Anne screamed and sprang back, as if it had been a snake, and Anthony Pye laughed aloud.
Then a silence fell . . . a very creepy, uncomfortable silence. Annetta Bell was of two minds whether to go into hysterics again or not, especially as she didn’t know just where the mouse had gone. But she decided not to. Who could take any comfort out of hysterics with a teacher so white-faced and so blazing-eyed standing before one?
“Who put that mouse in my desk?” said Anne. Her voice was quite low but it made a shiver go up and down Paul Irving’s spine. Joe Sloane caught her eye, felt responsible from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, but stuttered out wildly,
“N . . . n . . . not m . . . m . . . me t . . . t . . . teacher, n . . . n . . . not m . . . m . . . me.”
Anne paid no attention to the wretched Joseph. She looked at Anthony Pye, and Anthony Pye looked back unabashed and unashamed.
“Anthony, was it you?”
“Yes, it was,” said Anthony insolently.
Anne took her pointer from her desk. It was a long, heavy hardwood pointer.
“Come here, Anthony.”
It was far from being the most severe punishment Anthony Pye had ever undergone. Anne, even the stormy-souled Anne she was at that moment, could not have punished any child cruelly. But the pointer nipped keenly and finally Anthony’s bravado failed him; he winced and the tears came to his eyes.
Anne, conscience-stricken, dropped the pointer and told Anthony to go to his seat. She sat down at her desk feeling ashamed, repentant, and bitterly mortified. Her quick anger was gone and she would have given much to have been able to seek relief in tears. So all her boasts had come to this . . . she had actually whipped one of her pupils. How Jane would triumph! And how Mr. Harrison would chuckle! But worse than this, bitterest thought of all, she had lost her last chance of winning Anthony Pye. Never would he like her now.
Anne, by what somebody has called “a Herculaneum effort,” kept back her tears until she got home that night. Then she shut herself in the east gable room and wept all her shame and remorse and disappointment into her pillows . . . wept so long that Marilla grew alarmed, invaded the room, and insisted on knowing what the trouble was.
“The trouble is, I’ve got things the matter with my conscience,” sobbed Anne. “Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I’m so ashamed of myself. I lost my temper and whipped Anthony Pye.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Marilla with decision. “It’s what you should have done long ago.”
“Oh, no, no, Marilla. And I don’t see how I can ever look those children in the face again. I feel that I have humiliated myself to the very dust. You don’t know how cross and hateful and horrid I was. I can’t forget the expression in Paul Irving’s eyes . . . he looked so surprised and disappointed. Oh, Marilla, I HAVE tried so hard to be patient and to win Anthony’s liking . . . and now it has all gone for nothing.”
Marilla passed her hard work-worn hand over the girl’s glossy, tumbled hair with a wonderful tenderness. When Anne’s sobs grew quieter she said, very gently for her,
“You take things too much to heart, Anne. We all make mistakes . . . but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody. As for Anthony Pye, why need you care if he does dislike you? He is the only one.”
“I can’t help it. I want everybody to love me and it hurts me so when anybody doesn’t. And Anthony never will now. Oh, I just made an idiot of myself today, Marilla. I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Marilla listened to the whole story, and if she smiled at certain parts of it Anne never knew. When the tale was ended she said briskly,
“Well, never mind. This day’s done and there’s a new one coming tomorrow, with no mistakes in it yet, as you used to say yourself. Just come downstairs and have your supper. You’ll see if a good cup of tea and those plum puffs I made today won’t hearten you up.”
“Plum puffs won’t minister to a mind diseased,” said Anne disconsolately; but Marilla thought it a good sign that she had recovered sufficiently to adapt a quotation.
The cheerful supper table, with the twins’ bright faces, and Marilla’s matchless plum puffs . . . of which Davy ate four . . . did “hearten her up” considerably after all. She had a good sleep that night and awakened in the morning to find herself and the world transformed. It had snowed softly and thickly all through the hours of darkness and the beautiful whiteness, glittering in the frosty sunshine, looked like a mantle of charity cast over all the mistakes and humiliations of the past.
“Every morn is a fresh beginning,Every morn is the world made new,”
sang Anne, as she dressed.
Owing to the snow she had to go around by the road to school and she thought it was certainly an impish coincidence that Anthony Pye should come ploughing along just as she left the Green Gables lane. She felt as guilty as if their positions were reversed; but to her unspeakable astonishment Anthony not only lifted his cap . . . which he had never done before . . . but said easily,
“Kind of bad walking, ain’t it? Can I take those books for you, teacher?”
