Just when Diana was convinced that Anne’s composure was entirely unassailable, Gilbert found the chink in her armor. In a final attempt to ruffle her feathers, he reached across the aisle, picked up one of Anne’s braids, and whispered, “Carrots!”
Anne’s attention fell on Gilbert so hard and fast that the color actually drained from his face. Diana couldn’t see Anne’s face from where she sat, but she could see Gilbert’s, and his expression told her everything she needed to know. Gilbert gaped at Anne in surprise, his hazel eyes wide and startled, so Diana felt sure that Anne’s gray eyes must be positively blazing with fury. She reached out a trembling hand to try to restrain her friend, but it was too late. Anne sprang to her feet.
“You mean, hateful boy!” Anne shrieked. Everybody in the schoolhouse looked up from their lessons with a thrill of excitement.
Diana alone was not delighted by the scene. She could hear tears in her friend’s voice. She reached out again, trying to pull Anne back down to her seat before Mr. Phillips could descend upon her, but Anne darted like lightning, seizing her slate from the desk-top. She raised the slate high above her head and—crack!—smashed it down, right on Gilbert Blythe’s head.
The girls screamed. The boys released a collective groan of sympathy. A moment later the school erupted into chaos, with boys jumping up from their desks to point and laugh at Gilbert, and girls hugging each other in fits of hysterics. Ruby Gillis started to cry again. Through it all, Anne stood stock-still with her fists balled at her sides, trembling and glaring at her tormentor. Gilbert looked up at her rather blearily, slumping at his desk with pieces of cracked slate scattered about him.
Silence returned to the room when Mr. Phillips laid hold of Anne by one thin shoulder. He scolded Anne roundly, but Gilbert stood up from his desk, swaying slightly.
“It was my fault, Mr. Phillips. I teased her.”
Diana goggled at him. Gilbert had never admitted to teasing any girl before. She thought it was extremely gallant. But Mr. Phillips was unimpressed by Gilbert’s admission.
“I am sorry to see a pupil of mine displaying such a temper and such a vindictive spirit,” he said sternly. Then he directed Anne to stand at the front of the room, right in front of the blackboard, for the remainder of the school day.
Diana writhed with sympathy. It was the worst thing she could imagine, to be stood up on the platform, with every student’s eyes upon you. “Oh, Anne,” she said under her breath.
Anne went resolutely to her doom. She stood straight and stiff on the platform, her small white face fixed on a point above all the students’ heads so she would not have to meet any of their eyes… not Gertie and Josie Pye, not weeping Ruby Gillis, and certainly not Gilbert Blythe, who was by now blushing with remorse. Anne would barely even glance at Diana, who brimmed over with such powerful sympathy for her friend that she thought she might weep.
Mr. Phillips stalked up to Anne and snatched a piece of chalk from the tray. He wrote above her head, “Ann Shirley has a very bad temper. Ann Shirley must learn to control her temper.” Then he read the sentences aloud so there could be no mistake about it.
Anne glanced up at the blackboard once, then turned to glare out over the class again, pressing her lips together in a furious white line. Mr. Phillips had spelled her name without an E: an unbearable insult added to injury.
A Grave Injustice
The following day found Avonlea muted beneath a blanket of gray cloud. September was releasing its last hold on the soft greens of summer; trees and hedges blazed with autumnal glories as October prepared to make her grand entrance, and the morning air was sharp with the promise of early frosts to come. Anne was unusually quiet as Diana walked with her to school. A hectic flush darkened her complexion, telling Diana all she needed to know about the thoughts tumbling unchecked through Anne’s mind. Anne was so distracted by her anger—and the humiliation she’d been forced to bear the day before, standing up before the entire class—that she never remarked once on the crisp, delicate beauty of the season. Nor did she seem to notice the rabbits that darted across the Birch Path as the girls made their way through the woods.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to engage Anne in light-hearted conversation, Diana clutched her friend’s arm in desperation and wailed, “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t be so angry! You can’t go on hating Gilbert forever.”
