Anne's House of Dreams (13 page)

Anne and Gilbert spent many an autumn evening at the lighthouse. It was always a cheery place. Even when the east wind sang in minor and the sea was dead and grey, hints of sunshine seemed to be lurking all about it. Perhaps this was because the First Mate always paraded it in panoply of gold. He was so large and effulgent that one hardly missed the sun, and his resounding purrs formed a pleasant accompaniment to the laughter and conversation which went on around Captain Jim’s fireplace. Captain Jim and Gilbert had many long discussions and high converse on matters beyond the ken of cat or kind.

‘I like to ponder on all kinds of problems, though I can’t solve ’em,’ said Captain Jim. ‘My father held that we should never talk of things we couldn’t understand, but if we didn’t, Doctor, the subjects for conversation would be mighty few. I reckon the gods laugh many a time to hear us, but what matters so long as we remember that we’re only men, and don’t take to fancying that we’re gods ourselves, really, knowing good and evil. I reckon our powpows won’t do us or anyone much harm, so let’s have another whack at the whence, why, and whither this evening, Doctor.’

While they ‘whacked’ Anne listened or dreamed. Sometimes Leslie went to the lighthouse with them, and she and Anne wandered along the shore in the eerie twilight, or sat on the rocks below the lighthouse until the darkness drove them back to the cheer of the driftwood fire. Then Captain Jim would brew them tea and tell them

Leslie seemed always to enjoy those lighthouse carousals very much, and bloomed out for the time being into ready wit and beautiful laughter, or glowing-eyed silence. There was a certain tang and savour in the conversation when Leslie was present which they missed when she was absent. Even when she did not talk she seemed to inspire others to brilliancy. Captain Jim told his stories better, Gilbert was quicker in argument and repartee, Anne felt little gushes and trickles of fancy and imagination bubbling to her lips under the influence of Leslie’s personality.

‘That girl was born to be a leader in social and intellectual circles, far away from Four Winds,’ she said to Gilbert as they walked home one night. ‘She’s just wasted here – wasted.’

‘Weren’t you listening to Captain Jim and yours truly the other night when we discussed that subject generally? We came to the comforting conclusion that the Creator probably knew how to run His universe quite as well as we do, and that, after all, there are no such things as “wasted” lives, saving and except when an individual wilfully squanders and wastes his own life – which Leslie Moore certainly hasn’t done. And some people might think that a Redmond B.A., whom editors were beginning to honour, was “wasted” as the wife of a struggling country doctor in the rural community of Four Winds.’

‘Gilbert!’

‘If you had married Roy Gardner, now,’ continued Gilbert mercilessly, ‘
you
could have been “a leader in social and intellectual circles far away from Four Winds”.’

‘Gilbert
Blythe
!’

‘You
know
you were in love with him at one time, Anne.

‘Gilbert, that’s mean – “p’isen mean, just like all the men”, as Miss Cornelia says. I
never
was in love with him. I only imagined I was.
You
know that. You
know
I’d rather be your wife in our house of dreams and fulfilment than a queen in a palace.’

Gilbert’s answer was not in words; but I am afraid that both of them forgot poor Leslie speeding her lonely way across the fields to a house that was neither a palace nor the fulfilment of a dream.

The moon was rising over the sad, dark sea behind them and transfiguring it. Her light had not yet reached the harbour, the farther side of which was shadowy and suggestive, with dim coves and rich glooms and jewelling lights.

‘How the home lights shine out tonight through the dark!’ said Anne. ‘That string of them over the harbour looks like a necklace. And what a coruscation there is up at the Glen! Oh, look, Gilbert, there is ours. I’m so glad we left it burning. I hate to come home to a dark house.
Our
homelight, Gilbert! Isn’t it lovely to see?’

‘Just one of earth’s millions of homes, Anne-girl – but ours –
ours
– our beacon in “a naughty world”. When a fellow has a home and a dear little red-haired wife in it what more need he ask of life?’

‘Well, he might ask
one
thing more,’ whispered Anne happily. ‘Oh, Gilbert, it seems as if I just
couldn’t
wait for the spring.’