Anne surrendered her books and wondered if she could possibly be awake. Anthony walked on in silence to the school, but when Anne took her books she smiled down at him . . . not the stereotyped “kind” smile she had so persistently assumed for his benefit but a sudden outflashing of good comradeship. Anthony smiled . . . no, if the truth must be told, Anthony GRINNED back. A grin is not generally supposed to be a respectful thing; yet Anne suddenly felt that if she had not yet won Anthony’s liking she had, somehow or other, won his respect.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde came up the next Saturday and confirmed this.
“Well, Anne, I guess you’ve won over Anthony Pye, that’s what. He says he believes you are some good after all, even if you are a girl. Says that whipping you gave him was ‘just as good as a man’s.’”
“I never expected to win him by whipping him, though,” said Anne, a little mournfully, feeling that her ideals had played her false somewhere. “It doesn’t seem right. I’m sure my theory of kindness can’t be wrong.”
“No, but the Pyes are an exception to every known rule, that’s what,” declared Mrs. Rachel with conviction.
Mr. Harrison said, “Thought you’d come to it,” when he heard it, and Jane rubbed it in rather unmercifully.
XIII. A Golden Picnic
Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables, just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the Haunted Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad’s Bubble, where tiny ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from a nap.
“I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my birthday on Saturday,” said Anne.
“Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!”
“That wasn’t my fault,” laughed Anne. “If my parents had consulted me it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be born in spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their foster sister. But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring. Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane will be home. We’ll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden day making the acquaintance of the spring. We none of us really know her yet, but we’ll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else. I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at. We’ll make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”
“It SOUNDS awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of Anne’s magic of words. “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”
“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities. “And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I’m going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re NOT very poetical.”
Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green.
Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter echoed down to him.
“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was saying, with true Anneish philosophy. “Let’s try to make this a really golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight. We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. ‘Begone, dull care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school yesterday.”
“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.
“Oh, I know the expression . . . I’ve felt it often enough on my own face. But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear. It will keep till Monday . . . or if it doesn’t so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery. When I’m eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . . I shall shut my eyes and see those violets just as I see them now. That’s the first good gift our day has given us.”
“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet,” said Priscilla.
Anne glowed.
“I’m so glad you SPOKE that thought, Priscilla, instead of just thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more interesting place . . . although it IS very interesting anyhow . . . if people spoke out their real thoughts.”
“It would be too hot to hold some folks,” quoted Jane sagely.
“I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just what comes into her head. THAT is conversation. Here’s a little path I never saw before. Let’s explore it.”
The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing things.
“What a lot of elephant’s ears,” exclaimed Diana. “I’m going to pick a big bunch, they’re so pretty.”
“How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a dreadful name?” asked Priscilla.
“Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at all or else far too much,” said Anne, “Oh, girls, look at that!”
“That” was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up and its place filled with a rank growth of ferns; but now it was a glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A ring of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its margin.
“HOW sweet!” said Jane.
“Let us dance around it like wood-nymphs,” cried Anne, dropping her basket and extending her hands.
But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane’s rubbers came off.
“You can’t be a wood-nymph if you have to wear rubbers,” was her decision.
“Well, we must name this place before we leave it,” said Anne, yielding to the indisputable logic of facts. “Everybody suggest a name and we’ll draw lots. Diana?”
“Birch Pool,” suggested Diana promptly.
“Crystal Lake,” said Jane.
Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with “Glimmer-glass.” Anne’s selection was “The Fairies’ Mirror.”
The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil Schoolma’am Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne’s hat. Then Priscilla shut her eyes and drew one. “Crystal Lake,” read Jane triumphantly. Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had played the pool a shabby trick she did not say so.
Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture. Across it they found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of wild cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of sky or sunlight to be seen.
“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne. “They are impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the sunshiny places.”
“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one? What would you wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I’d wish to be rich and beautiful and clever.”
“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.
“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla. Anne thought of her hair and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.
“I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and all our lives,” she said.
“But that,” said Priscilla, “would be just wishing this world were like heaven.”
“Only like a part of heaven. In the other parts there would be summer and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too. I think I want glittering snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes. Don’t you, Jane?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Jane uncomfortably. Jane was a good girl, a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her profession and believed everything she had been taught. But she never thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.
“Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses every day in heaven,” laughed Diana.
“And didn’t you tell her we would?” asked Anne.
“Mercy, no! I told her we wouldn’t be thinking of dresses at all there.”
“Oh, I think we will . . . a LITTLE,” said Anne earnestly. “There’ll be plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more important things. I believe we’ll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I suppose RAIMENT would be a more suitable way of speaking. I shall want to wear pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me that long to get tired of it, I feel sure. I do love pink so and I can never wear it in THIS world.”
