But a rehearsal is a world apart from a concert. On Christmas night, at the Avonlea meeting hall, the school’s pupils flocked nervously around Miss Stacy as she directed them to their places. The hall was beginning to fill with the children’s families and neighbors, greeting one another merrily, their coats and hats still smelling of horses and winter cold.
The performers were seated in two rows of chairs that spread out from the stage like wings, so that even while they awaited their turn on the stage, each child was still clearly visible to everyone in the audience. Ruby Gillis, who was on the other side of the room from where Anne and Diana sat, was already crumbling under the scrutiny. She dabbed at her red eyes with a handkerchief while Carrie Sloane and Julia Bell tried in vain to comfort her. Gilbert was across the hall, too, lounging unconcernedly in his chair and looking distressingly handsome in wool trousers with suspenders and perfectly shined shoes.
Anne, seated to Diana’s left, fidgeted on her hard chair. She was dressed in a lovely new dress of brown gloria with puffed sleeves. It was the perfect shade, mellowing the brassiness of her hair to a nearly auburn hue and keeping a hint of color in her cheeks despite her wide-eyed, pale-skinned worry. Diana had helped her clip a few small, hot-house tea roses into her hair, a becoming shade of ivory-white.
“Oh, I’m terribly afraid,” Anne whispered. “What if I forget my lines?”
“Nonsense,” Diana said stoutly, though she felt as if her insides had turned to syrup. “You’ll do fine, Anne. Really, there’s no one better than you at reciting.”
As the girls clutched each other’s hands and went on whispering encouragement, a shy, hesitant figure approached with shuffling steps. Diana didn’t see, for she was focused on whispering in Anne’s ear about how dreadful Josie Pye looked in olive-green, but when Anne kicked her ankle she sat up and looked around.
Fred Wright stood before her, shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, his red face even redder than usual as he smiled timidly at Diana.
“Merry Christmas, Diana,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, Fred.”
“I got a gift for you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny box made from folded card. It was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
Diana cast a wondering glance at Anne, who nodded in encouragement.
“Th… thank you, Fred. But I’m afraid I didn’t get anything for you.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Fred said gamely. “Go on, open it.”
Diana took the box and slid off its lid. Inside was a tiny, pink enamel charm, shaped like a heart. She had never received a gift of that kind from a boy before. Diana was struck quite dumb by the shock.
“I saw that you have a charm bracelet with little silver hearts on it,” Fred said quickly, as if he felt he must explain such outrageous behavior. The poor boy’s face had turned a truly alarming shade of red. “So I thought you might like one with some color.”
“It’s perfectly beautiful,” Anne said effusively. “Fred, you are so thoughtful and I know Diana is thrilled but she’s so overcome with nerves due to her upcoming solo that she can hardly speak anyhow. Here, Diana; let me fasten it on the bracelet for you.”
Diana giggled nervously as Anne did just that. The charm fit in well with the tiny silver hearts and stars of Aunt Josephine’s bracelet.
“Gosh, Fred,” Diana finally managed, “that was awful nice of you. I’m so glad. But…” She glanced across the room at Gilbert, who was deep in conversation with Charlie Sloane. “But…” Anne was a solid force beside her, brimming with energy, and Diana could already hear the rebuke her friend would deliver if she so much as mentioned Gilbert’s name. “But the concert is about to start,” Diana finally gasped as Mr. Allan took the stage to announce the start of the show.
Fred scampered away to his seat, and with a flurry of applause, the show began.
Diana was the first to be called to the stage, which was an unexpected change from the rehearsed order. But Ruby Gillis was, for the moment, inconsolable with hysteria and could not go on. For one terrible, frozen moment, Diana sat stunned in her chair, not knowing what she should do. It seemed an impossible feat just to rise and walk the few steps to the stage, and then to climb its steps… no, she could never do it!
Anne squeezed her hand. “It’s better this way,” she whispered quickly. “Then you’ll be all done and you won’t have to fret about your performance anymore.”
