.”
Diana Finds Her Vinegar
The seamstress rose gracefully from her knees, winding a long linen measuring tape around her hand.
“You may put your arms down now, Diana,” Mrs. Barry said.
Diana did accordingly. Her shoulders had begun to tingle with weariness after holding her arms straight out to her sides for whole minutes at a time, while the seamstress recorded every conceivable measurement of her body. Diana was dressed only in her chemise and her knee-length pantalets, which really can’t be said to be “dressed” at all. She was eager to get back into her frock of pretty, flowered calico, which lay neatly folded on the parlor sofa behind her.
“My, Diana,” the seamstress said, “you have grown up like a weed since the last time I made a dress for you.”
Her name was Miss Adams. She had clever, quick, small hands and a beaming smile that Diana liked very much. Her hair, a toasty, ash-like blonde, was beginning to show a few threads of gray, and some lines had formed around her twinkling, hazel eyes since the last time Diana had seen her. Diana thought her very pretty and regal, but she knew her mother didn’t entirely approve of the woman, for Miss Adams had never married. That would have been acceptable to Mrs. Barry if Miss Adams had simply been unlucky in love, but word in Avonlea society held that Miss Adams had turned down a whole pack of suitors in favor of living and working on her own. “It’s unnatural, bordering on sinful,” Diana had once heard her mother murmur to another Avonlea lady. But Miss Adams was the very best seamstress for miles around… maybe the best on the whole island. Mrs. Barry was not about to spend her money on second-rate clothing for her little girl—not when the very best was close at hand.
“May I put on my dress now?” Diana asked.
“Yes, indeed,” Miss Adams said, jotting a few last-minute notations on the small pad of paper. The pad hung by a ribbon that was pinned to her waist sash. Diana found the tools of the seamstressing trade endlessly fascinating. She remembered Anne’s hatred for sewing and wondered at it. Perhaps Anne would like sewing better if she could see how jaunty Miss Adams looked, with her notebook dangling from her sash as if it were a beaded purse. And wouldn’t Anne just love to jot down all her rainbow fancies as they came to her!
“Go on,” Mrs. Barry prompted. “Don’t stand about; get dressed if you’re going to.”
Blushing, Diana hurried to her calico dress and pulled it on while her mother opened the curtains, which had blocked the parlor windows while Diana’s measurements were taken. There had been little sense in blocking them in the first place, as far as Diana could tell, for Father had gone into town on business, and the only other people at Orchard Slope were Minnie May, Diana’s three-year-old sister, and the French girl who sometimes helped look after her.
Mrs. Barry extinguished the oil lamps that had kept the parlor lit, then settled on the sofa to look over the samples of fabric Miss Adams had brought. “Come here, Diana. We must choose the fabric for your new dress.”
Diana sat close beside her mother and looked at each sample with wonder and delight. It was perfectly delicious, to imagine herself dressed in such glorious textures and gay colors. There were cranberry cottons and linens in blue-and-white stripes, a satin-like weave of lustrous mauve and a leaf-green velvet with a silvery nap. Diana felt each sample with a near-reverent awe, and bubbled inside with secret mischief when she pictured the open envy of Gertie and Josie Pye.
“I think this blue will do very nicely,” Mrs. Barry said.
Diana looked at the sample with fading enthusiasm. There was nothing wrong with the fabric. But it wasn’t glamorous at all. It had no hint of sheen or luxury; it was as simple as could be. And worse, the color was a misty, powdery blue, better suited to a very small girl like Minnie May than to Diana, whose eleven years had surely earned her some claim to a little finery.
“I’ve thought so often that I only want to be a girl while I still can,” Diana thought, resisting the urge to chew on her lower lip, “but this is entirely too girlish! Oh, couldn’t Mother insist on growing me up a little now? She’s so quick to do it at other times.”
Diana, recalling Anne’s request, pulled a vivid, rosy pink from the stack of samples. “This is such a pretty color. And it’s so becoming on me… look!” She held it up beside her cheek so Mrs. Barry could appreciate how it harmonized with her complexion.
Her mother scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous, Diana. Pink is far too showy a color. It’s immodest! I won’t have it.”
“But…” Diana began.
Mrs. Barry collected the samples together and handed them back to the seamstress. “The pale blue will do very nicely, Miss Adams. I thank you.”
“It’s a very good weave,” Miss Adams said, “and it wears so softly, Diana… it’s just like silk after you wash it a time or two. I’m sure you’ll adore
it.”
Diana lowered her eyes to the parlor rug, but she remembered to smile. “I’m sure I will, thank you, Miss Adams.”
