“It’s such a lovely story,” Diana thought, yawning on her pillow. “I should write it all out in a letter to Anne.”
Anne would, no doubt, find the whole idea thrilling. But Diana snuffed her lamp and lay back with a stormy sigh. What if Anne replied wishing to know what these imagined suitors looked like, talked like? There was only one boy Diana could picture in the role of the gentleman on bended knee with his hat in his hand, waiting in tense, manfully stoic silence for Diana’s answer.
But Diana never wrote of him in her letters to Anne. Anne simply wouldn’t suffer to read that boy’s name.
Diana did see that very boy several days later, and had occasion to talk to him, too. She and Anne had worked out a new method of communication. Concerned about potential meddling from the Pye camp, Diana and Anne agreed to use the oak tree at the back of the school yard as their private mail depot. It had a hollow about shoulder height, with a small opening just big enough for a girl’s hand to fit through. The space inside remained dry throughout the winter. Diana was lurking around the oak after school had let out, retrieving Anne’s most recent correspondence and depositing something of her own: the cover of a pattern catalogue, which she had pilfered from the bottom of her mother’s sewing basket. The cover featured several dresses with puff sleeves, and Diana knew what a passion Anne had for the style. She didn’t know that Gilbert Blythe had also lingered after Mr. Phillips shut up the school house, and was watching her curiously from the porch railing.
“Hullo, Diana,” he called, just as Diana withdrew her hand from the oak trunk.
Diana jumped guiltily and turned to glare at him. “Gilbert, whatever are you doing? Everyone else has gone home.”
“I should ask what you’re doing,” he said, cheekily leaning against one of the shingled posts that held up the porch roof. “But I already know.”
“Oh, do you? Aren’t you smart,” Diana returned saucily, as was the custom when a boy and girl confronted one another in the schoolyard, about any subject.
“You’re passing notes to Anne Shirley,” Gilbert said.
Diana shoved her hands, one of which held Anne’s note, deep in the pockets of her winter coat and said nothing. She could feel the flush rising to her cheeks, though. “I can’t let him get the better of me,” she told herself, even as her heart raced. “I must be as bold to him as Anne ever was.” Though, she reminded herself, she ought to stop short of breaking a slate over his head.
“What do you know about it?” she said, and turned away with a toss of her head. She made briskly for the Birch Path.
“Wait, Diana,” Gilbert called. He dashed down the porch steps and fell in beside her. “Don’t be mad now. I won’t tell anyone.”
Diana eyed him dubiously as they walked.
“I promise,” he said with solemn emphasis. Then he brightened. “Say, how about if I walk you home? You always go by the back way, don’t you, instead of the road?”
Diana bit her lip so she wouldn’t grin too broadly, thereby ruining her poised demeanor. No boy had ever offered to walk her home before. And for the first one to be Gilbert… ! “All right, I suppose,” she said airily, as if she was used to being accompanied by boys every day. “But you mustn’t tell anybody about the tree. It’s the only way Anne and I can be friends now. If Mother ever found out, she would forbid me from going anywhere near that tree, and she’d be ever so cross with me, and everything would be ruined.”
“You and Anne aren’t allowed to be friends?” Gilbert asked as they left the spruce grove behind and crossed the Avonlea Road. The Birch Path stretched before them. The birch trunks were palisades of the purest silver, gleaming faintly in the last pale light of afternoon.
“Not since… well…” Diana hesitated, lowering her face to watch her own feet tread the frosty ground. What ought she to say? Gilbert was a nice boy most of the time, but he did have a penchant for mischief. She was lucky that word of her disastrous brush with the “raspberry cordial” hadn’t escaped to circulate around the town. She aimed to keep it that way. “Not since Anne accidentally made me sick. But I wasn’t very sick; I was better by the next day. Mother thought Anne did it on purpose, though, and she absolutely forbids us to be friends. It’s terribly unfair, Gilbert. I’ve never had a friend like Anne before.”
“She is… well… different, isn’t she?”
