“Well, then, in the name of humanity help me out of this.”
“I dunno’s I can,” said Little Sam dubiously. “Seems to me the only way’d be to yank you back by the legs and I can’t git round the cape to do that.”
“If you can get a good grip on my shoulders or my coat you can yank me out this way. It only wants a good pull. I can’t get my arms free to help myself.”
“And I dunno’s I will,” went on Little Sam as if he had not been interrupted.
“You — dunno’s — you — will! D’ye mean to say you’ll leave me here to die a night like this? Well, Sam Dark—”
“No; I ain’t aiming to do that. It’ll be your own fault if you’re left here. But you’ve got to show some signs of sense if I’m going to pull you out. Will you come home and behave yourself if I do?”
“If you want me to come home you know all you’ve got to do,” snapped Big Sam. “Shoot out your Roarer.”
“Aurorer stays,” said Little Sam briefly.
“Then I stay, too.” Big Sam imitated Little Sam’s brevity — partly because he had very little breath to use for talking at all.
Little Sam took out his pipe and proceeded to light it.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to reflect ‘fore I go. I don’t aim to stay long here in the damp. I dunno how a little wizened critter like you’ll stand it all night. Anyhow, you’ll have some feeling after this for the poor camel trying to get through the needle’s eye.”
“Call yourself a Christian?” sneered Big Sam.
“Don’t be peevish now. This ain’t a question of religion — this is a question of common sense,” retorted Little Sam.
Big Sam made a terrific effort to free himself but not even a tremor of the grim red headland was produced thereby.
“You’ll bust a blood-vessel in one of them spasms,” warned Little Sam. “You’d orter to see yourself with your red whiskers sticking out of that hole. And I s’pose the rest of you’s sticking out of the other side. Beautiful rear view if any one comes along. Not that any one likely will, this time o’ night. But if you’re still alive in the morning I’m going to get Prince Dark to take a snap of your hind legs. Be sensible, Sammy. I’ve got pea soup for supper — hot pea soup.”
“Take your pea soup to hell,” said Big Sam.
Followed a lot of silence. Big Sam was thinking. He knew where his extremities were now, for the cold was nipping them like a weasel. The rock around him was hard as iron. It was beginning to rain and the wind was rising. Already the showers of spray were spuming up from the beach. By morning he would be dead or gibbering.
But it was bitter to knuckle under to Little Sam and that white-limbed hussy on the clock shelf. Big Sam tried to pluck a little honour from the jaws of defeat.
“If I come back, will you promise not to marry that fat widow?”
Little Sam concealed all evidence of triumph.
“I ain’t promising nothing — but I ain’t marrying any widow, fat or lean.”
“I s’pose that means she wouldn’t have you.”
“She didn’t get the chance to have me or not have me. I ain’t contracting any alliance with the House of Terlizzick, maid or widow. Well, I’m for home and pea soup. Coming, Sammy?”
Big Sam emitted a sigh, partly of exhaustion, partly of surrender. Life was too complicated. He was beaten.
“Pull me out of this damn’ hole,” he said sourly, “and I don’t care how many naked weemen you have round.”
“One’s enough,” said Little Sam.
He got a grip somehow of Big Sam’s coat over his shoulders and tugged manfully. Big Sam howled. He was sure his legs were being torn off at the hips. Then he found that they were still attached to his body, standing on the rock beside Little Sam.
“Wring your whiskers out and hurry,” said Little Sam. “I’m afraid that pea soup’ll be scorched. It’s sitting on the back of the stove.”
V
This was comfort now — with the cold rain beating down outside and the gulf beginning to bellow. The stove was purring a lyric of beech and maple, and Mustard was licking her beautiful family under it.
Big Sam drew a long breath of satisfaction. There were many things to be talked over with Little Sam — incidents they could discuss with the calm detachment of those who lived on the fringe of the clan only. What name had really been in the envelope Dandy’s pig had eaten. The uncanny miracle of Lawson Dark’s restoration. The fact that Joscelyn Dark had got over her long fit of the sulks. The wedding of Peter and Donna and all the expense Drowned John must have gone to. All the things that had or had not happened in the clan because of Aunt Becky’s jug. And some amazing yarn of Walter Dark’s black cat that had fallen into a gallon of gasoline and come out white.
Really the pea soup was sublime.
After all, them earrings rather became Little Sam. Balanced the moustache, so to speak. And Aurorer — but what was the matter with Aurorer?
“What you bin doing with that old heathen graven immidge of yours?” demanded Big Sam, setting down half drunk his cup of militant tea with a thud.
“Give her a coat of bronze paint,” said Little Sam proudly. “Looks real tasty, don’t it? Knew you’d be sneaking home some of these long-come-shorts and thought I’d show you I could be consid’rate of your principles.”
“Then you can scrape it off again,” said Big Sam firmly. “Think I’m going to have an unclothed nigger sitting up there? If I’ve gotter be looking at a naked woman day in and day out, I want a white one for decency’s sake.”