The seamstress gathered her supplies into her attaché case and took Mrs. Barry’s hand, a professional farewell. “I’ll have the new dress finished in two days.”
“Diana and I are both looking forward to it. Farewell, now.”
When Miss Adams had gone, Mrs. Barry gave a loud sniff. Diana didn’t know whether her mother’s disapproval was for the unmarried seamstress or for Diana herself, but it hardly mattered. Mrs. Barry was in a mood, and would remain so for the duration of the afternoon. Diana steeled herself within.
“It’s time to prepare supper,” Mrs. Barry announced. “Come along, Diana.”
Diana stifled a groan. She didn’t mind cooking. In fact, she often enjoyed it. But the kitchen would be a terribly confined space with Mother simmering as she was. But like the good girl she always tried to be, Diana followed her mother into the kitchen without a word of complaint.
Mrs. Barry set her to work straight away, washing potatoes and carrots for roasting. When the last round little potato was spotlessly clean, Diana carried her bucket of wash-water outside to pour it in the garden. She dumped it onto the roots of the tiger lilies and paused, smelling their sweet fragrance and recalling the thrilling hour when she had first met Anne Shirley.
“How my life has changed, in less than a week!” Diana said to herself.
Anne had brought a new, indefinable feature to life, something Diana hadn’t even known she was lacking until at last it was found. With her heartbreaking history and her glories of romantic fancies, Anne was the very avatar of adventure. It seemed a great injustice to Diana that she should be stuck doing boring old chores like some sort of peasant, when now she knew how grand life could be… ought to be. She thought of the dream-lover she and Anne had conjured up between them: tall, dark-haired, with sober eyes and an air of mystery hanging over him. He would never find any interest in a girl who washed potatoes and carrots.
“Diana!” Mrs. Barry called from the kitchen door. “Stop dilly-dallying and come back inside. There’s work to be done.”
Diana sighed heavily and marched back toward the kitchen, her pail swinging against her knees. It left wet splotches on her dress.
“Now peel those potatoes,” Mrs. Barry said, the moment Diana appeared over the threshold. “They aren’t about to peel themselves.”
Diana pulled a stool near the kitchen window and began her duty, dropping the long, ruddy curls of peel into the bucket at her feet. After a few minutes, Mrs. Barry looked up from where she was kneading the bread dough on the flour-covered kitchen table.
“Land’s sake, you’ve only peeled one potato! You’re mooning out the window, not working.”
“The day is so beautiful,” Diana said plaintively. “I can’t help but look.”
“You were already out playing until lunch-time with that orphan girl the Cuthberts have acquired. That ought to be enough idleness for any child.”
“Anne and I aren’t idle when we play. We go everywhere… down the brook and along the road and even away back into the woods. It’s great fun. And we talk about so many interesting things. Anne is terribly interested in my new dress. I told her all about what it’s like to have a fitting by a real seamstress, because she has only ever had Marilla and other benefactors make dresses for her, but I’ve had seamstress-made clothes so many times before.”
“I suppose it was that Anne child’s idea that you should have your dress made in flamboyant pink.”
Diana looked up from her potato with a guilty flush on her cheeks.
Mrs. Barry sighed with all the burdensome weight of dignity. “I suppose the girl isn’t to blame. Waif that she is, I’m sure she has never had the opportunity to learn how to be elegant and becoming.”
Diana always did her best to be a proper, well-behaved little girl, but she could put on a display of temper when her ire was roused. Even the angels in Heaven have their limits. It was more than she could bear, to hear her bosom friend referred to in such a derogatory manner. Waif!
She dropped her paring knife in the bucket with a clatter. The potato thumped into the bucket, too. “Pink is becoming and elegant. At least, it is on me. I still have the bloom of youth—”
Her mother’s gasp cut Diana short, which was probably for the best. “The bloom of youth,” Mrs. Barry repeated with scorn. She wiped the dough from her fingers with fidgety jerks of a sack-cloth towel. “What nonsensical, high-flown words.”
Diana suspected it wasn’t the high-flown words that had angered her mother so, but rather the unfortunate stress she had placed on the word I. She couldn’t help it; ever since their conversation in the birch-tree playhouse, Diana had nurtured a scandalous fantasy that Mrs. Barry was, after all, the aging old countess and she, Diana, was her envied, orphaned step-daughter.
“Anne Shirley is a bad influence on you,” Mrs. Barry said sternly. “She is teaching you to think and speak in ways good little girls ought never to think or speak.”