Diana heard the somewhat wistful note in Gilbert’s voice. She glanced up at him and saw that his eyes were distant, his smile strangely hopeful. It was clear he didn’t mean “different” as an insult.
“I’ve never known anyone like her,” Diana admitted quietly.
“You don’t talk to her at all anymore?” Gilbert said.
“Only in our letters. It’s the only way I can manage, without Mother hearing about it and coming down on me.”
“Does she ever… well… has she ever mentioned me in her letters, Diana?”
Diana laughed. “Indeed, no! She’s furious with you, Gilbert.”
“All because I twitted her about her hair.” He sounded regretful. “Do you think she’ll ever forgive me, Diana?”
Diana didn’t know what to tell him. Anne’s passions were vast, impressive things, just as whole-hearted and all-encompassing as the loves and hatreds of the most romantic heroines in the grandest of stories. Diana thought it entirely possible that Anne could carry her dislike of Gilbert Blythe to the grave.
“Well, she must forgive you at some point,” Diana replied practically, though she wasn’t at all convinced, herself. “After all, it was just a comment about her hair. No one can stay mad over such a thing forever, can they?”
“You’re so steady and thoughtful,” Gilbert said suddenly, beaming at her as they passed Violet Vale and skirted the snow-drifted hay fields. “That’s what I like about you, Diana.”
Her cheeks flamed, and she looked away quickly so he wouldn’t see her blush. She wanted to say, “Do you really like me, Gilbert?” But no words would come.
“Seeing as how you are so steady,” he continued, kicking a rock down the lane, “maybe you can write to Anne and tell her she ought to forgive me. She’ll listen to you; I know she will.”
The blush faded from Diana’s cheeks, replaced by the sting of winter cold. So the talk had come around to Anne again. A painful weight had settled in Diana’s stomach. She loved Anne and missed her terribly. But… why couldn’t Gilbert like Diana for her own merits? “Even without Anne beside me,” she thought miserably, “I am still in her shadow.” It was clear now to Diana that she had no chance of catching Gilbert’s eye with Anne as her best friend.
They reached the foot bridge, nestled in the gray-and-white division between Orchard Slope and Green Gables. Gilbert turned to look at the neighboring farm, the stout white house with its dark-green roof peak standing out sharp against the dimming clouds. There was a golden light twinkling in the window of the east gable—Anne’s room, though Gilbert didn’t know that. He turned to Diana with hope sparkling in his hazel eyes. “Please say you’ll write to Anne,” he implored. “I’ll owe you a favor if you do, and I’ll be so grateful.”
Diana offered a tremulous smile, but she really wanted to frown and even to cry. She was grateful that the cold made her eyes dry; otherwise she might actually have burst into tears. “He is so handsome,” she thought angrily. “Why is it so hard to say ‘no’ to a handsome boy?”
“I’ll… I’ll write to her,” Diana faltered. “Maybe I can convince her.”
Gilbert’s grin broadened. “Thanks, Diana. You’re a real friend. Well… good night.” He tipped his cap to her, then sauntered away toward the long bridge that crossed Barry’s Pond. Beyond lay the eastward bend of the Avonlea Road, and the Blythe homestead tucked away in the sleeping, barren fields.
Diana watched him go in a pinched, pained silence. “Anne was all he talked about,” she said to herself. “All we talked about. She had bewitched us both, I suppose. There isn’t any hope for me if I can’t get out of her shadow… no
ne at all! What am I to grow up to be, if I can’t stand out and make a way in the world? Why, I’ll be just no one forever. Forgotten and ignored. No, I won’t write to Anne… about Gilbert or anything else. I won’t leave any more presents in the oak tree, either. I must make other friends, find other girls to be my chums. I want friends who are nice and fun, like Anne, but who will still give me a fighting chance.”
Thus decided, Diana cast one lingering look at the light in Anne’s window. Then she trudged up the hill to Orchard Slope. But no matter how quickly she walked, she couldn’t outpace the weight of regret that dragged along behind her.