Anne stiffened, lifting her pointed chin, staring straight ahead with icy resolution. “You know how I feel, Diana. My mind is made up. I cannot ever forgive Gilbert Blythe for the awful thing he said to me. I shall be forever set against him. We are mortal enemies, from this day forward. No… from yesterday forward. It’s history now, Diana—a grave history between us. One can’t ever undo what is in the past.”
“But one can forgive.” Imploringly, Diana pulled Anne closer. And all the while, as she tried to convince Anne to grant some leniency to Gilbert Blythe, a tiny voice shrieked at her from inside her head. “Don’t stop this,” the voice cried. “Let Anne be cross with Gilbert forever. That way you will have a chance someday to catch his eye.”
Diana ignored the voice—or tried to. She had no desire to set her heart against Anne, the only true and loving friend she’d ever had. The very last thing she wanted was for things to spoil between herself and her bosom friend, for Anne to become as distant and disagreeable to her as was Gertie Pye. “If I let jealousy rule me, I shall hate Anne,” Diana thought morosely. “For there’s no one more popular in school or in town, no girl as well-liked. She may have started life as an orphan, but she has won every heart in Avonlea. Even Gilbert Blythe’s. If I am not to be her friend, then I must be her enemy, like the Pye girls… and I don’t want to feel spiteful and bad-tempered like them.”
(It must be stated here that Diana Barry was remarkably clear-headed for a girl of only eleven years!)
But Anne would hear no more on the subject of Gilbert, and now refused even to speak his name. Diana was forced to let it drop, for fear that Anne would grow angry with her, too. An uncomfortable, heavy silence accompanied them the rest of the way to the schoolhouse. They reached the yard before Prissy Andrews appeared to ring the bell. Diana embraced Anne impulsively beside the stout little bell-tower. “You are still my friend, Anne Shirley, no matter what. I do hope that someday you’ll forgive… that person… but even if you never do, I will always treasure you.”
Anne stared at Diana, her soulful eyes wide and shining with emotion. “Diana. I treasure thee more than silver and gold and heaps of pearls and rubies and sapphires.”
Diana smiled cautiously at this. She always found it secretly amusing when Anne used poetic language, but she never dared to laugh about it. The merest hint of affection could send Anne off in a bout of starry sentimentality.
“We must never be separated,” Anne went on passionately, clinging to both of Diana’s hands. “Never, never! Now that I’ve found a true friend, I cannot bear to spend my days apart from thee. It’s a good thing we go to school together, or else I am fairly sure my heart would break and I’d waste away from lonesomeness.”
“There’s Prissy, about to ring the bell. Let’s go in to our desk now.”
“All right, but you must hold my hand to guide me. I will have to shut my eyes so I won’t see that person.”
“Really, Anne, I think it’s safe to walk with your eyes open. If you see Gil… I mean, that person, just look away quickly and it will be the same as if you’d never seen him at all.”
Anne drew a very deep breath, as if steadying herself for a charge into battle. Mind made up, she let the breath out again in an explosive rush. “All right. I will keep my eyes open. But you must sit on the aisle side. He mustn’t be able to touch my hair again. Just thinking about what he said makes me wild with indignation!”
Anne weathered the morning lessons without her indignation boiling over, though Diana, seated between her and Gilbert Blythe, could feel her friend quiver with anger whenever Mr. Phillips called upon her hated enemy to d
eliver an answer or spell a word. Poor Diana felt torn between her loyalty to Anne and excitement at being a few feet closer to the handsome Gilbert. For his part, Gilbert, who had apologized the previous day after school had let out (even though his head was no doubt still smarting from Anne’s slate), kept casting surreptitious glances across the aisle at Anne. His face was full of remorse. He even attempted to whisper more apologies while the teacher was distracted, but they fell on deaf ears. While Mr. Phillips wrote on the blackboard with his back turned to the class, Diana caught Gilbert’s eye and offered him a sympathetic smile. He smiled sheepishly back, and the glow it ignited in Diana’s chest stayed with her until lunch time.
That day, Mr. Phillips announced to the class that he must return to his home for the dinner hour. He had some business there which needed urgent attention. “But I shall return at the end of the hour,” he admonished, “and I expect to find all of you in your seats when I do return. Anyone who comes back late will be punished. Am I understood?”