The front door opened, and Mr. Barry’s cheerful hello rang through the house. But neither Mrs. Barry nor Diana responded, caught up as they were in their private confrontation.
“I speak from my own heart,” Diana insisted. “I am my own person, Mother, whatever you may think.”
Mrs. Barry dunked her hands in the wash-bucket so vigorously that water slopped onto her apron. “You are saucing me, Diana, and I won’t stand for it.”
“Now, what’s all this?” Diana’s father stepped into the kitchen, glancing with obvious concern between his wife and his daughter.
“Your daughter is full of vinegar, that’s what. She has been giving me the sharp side of her tongue all afternoon, and generally being contrary.”
“I haven’t!” Poor Diana’s protest sounded very weak.
“There; you can see for yourself,” Mrs. Barry said with steely composure. “I’ve allowed her to play too much with that wild girl the Cuthberts have taken in. Anne Shirley has had a corrupting influence on Diana’s morals.”
“My morals haven’t been corrupted one bit!” Diana sprang up from her stool and clasped her father’s hands, heedless of the wet slurry of potato starch that covered them. “Oh, Father, don’t let Mother prevent me from seeing Anne! She’s the only dear friend I’ve ever had.”
“Now, now,” Father murmured, attempting to soothe Diana’s fears even as he tugged his hands away and sought out something to clean them with.
“You have plenty of friends who are good, obedient, perfectly normal girls,” Mrs. Barry said, relentless in her righteousness. “What about Jane Andrews? And Ruby Gillis? You like them well enough.”
“Jane and Ruby aren’t the same,” Diana wailed. “They aren’t like Anne.” Oh, how could she ever explain it?
Mrs. Barry issued a hard, level stare to Diana, the kind that meant she had reached the absolute limit of her leniency. “Diana, stop this protesting at one. You’ve heard my opinion on the matter.”
Diana knew she should stop herself, but a fiercely rebellious spirit had bubbled up in her, like a spring bursting from the earth. She lifted her chin to an arrogant angle and said, “I don’t care for your opinion on the matter.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew she had misstepped gravely. Her mother’s face set in a mask of stony disapproval. Her eyes were as cold as black ice.
“Go up to your room at once,” Mrs. Barry said, quiet with authority. “And for your backtalk, you have forfeited the right to attend the picnic.”
Diana’s mouth fell open, but nothing came out of it, not even a cry of despair. The cruel blow struck her mute and numb.
“Now, wait a moment, Rebecca,” Father said. “You know the Sunday school picnic is an important affair.”
“It is equally important for a child to obey her mother.”
“Of course, of course. But what will your circle of friends think if Diana isn
’t there? And the minister’s wife… she has been considering Diana for the choir. The picnic will be a perfect opportunity for Diana to present herself favorably to the minister’s wife.”
Mrs. Barry thawed—only by a droplet or two, but it was enough. “Perhaps you’re right. Though I wish you would not interfere in my discipline, George! If you had your way, both your daughters would grow up to be scandalous examples of womanhood. Somebody has to raise them properly.”
“So… so I may go to the picnic after all?” Diana ventured.
“I suppose,” Mrs. Barry snapped. “But you had best exhibit impeccable behavior between now and then, or I shall change my mind. And don’t think your father can save your goose a second time, Diana Barry.”
Diana lowered her face contritely, but not before catching a conspiratorial wink from her father.
“I still maintain,” Mrs. Barry said in a voice thick with dignity, “that Anne Shirley is a dreadful influence on you. I don’t trust the girl. Don’t try to protest, George; I know my suspicions about that orphan child will be justified in time… to this family’s sorrow.”
Anne Is Introduced
The day of the Sunday school picnic was fine and bright. The sky was a clear, sweet blue, as of spring-time hyacinths, but the day’s warmth was summer at its ripe, fulsome best. The sun coaxed a spicy perfume from the shore of Barry’s Pond, a ferny, green-smelling air that mingled in an intoxicating way with cut grass and the roses blooming in the Andrews’s garden. Under the shade of a broad, gray-barked willow tree, the Avonlea band played a tune that felt much bigger and bolder than its handful of horns and lone drummer ought to have produced. Everyone from the Methodist church was there, eating potato salad and scones on the patchwork blankets spread about the field, or paddling in canoes and skiffs around the glass-smooth, sapphire lake.
Diana longed to be out on the water. She loved rowing, and loved the stillness at the heart of Barry’s Pond (which was so large that it more properly should have been called a lake.) But there was no hope for stillness on the water today; several of the older boys were splashing each other with their oars and rocking one another’s canoes. Their laughter was almost as loud as the band’s music.
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 4