“All right,” Diana said, as stoically as she could manage. She forced herself to stand and managed to step up onto the stage without stumbling.
Never in her life had Diana felt so conscious of her own appearance. In a dark blue dress with modest puffs at the sleeves, and with Aunt Josephine’s cameo necklace hanging at her throat, she knew she looked as neat and fine as a girl her age could look. But still she felt small and insignificant, and had the uncomfortable certainty that the whole meeting hall was about to burst into laughter—laughing at her—although every face was turned to her with smiling, friendly encouragement.
The accompanist struck up the bold, opening chords of the song, and then there was nothing for it but to sing. Diana closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the audience. She imagined only two people sat in the chair before her: Miss Stacy and Aunt Josephine. It was easy to feel that Josephine was there, with the cameo lying cool against her skin. “Let your light shine brightly,” she imagined Miss Stacy saying. And then, at just the right point in the music, Diana sang out with all the conviction in her spirit:
Angels, from the realms of glory,
Wing your flight o’er all the earth;
Ye who sang creation’s story,
Now proclaim Messiah’s birth.
* * *
Come and worship,
Come and worship,
Worship Christ, the newborn king.
She felt like an angel herself as the piano carried her on great, soaring swells of glory. After the first chorus, she forgot all about the stage, the audience, and even the little pink charm dangling at her wrist. She could hear how sweet her voice was… how it blended with the chords of the piano and found each note with delightful ease. She opened her eyes and looked out at the audience as she sang. And there was her mother, smiling with a hand at her throat as if the sound of Diana’s voice had moved her that much… and Father, grinning openly with Minnie May on his knee. And there, standing at the back of the hall and beaming as if the accomplishment were her own, was Miss Stacy.
When the song ended, the audience erupted in applause. Diana, with a thrilling new kind of wobbliness overtaking her, managed to give a rather weak curtsey. She had done it! She could scarcely believe it, but she had stood up and performed in front of almost the whole of Avonlea.
“Encore!” someone called. And then another voice echoed back, “Encore!”
Diana hadn’t prepared for this. She turned to gape at Anne, helpless and disbelieving. Anne stared back at her with stars gleaming in her eyes. Her hands were clasped before her in a gesture of awed affection.
“What should I do?” Diana mouthed at Anne.
“Sing,” Anne replied.
Diana conferred quickly with the pianist, and then gave a brief rendition of “Old Russell’s Hen,” just long enough to satisfy those who called for her encore. When she was finished, she rushed off the stage and fell back into her seat, glowing with the pride of accomplishment.
Anne wrapped her in a long embrace while the hall was still ringing with applause. “Oh, Diana, weren’t you just wonderful? I always knew you could sing beautifully, but now everyone else knows it, too, and I’m glad—I’m so glad! I couldn’t be happier or prouder if I’d earned all that applause.”
“Anne, you’re such a dear,” Diana said, wondering yet again how she ever could have felt so peevish toward her friend.
To everything there is a season, and Anne’s season came in due time. Mr. Allan called her up to the stage several performances later; Anne froze
just as Diana had done.
“Go on,” Diana urged. “It’s not as bad as you think, Anne, honest. And after the first few moments it’s even sort of fun.”
“I can’t, Diana,” Anne said breathlessly. “What if I make a fool of myself in front of Gil… in front of everybody?”
“You won’t, Anne, I swear it. Don’t be afraid; I’ll be here watching you. Just pretend like I’m the only one in the audience, and you’ll do it fine, just like all the recitations you’ve done for me at Idlewild.”
Trembling, Anne took the stage. But neither Diana nor anyone else, least of all Anne herself, need have feared on her behalf. After one shivery moment, during which she stared out at the audience with a stricken look, Anne seemed to find her composure and her confidence all at once. She drew herself up, in as stately a posture as a girl of almost-thirteen could affect, and took her cue.