The class murmured their assent, and Mr. Phillips dismissed the children to their free hour.
Now, without a shepherd to guide them toward more sensible pasture, the children embarked together for Mr. Bell’s spruce grove, skipping and singing and tussling as they went. The spruce grove was a favorite gathering place for Avonlea School pupils. Occasionally, in the earliest weeks of the school year and later, when spring began to give way to summer, the teacher would indulge his students’ restlessness and arrange for outdoor lessons. Then the children would sit on the springy, loamy ground beneath the trees, on cushions of fallen needles that smelled of green sap amid cool, soothing shadows. Mr. Bell had no objection to the scholars roaming about his spruce grove with proper supervision. However, an entire school of children left to their own devices was another matter altogether. The children knew they risked Mr. Bell’s ire if they made too free a use of his grove. Whenever they played in the grove, they always intended merely to pick golden nuts of spruce gum from the branches, chew them to savor the earthy, refreshing taste, and then return to the schoolhouse like good boys and girls. Yet somehow their best intentions never managed to hold. The enchantment of the grove was too strong for them. Before long they were ranging far and wide beneath the blue-green, shadowy boughs, wandering down the hill toward the road, and even climbing up into the spruces.
Diana picked a nut of gum quickly and popped it into her mouth, then joined Anne on the far edge of the grove. Anne had found a patch of rice lilies, tricked into an autumn bloom by the warmth of the preceding weeks, growing down among the dainty feet of the tall ferns. Together she and Diana plucked up the nodding, checkered-brown blossoms and wove them into a crown, along with a few newly opened, pale-purple asters, the heralds of October.
“These brown lilies will look real pretty with your hair,” Diana said. “Brown is your color.”
“Do you think so?” Anne had left her straw hat back in the schoolhouse; she set the crown of lilies gently atop her ruddy head. “Brown is a good, sensible color, I suppose, and I should be glad it looks good on me, because it can be very elegant. But it’s only really elegant on older ladies—the kind who are grand dames with mantles of dignity—isn’t it? It’s not a very good color for a girl.”
“Any color is a good one,” said sensible Diana, “as long as it brings out your best.”
“Pink would be so delicate and sweet, though,” sighed Anne. “Or a soft, pale purple, like these asters here. You’re lucky you have such dark hair, Diana. You can wear any color you please. And Ruby… what I wouldn’t give for hair like hers! Hair like strands of golden floss, spun on a fairy’s spindle. Ruby can wear any color she likes, too. I try not to be ungrateful, because I know I am very fortunate now that I’m here in Avonlea and not in the asylum anymore, or in Mrs. Hammond’s care, so I shouldn’t complain about anything. But if pink looked becoming on me I do think I could finally manage to be rapturously happy all the time, and never feel dismayed about anything.”
“Not about anything?” Diana teased.
“Nothing. Because if pink were my color, then I wouldn’t have red hair, and then the last of my sorrows in this world would be undone.” Anne narrowed her eyes, glaring across the spruce grove at Gilbert Blythe, who was swinging by his hands from a spruce bough. She muttered hoarsely, “Carrots!”
Diana sighed. “You must let it drop someday, Anne.”
“I must not! And I never will. Just try me, Diana.” Anne folded her arms stubbornly across her chest. With her crown of delicate rice lilies and her pale, pointed face, she looked like the most determined fairy-queen the woods had ever seen.
“Some spruce gum will make you feel better. It’s impossible to be cross when you’ve got a chew.”
“I’ve never had spruce gum before.”
“It’s delicious,” Diana promised. “I’ll go pick you a nice fat piece. Mine has already lost its flavor anyhow, so I need another. Wait here; I’ll be back before you know it.”
Diana skipped off into the depths of the grove, among the circles of playing children. She busied herself with inspecting the trunks of the trees, looking for two good pieces of gum, just the right size to soften and chew easily, and of the amber-gold color that meant a pleasant, piney taste. As she broke off a few pieces and picked the bits of bark and needles from their surface, someone sidled up to her with a hesitant, shuffling gait.
“Hello, Diana.”