Diana Dares
Christmas came and went in a bright flurry of holly and ivy and evergreens, and candles glowing merrily at every windowpane in Avonlea. Diana always loved Christmas-time, not least because her mother loved the season and always drifted through Christmas in a splendid mood.
Mrs. Barry spent the two weeks of Christmas vacation flitting about a kitchen that was always warm from the prodigious amounts of baking that determined lady undertook. The whole house smelled richly of cinnamon and cloves and fresh-made breads. Diana was glad to join her mother in the kitchen, lending a hand with the cookies and pies and delicious roasts Mrs. Barry prepared. They sang songs of the Nativity as they worked side by side, and not once did a quarrel arise between them, even when Mrs. Barry’s considerable talents in the kitchen were taxed to their limits by the rigorous schedule of parties and visits and cake exchanges with her sewing circle and society friends.
Diana and Minnie May were each given new felt coats and hats with matching mittens and scarves. They looked as charming as could be, dressed alike and standing side by side in the snow to wait for the sleigh that would take them on a ride across the frozen fields. That Christmas was the happiest time Diana could recall in many months. She hadn’t felt so glad in her heart since she and Anne had first initiated their friendship. And the busy, bright whirl of the season swept thoughts of Anne away from Diana’s mind… most of the time… so that she didn’t always feel the confusing ache in her heart that arose whenever she thought too much of Anne and Gilbert and the letter he so desperately wanted Diana to write.
Those thoughts only came at night, when, brushing out her long, dark curls at her small mirror, Diana would catch sight of the light flickering in the east gable across the fields. Then she would remember the good times she’d had with Anne before… in a time that felt “long, long ago,” as stories often say. Sometimes she only sat and gazed out her window toward Green Gables, which now seemed to reside beyond an uncrossable gulf. Sometimes she repented of her decision to cut off communication with Anne, and got out paper and pencil, determined to write and spill out the jumble of her feelings. But she never made a single mark. Diana didn’t know what she could possibly say now, nor where she might begin.
Sometimes the light in the east gable would blink out the rhythms of the secret code Anne and Diana had developed, a signal to summon one another to the Dryad’s Bubble to exchange secrets that were too exciting to keep. In those moments, Diana would watch Anne’s lamp flare and darken and flare again. It was a like a hand reaching out through endless dark, desperate for a friend’s touch, yearning for an end to her isolation. But Diana could never quite convince herself to signal back.
The Christmas vacation came to a close and the Avonlea School opened its doors once again, welcoming its young scholars back refreshed and invigorated from their celebrations. Minnie May had caught a fearfully bad cold, and Diana was afraid she’d take it, too, and miss the first days of school. She was determined to re-enter Avonlea School society and venture whole-heartedly into new friendships.
In the schoolyard she caught sight of a bright bit of something protruding from the hole in the old oak tree, and all her conflicted feelings about Anne came rushing back to her at once. She approached the tree cautiously when she was certain no other children were watching. Inside was a small parcel wrapped in red paper and tied with a bit of pink ribbon. Diana pocketed the gift and went inside, as Prissy Andrews had begun to ring the bell with vigor. But all day long, Diana found it impossible to concentrate on her spelling and history. She was aware of nothing but the small gift in her skirt pocket; the temptation to open it then and there was great, but Diana knew it would only attract attention from the other children—perhaps even from Mr. Phillips.
At last the school day ended. Diana raced home, her hands tingling with the desire to open the gift and learn what Anne had to say to her… if indeed Anne had sent along a note at all. She hung up her new coat and scarf on the peg beside the kitchen stove, then rushed up to her bedroom and shut herself away. Diana flung herself across her bed and examined the parcel carefully, admiring the way Anne had folded the red paper so neatly, the simple prettiness of the pink bow.
She untied the bow and let the red paper fall open. It revealed a match box, decorated with a stamped scene of horses pulling a sleigh. Diana slid the box open. Inside was a slender bracelet made of braided, multi-colored thread and decorated with a single blue glass bead. And beneath the bracelet was the neat, square fold that always identified one of Anne’s letters.