Anne gave two monologues: the first one humorous, which was given in a bouncing rhythm and lit by a gleam in Anne’s gray eyes which the whole audience found rather contagious. The second monologue was quite a departure. It was tragic and bitter, and Anne’s dramatics were so whole-hearted that Diana heard more than a few sniffles from the audience. As Anne wilted into her death scene, her heart-rending groan carried out across a hall gone perfectly silent. Then the thunder of their applause came, and as Anne picked herself up from the stage floor, Diana clapped twice as hard as anyone else. She was glad to find that there was no envy in her now. She felt as proud of Anne’s performance as if she had given it herself.
While Anne was still on the stage, Mr. Allan called up the girls who were to join her for their dialogue, “The Fairy Queen.” It was sweet and charming, and the girls looked perfectly delightful in their flower crowns and capes made from embroidered table cloths. But after Anne’s remarkable monologues, “The Fairy Queen” couldn’t help but pale a little by comparison.
When it was over, all the girls on stage clutched each other and gave stifled shrieks of victory. Together they ran off stage and returned to their places. As they went, one of the tea roses worked itself loose from Anne’s hair and fell to the ground.
“We’ll have the boys’ dialogue next,” Mr. Allan announced, “given by Fred Wright, Charlie Sloane, Billy Andrews, and Gilbert Blythe.”
The boys sprang up eagerly and made their way to the stage. But Gilbert paused and bent to the floor. He plucked up Anne’s rose and, with a small, secret grin, tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
A Departure in Styles
On a cold, early Tuesday morning in April, Diana was dressing for school by lamplight—for the day was so heavily overcast that the sunrise was hardly any brighter than dusk. Mrs. Barry was moving about in the kitchen below, preparing breakfast and starting the stew pot, too, for she would be in town for a Women’s Society gala that evening, and it would be up to Diana to set out the family’s supper. Diana was just tying her sash and looking forward to a leisurely bowl of porridge when Mrs. Barry’s muffled exclamation of “Land’s sake!” put Diana on the alert.
“Mother?” she called down the stairs.
“You had better come down here, Diana. It seems you’re wanted.”
Diana hurried to the kitchen, expecting to find that her mother had spilled something and needed help with it, or worse, that she had burned a finger on the stove. Instead, just as she arrived, there was a timid rap at the kitchen door.
“It’s Anne Shirley,” Mrs. Barry said. “I looked up and saw her coming through the garden, out there in the rain, looking just like a wraith. She nearly scared the wits out of me.”
“Something dreadful must have happened,” Diana said, making for the door. “It’s still too early for us to meet for the walk to school.”
When Diana swung the door open, she found woe personified waiting on the kitchen stoop. Anne gazed at her silently with quivering lip and teary, tragic eyes. Her black cloth coat was already soaked with rain, and she had wrapped a long plaid scarf all around her head, with its ends knotted hastily beneath her chin, and crammed a straw hat atop the scarf. Its brim dripped rain water in a disconsolate rhythm.
“Anne,” Diana exclaimed. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Oh, Diana. ‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ Mrs. Lynde has said that to me many times, though I never thought before that I was prideful or haughty, but now I see that I was. And oh, how far I have fallen! I fear I shall never recover. And I have only myself to blame for it. That’s the worst part, Diana. The very worst part.”
Diana and her mother exchanged looks of utter confusion. Then Mrs. Barry said, “You had better come in, girl, whatever is troubling you.”
Anne came in and Diana took her hat. There was a moment of expectant silence, as Diana and Mrs. Barry waited to see whether Anne would remove the plaid scarf, too. Finally, with trembling, hesitant hands, she undid the knot and unwound the scarf from around her head.
“Mercy!” Mrs. Barry said when Anne was revealed in full.
Diana couldn’t even say that much. She was shocked to pitying silence. Where Anne’s long waves of red hair had been, there was… nothing. It had all been cut away, and not as stylishly as one might have hoped. Patches of orange-red curls stood up unevenly on Anne’s head. She looked positively dreadful.
“What under the canopy happened to you, Anne?” Mrs. Barry demanded.