She looked up in surprise, her heart thumping. It was Gilbert Blythe. She didn’t know what to say to him, and wasn’t sure she could trust her tongue to function properly anyhow, so she only stared at him, wide-eyed.
“You’re Anne’s closest friend. Is she really that cross with me?”
“She’s awful sore, Gilbert,” Diana said, finding her voice at last. “You shouldn’t have twitted her about her hair.”
“I know that now.” He grinned ruefully and rubbed his head in exactly the spot where the slate had cracked down. “Don’t you think you can talk to her for me? Make her see that I’m sorry?”
“I’ve already tried. She’s dead set in her ways. She’s determined not to like you now, and I don’t think there’s anything in all the world that can make Anne Shirley change her mind once she’s set it.”
Gilbert’s grin slid away. He gazed across the grove at Anne, who drifted among the ferns with a distant, dreamy expression on her face. Now and then she bent to pluck up a flower, and her lips moved rhythmically, as if she were singing to herself, lost in her world of rosy fancy.
Diana bit her lip, glancing at Gilbert from the corner of her eye. “I’ll… I’ll try to convince her,” she said. “Maybe I can—”
At that moment, a panicked shout rang out from high above. “Master’s coming!” Jimmy Glover, perched high up in the nearest spruce like a crow on a rooftop, was sounding the alarm.
“Oh, dear!” Diana spun this way and that as the children ran past her, emerging from all directions. Like a herd of frightened deer, they sprang out of the shadows and thicket-veiled dells, running as fast as they could go toward the schoolhouse. In the chaos, Diana ran with the other girls, never thinking to stop and wait for Anne.
It wasn’t until she was back on the schoolhouse porch, panting and gasping, that she realized Anne was not among her other friends. Diana clutched her hand tight around the spruce gum and stared back toward the grove. The girls, who hadn’t climbed up into the trees, made it back to the school with enough time to spare—but the boys were not so fortunate. They had lost precious time in scrambling down from their perches, and now ran as one frantic mass toward the schoolhouse. And there among them, white and frail-looking in her calico dress, was Anne. She had wandered too far in her private musings; she was stuck with the rowdy, hooting, shoving band of boys.
“Come on, Diana,” Ruby squealed. She seized Diana by the arm and dragged her toward the door. “Mr. Phillips will punish you if you’re caught out of your seat!”
Diana could see Mr. Philli
ps now, coming up the lane with a terse, angry stride. No doubt he had noted the stampede of boys as they thundered up from the spruce grove.
With a sob of remorse, Diana followed Ruby into the schoolhouse and dropped numbly into her seat.
Mr. Phillips burst into the room a moment later. The girls rustled in their seats, like hens in a coop when the fox has slipped inside. The schoolmaster stared silently around the room, his mustache quivering with the words he only just managed to hold back. He hung his hat on the peg beside the door and strode grimly to the platform at the front of the room.
Just as he reached it, the door flew open and a fountain of boys poured into the room. And there in their midst, flushed and winded with her tousled hair pulling itself right out of her braids, was Anne.
Anne fought her way up the aisle to her desk. She fell into the seat beside Diana and huddled down, trying to avoid Mr. Phillips’s eye. But she was to find no mercy at his hands. He couldn’t mete out the promised punishment on every boy in the classroom—half of Avonlea School! Instead he let the full force of his wrath fall upon Anne’s narrow shoulders.
“Anne Shirley,” he said coldly, “since you seem to be so fond of the boys’ company, we shall indulge your taste for it this afternoon. You will sit with Gilbert Blythe. And take those flowers out of your hair.”
Diana gasped. To sit with the boys was scandalous enough, but for Anne to be relegated to Gilbert’s seat…! She knew how her friend must burn with helpless fury. But there was nothing to be done now, except follow Mr. Phillips’s command. Diana gently removed the wreath, which was falling apart by now, from Anne’s hair.
Anne did not move. She only stared at the schoolmaster, blank with shock or anger or both.
“Did you hear what I said, Anne?” Mr. Phillips said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied in a small, perfectly controlled voice. “But I didn’t suppose you really meant it.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 8