Diana pulled the letter from the box, unfolded it, and read eagerly.
Dearest Diana
How I miss you and your letters! I walked up to the schoolhouse almost every day during Christmas vacation to see if you had left anything for me to find in our tree. I do not know why you no longer write to me, but I suppose your mother found out and won’t let you. I hope it is only that. I don’t want to think that you have decided you don’t love me after all, or even like me, and that you’ve given up on the dream that we may still be true friends one day. But most of the time my imagination gets the better of me and I think exactly that. O, Diana! If I have done anything to hurt you, I am tremendously sorry and will carry the shame and regret with me all of my life, even unto my grave, for you are the last person I would ever wish to upset. I never had a friend until you. Maybe I am not very good at tending friendships because I had so little experience to begin with, and made a mistake that most girls would have known to avoid. If so, I beg you to forgive me and to grant me another chance to prove myself worthy. To be without you, even as my secret friend of letters, is a misery that CRUSHES me under a weight of sorrow. The other girls in school are nice to me, but they all think I’m queer and don’t understand or appreciate my fancies like you do, dear Diana. I can’t be myself with anyone but you. And I don’t want to be myself with anyone else, for the truest and best Anne is the Anne who has her Diana beside her.
Aside from being in the depths of despair, Christmas was fairly jolly. One of Marilla’s and Matthew’s cousins came to visit, an old lady from Halifax. She was not as thrilling as I imagined a real Haligonian to be. I thought because she came from a city, there would be something dazzling and splendid about her, because just the idea of a city is so thrilling all by itself. But she seemed like the kind of person who would fit right in here in Avonlea. She didn’t have any good stories about the city, and mostly talked about her aching joints and how bad the boat ride was to P.E.I. and how bad the trains were. I got the impression that it is a fearful nuisance to travel when you are an old lady. I made up my mind that I will do all my traveling while I am still young, so I will have plenty of interesting things to say about it when I go on visits and talk to younger people about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. I do want to travel someday, but I also don’t want to leave the island because it is so pretty and pleasant and comfortable here. Sometimes I think there can’t really be anywhere as nice as our island, even though great cities like Paris and Boston have such glamorous reputations. Anyway, I got some good new stockings and a felt cap from Marilla for my Christmas present, and Matthew gave me some nice peppermints and some pretty pencils. I am so grateful. It’s nice to be given presents, isn’t it? It makes you feel so warm and cozy on the inside, to be remembered with something special, even if it is only pencils with striped
paper on the outside. I am using one of my new pencils to write this letter. It is green with pink stripes, very fetching. I’ll be sorry when I’ve used it all down to a stub.
I made this bracelet for you out of Marilla’s leftover embroidery thread. She says I am hopeless at embroidering things so I might as well do something else useful with the thread instead of tangling and knotting it all up trying to make a proper sampler. (I don’t understand the point of samplers anyhow.) So I braided it and used this bead, which one of the girls gave me when I got back to school, for a fastener. I think it will fit your wrist perfectly because I remember exactly what you look like and how big you are, even though circumstances have held us far apart. I hope that you will wear it, dearest Diana. It is a symbol of my everlasting devotion to you. But if you don’t wear it, I won’t be mad at you. I never could be mad at you for anything, and that’s why I hope I haven’t offended you with some unintended slight.
Until we may meet in friendship again, I am
Despairing but ever hopeful,
Anne Shirley
As soon as she finished reading the note, Diana pressed her face down into her pillow and wept. The guilt that had formerly dragged behind her now hung as heavy on her as a cape made of lead. “Anne,” she thought passionately, “I’m so mixed up inside! I don’t know whether to be angry with you or not, and if I am, I don’t know why, exactly, or how to make myself stop feeling this way!” Diana suspected very much that it had been a grave mistake to stop writing her letters to Anne, not because Anne was now heartbroken—which was tragic enough to contemplate—but because she herself felt lost and disoriented in the tangled forest of their relation. How did one rekindle friendship’s flame when cold, bitter winds had snuffed it out?
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 13