Anne seemed to be fighting the urge to cry. She was bravely winning that battle, though not without obvious effort. “Marilla had to cut it all off,” she said haltingly. “I… I dyed it, you see. It was terribly wicked of me to do it, and I’m paying for my sin now, so there is no need to remind me of just how bad it was.”
“Dyed it?” Diana said. “But why?”
“I wanted to have beautiful raven-black hair like yours,” Anne said in a voice that was dangerously close to a wail. “You know how I’ve always longed for black hair, Diana. I met a peddler and he had some dye, and he promised it would turn it a perfect shade of black, but it only turned green, Diana… green! You can’t imagine how dreadful I felt. But it was no more than what I deserved, for being so vain about my hair.”
“If only Marilla had sent you to me to cut it,” Mrs. Barry said. “I don’t think Marilla Cuthbert has cut a girl’s hair ever in her life!”
“If my hair looks like a patch of weeds now, please tell me right out so I can get used to the idea,” Anne said with dignified resignation. “I would rather know the truth.”
A patch of weeds was exactly what Anne’s hair looked like, but neither Diana nor Mrs. Barry was about to shatter Anne’s fragile composure by telling her the awful truth.
“You might even it up a touch, Diana,” Mrs. Barry said, going to her sewing basket for her sharpest scissors. “You’ve trimmed Minnie May’s hair before and done a fine job of it. Why don’t you take Anne up to your bedroom and the two of you can try some ways of styling it so it doesn’t look so—” She stopped herself, pressing her lips tightly together. “Well, I think you can make it look properly rakish and very fashionable if you try. And when you come down I’ll have warm scones with honey waiting for you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Barry,” Anne said, with an air of bearing an unimaginable sorrow.
The two girls stood before Diana’s mirror and took stock of the damage. Anne’s eyes were puffy and red, but she refused to let any more tears fall. She sniffled as she stared straight at herself, confronting the atrocity head-on.
“It’s not so bad,” Diana said cheerfully, snipping here and there to bring the worst of the weed patch under control. “Why, you have all this natural curl, and once you put a little oil in your hair the curls will look real neat and fetching all around your face.”
“Do you think so?”
“Just try it and see.”
Diana had a small bottle of rose oil; she showed Anne how to twist the curls around her oiled fingers so they lost most of their frizz and lay tame against her forehead and temples.
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br /> “Now all you need is a good hair ribbon. You’ll have to do a nice, big one. That’s the good thing about short hair, Anne; you can put in the biggest, showiest ribbons, and big flowers, too, and no one will think it looks overdone.”
“Let them all think whatever they will,” Anne said stoically. “I will bear their scorn as my deserved punishment for the sin of vanity.”
“Don’t be a goose,” Diana scoffed as she selected her widest blue satin ribbon. She tied it in a huge bow, just off-center from Anne’s curly crown. “There. Now you look real darling, like you did it all on purpose.”
“Oh, it will take years to grow back,” Anne said, giving sudden vent to barely suppressed despair.
“It doesn’t matter. And anyway, the most fashionable ladies are wearing their hair short now because it makes it easier to put the stylish hair pieces in. I read all about it in Mother’s Canadian Woman magazine. They buy the most intricate braids and buns and top-knots, and pin them in on top of short curls just like yours, so it looks like they have masses and masses of hair all piled up to the sky. But at night they can just take their hair off and set it aside, and go right to bed, without fussing with braids and papers and rags. Isn’t that clever?”
“It is very clever,” Anne conceded. “I think that news would even comfort me, Diana, if I had the money to buy fancy hair pieces. But I spent all my egg money on that accursed dye, and anyway, I don’t suppose egg money would be enough to get even one stylish hair braid, would it?”
“No,” Diana admitted. “I suppose not. But take heart, Anne. New styles come from somewhere, don’t they? Somebody has to be the very first to do something brave and unusual with her dress or her hair, and then everyone else follows along. Maybe you’ll set a new trend in Avonlea.”
Diana of Orchard Slope Page 22