THE END
JANE OF LANTERN HILL
McClelland & Stewart published Jane of Lantern Hill in 1937. The novel’s heroine, Jane Victoria Stuart, lives in Toronto in a family of women, ruled by her strict grandmother. Her only friend is Jody Turner, an orphan servant living in a boarding house next door. After receiving a letter from her estranged father, who lives on Prince Edward Island, Jane spends the summer with him at Lantern Hill, where she flourishes. Jane’s compassion for her friends, her desire for reconciliation between her parents, her courage under great odds, as well as several exciting adventures, all contribute to the novel’s absorbing plot. She began a sequel, entitled Jane and Jody, but did not complete it.
Montgomery dedicated Jane of Lantern Hill to one of her beloved cats, Lucky. Some of the letters from Jane’s father Andrew to her mother Robin are identical to those used in Montgomery’s story, “The Schoolmaster’s Letters,” published in Sunday Magazine in 1905.
A first edition copy of Jane of Lantern Hill
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
TO THE MEMORY OF
“LUCKY”
THE CHARMING AFFECTIONATE COMRADE OF FOURTEEN YEARS
CHAPTER 1
Gay street, so Jane always thought, did not live up to its name. It was, she felt certain, the most melancholy st
reet in Toronto . . . though, to be sure, she had not seen a great many of the Toronto streets in her circumscribed comings and goings of eleven years.
Gay Street should be a gay street, thought Jane, with gay, friendly houses, set amid flowers, that cried out, “How do you do?” to you as you passed them, with trees that waved hands at you and windows that winked at you in the twilights. Instead of that, Gay Street was dark and dingy, lined with forbidding, old-fashioned brick houses, grimy with age, whose tall, shuttered, blinded windows could never have thought of winking at anybody. The trees that lined Gay Street were so old and huge and stately that it was difficult to think of them as trees at all, any more than those forlorn little things in the green pails by the doors of the filling station on the opposite corner. Grandmother had been furious when the old Adams house on that corner had been torn down and the new white-and-red filling station built in its place. She would never let Frank get petrol there. But at that, Jane thought, it was the only gay place on the street.
Jane lived at 60 Gay. It was a huge, castellated structure of brick, with a pillared entrance porch, high, arched Georgian windows, and towers and turrets wherever a tower or turret could be wedged in. It was surrounded by a high iron fence with wrought-iron gates . . . those gates had been famous in the Toronto of an earlier day . . . that were always closed and locked by Frank at night, thus giving Jane a very nasty feeling that she was a prisoner being locked in.
There was more space around 60 Gay than around most of the houses on the street. It had quite a bit of lawn in front, though the grass never grew well because of the row of old trees just inside the fence . . . and quite a respectable space between the side of the house and Bloor Street; but it was not nearly wide enough to dim the unceasing clatter and clang of Bloor, which was especially noisy and busy where Gay Street joined it. People wondered why old Mrs Robert Kennedy continued to live there when she had oodles of money and could buy one of those lovely new houses in Forest Hill or in the Kingsway. The taxes on a lot as big as 60 Gay must be ruinous and the house was hopelessly out of date. Mrs Kennedy merely smiled contemptuously when things like this were said to her, even by her son, William Anderson, the only one of her first family whom she respected, because he had been successful in business and was rich in his own right. She had never loved him, but he had compelled her to respect him.
Mrs Kennedy was perfectly satisfied with 60 Gay. She had come there as the bride of Robert Kennedy when Gay Street was the last word in streets and 60 Gay, built by Robert’s father, one of the finest “mansions” in Toronto. It had never ceased to be so in her eyes. She had lived there for forty-five years and she would live there the rest of her life. Those who did not like it need not stay there. This, with a satirically amused glance at Jane, who had never said she didn’t like Gay Street. But grandmother, as Jane had long ago discovered, had an uncanny knack of reading your mind.
Once, when Jane had been sitting in the Cadillac, one dark, dingy morning in a snowy world, waiting for Frank to take her to St Agatha’s, as he did every day, she had heard two women, who were standing on the street-corner, talking about it.
“Did you ever see such a dead house?” said the younger. “It looks as if it had been dead for ages.”
“That house died thirty years ago, when Robert Kennedy died,” said the older woman. “Before that it was a lively place. Nobody in Toronto entertained more. Robert Kennedy liked social life. He was a very handsome, friendly man. People could never understand how he came to marry Mrs James Anderson . . . a widow with three children. She was Victoria Moore to begin with, you know, old Colonel Moore’s daughter . . . a very aristocratic family. But she was pretty as a picture then and was she crazy about him! My dear, she worshipped him. People said she was never willing to let him out of her sight for a moment. And they said she hadn’t cared for her first husband at all. Robert Kennedy died when they had been married about fifteen years . . . died just after his first baby was born, I’ve heard.”
“Does she live all alone in that castle?”
“Oh, no. Her two daughters live with her. One of them is a widow or something . . . and there’s a granddaughter, I believe. They say old Mrs Kennedy is a terrible tyrant, but the younger daughter . . . the widow . . . is gay enough and goes to everything you see reported in Saturday Evening. Very pretty . . . and can she dress! She was the Kennedy one and took after her father. She must hate having all her fine friends coming to Gay Street. It’s worse than dead . . . it’s decayed. But I can remember when Gay Street was one of the most fashionable residential streets in town. Look at it now.”
“Shabby genteel.”
“Hardly even that. Why, 58 Gay is a boarding-house. But old Mrs Kennedy keeps 60 up very well, though the paint is beginning to peel off the balconies, you notice.”
“Well, I’m glad I don’t live on Gay Street,” giggled the other, as they ran to catch the car.
“You may well be,” thought Jane. Though, if she had been put to it, she could hardly have told you where she would have liked to live if not at 60 Gay. Most of the streets through which she drove to St Agatha’s were mean and uninviting, for St Agatha’s, that very expensive and exclusive private school to which grandmother sent Jane, now found itself in an unfashionable and outgrown locality also. But St Agatha’s didn’t mind that . . . St Agatha’s would have been St Agatha’s, you must understand, in the desert of Sahara.
Uncle William Anderson’s house in Forest Hill was very handsome, with landscaped lawns and rock gardens, but she wouldn’t like to live there. One was almost terrified to walk over the lawn lest one do something to Uncle William’s cherished velvet. You had to keep to the flat stepping-stones path. And Jane wanted to run. You couldn’t run at St Agatha’s either, except when you were playing games. And Jane was not very good at games. She always felt awkward in them. At eleven she was as tall as most girls of thirteen. She towered above the girls of her class. They did not like it and made Jane feel that she fitted in nowhere.
As for running at 60 Gay . . . had anybody ever run at 60 Gay? Jane felt as if mother must have . . . mother stepped so lightly and gaily yet that you thought her feet had wings. But once, when Jane had dared to run from the front door to the back door, straight through the long house that was almost half the length of the city block, singing at the top of her voice, grandmother, who she had thought was out, had emerged from the breakfast-room and looked at her with the smile on her dead-white face that Jane hated.
“What,” she said in the silky voice that Jane hated still more, “is responsible for this outburst, Victoria?”
“I was running just for the fun of it,” explained Jane. It seemed so very simple. But grandmother had just smiled and said, as only grandmother could say things:
“I wouldn’t do it again if I were you, Victoria.”
Jane never did it again. That was the effect grandmother had on you, though she was so tiny and wrinkled . . . so tiny that lanky, long-legged Jane was almost as tall as she was.
Jane hated to be called Victoria. Yet everybody called her that, except mother, who called her Jane Victoria. Jane knew somehow that grandmother resented that . . . knew that for some reason unknown to her, grandmother hated the name of Jane. Jane liked it . . . always had liked it . . . always thought of herself as Jane. She understood that she had been named Victoria after grandmother, but she did not know where the Jane had come from. There were no Janes in the Kennedys or Andersons. In her eleventh year she had begun to suspect that it might have come from the Stuart side. And Jane was sorry for that, because she did not want to think she owed her favourite name to her father. Jane hated her father in so far as hatred could find place in a little heart that was not made for hating anybody, even grandmother. There were times Jane was afraid she did hate grandmother, which was dreadful, because grandmother was feeding and clothing and educating her. Jane knew she ought to love grandmother, but it seemed a very hard thing to do. Apparently mother found it easy; but, then, grandmot
her loved mother, which made a difference. Loved her as she loved nobody else in the world. And grandmother did not love Jane. Jane had always known that. And Jane felt, if she did not yet know, that grandmother did not like mother loving her so much.
“You fuss entirely too much about her,” grandmother had once said contemptuously, when mother was worried about Jane’s sore throat.
“She’s all I have,” said mother.
And then grandmother’s old white face had flushed.
“I am nothing, I suppose,” she said.
“Oh, mother, you know I didn’t mean that,” mother had said piteously, fluttering her hands in a way she had which always made Jane think of two little white butterflies. “I meant . . . I meant . . . she’s my only child. . . .”
“And you love that child . . . his child . . . better than you love me!”
“Not better . . . only differently,” said mother pleadingly.
“Ingrate!” said grandmother. It was only one word, but what venom she could put into a word. Then she had gone out of the room, still with that flush on her face and her pale blue eyes smouldering under her frosty hair.
CHAPTER 2
“Mummy,” said Jane as well as her swelled tonsils would let her, “why doesn’t grandmother want you to love me?”
“Darling, it isn’t like that,” said mother, bending over Jane, her face like a rose in the light of the rose-shaded lamp.
But Jane knew it was like that. She knew why mother seldom kissed her or petted her in grandmother’s presence. It made grandmother angry with a still, cold, terrible anger that seemed to freeze the air about her. Jane was glad mother didn’t often do it. She made up for it when they were alone together . . . but then they were so very seldom alone together. Even now they would not have very long together, for mother was going out to a dinner party. Mother went out almost every evening to something or other and almost every afternoon too. Jane always loved to get a glimpse of her before she went out. Mother knew this and generally contrived that Jane should. She always wore such pretty dresses and looked so lovely. Jane was sure she had the most beautiful mother in the whole world. She was beginning to wonder how any one so lovely as mother could have a daughter so plain and awkward as herself.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 509