At first Anne and Gilbert talked of going home to Avonlea for Christmas; but eventually they decided to stay in Four Winds. ‘I want to spend the first Christmas of our life together in our own home,’ decreed Anne.

So it fell out that Marilla and Mrs Rachel Lynde and the twins came to Four Winds for Christmas. Marilla had the face of a woman who had circumnavigated the globe. She had never been sixty miles away from home before; and she had never eaten a Christmas dinner anywhere save at Green Gables.

Mrs Rachel had made and brought her an enormous plum pudding. Nothing could have convinced Mrs Rachel that a college graduate of the younger generation could make a Christmas plum pudding properly; but she bestowed approval on Anne’s house.

‘Anne’s a good housekeeper,’ she said to Marilla in the spare room the night of their arrival. ‘I’ve looked into her bread box and her scrap pail. I always judge a housekeeper by those, that’s what. There’s nothing in the pail that shouldn’t have been thrown away, and no stale pieces in the bread box. Of course, she was trained up with you – but, then, she went to college afterwards. I notice she’s got my tobacco stripe quilt on the bed here, and that big round braided mat of yours before her living-room fire. It makes me feel right at home.’

Anne’s first Christmas in her own house was as delightful as she could have wished. The day was fine and bright; the first skim of snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and made the world beautiful; the harbour was still open and glittering.

Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia came to dinner. Leslie and Dick had been invited, but Leslie made excuse; they always went to Isaac West’s for Christmas, she said.

‘She’d rather have it so,’ Miss Cornelia told Anne. ‘She can’t bear taking Dick where there are strangers. Christmas is always a hard time for Leslie. She and her father used to make a lot of it.’

Miss Cornelia and Mrs Rachel did not take a very violent fancy to each other. ‘Two suns held not their courses in one sphere.’ But they did not clash at all, for Mrs Rachel was in the kitchen helping Anne and Marilla with the dinner, and it fell to Gilbert to entertain Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia – or rather to be entertained by them, for a dialogue between those two old friends and antagonists was assuredly never dull.

‘It’s many a year since there was a Christmas dinner here, Mistress Blythe,’ said Captain Jim. ‘Miss Russell always went to her friends in town for Christmas. But I was here to the first Christmas dinner that was ever eaten in this house – and the schoolmaster’s bride cooked it. That was sixty years ago today, Mistress Blythe – and a day very like – just enough snow to make the hills white, and the harbour as blue as June. I was only a lad, and I’d never been invited out to dinner before, and I was too shy to eat enough. I’ve got all over
that
.’

‘Most men do,’ said Miss Cornelia, sewing furiously. Miss Cornelia was not going to sit with idle hands, even on Christmas. Babies come without any consideration for holidays, and there was one expected in a poverty-stricken household at Glen St Mary. Miss Cornelia had sent that household a substantial dinner for its little swarm, and so meant to eat her own with a comfortable conscience.

‘Well, you know, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Cornelia,’ explained Captain Jim.

‘I believe you – when he
has
a heart,’ retorted Miss Cornelia. ‘I suppose that’s why so many women kill themselves cooking – just as poor Amelia Baxter did. She died last Christmas morning, and she said it was the first Christmas since she was married that she didn’t have to cook a big, twenty-plate dinner. It must have been a real pleasant change for her. Well, she’s been dead a year, so you’ll soon hear of Horace Baxter taking notice.’

‘I heard he was taking notice already,’ said Captain Jim, winking at Gilbert. ‘Wasn’t he up to your place one Sunday lately, with his funeral blacks on, and a boiled collar?’

‘No, he wasn’t. And he needn’t come neither. I could have had him long ago when he was fresh. I don’t want any second-hand goods, believe
me
. As for Horace Baxter, he was in financial difficulties a year ago last summer, and he prayed to the Lord for help; and when his wife died and he got her life insurance he said he believed it was the answer to his prayer. Wasn’t that like a man?’

‘Have you really proof that he said that, Cornelia?’

‘I have the Methodist minister’s word for it – if you call
that
proof. Robert Baxter told me the same thing too, but I admit
that
isn’t evidence. Robert Baxter isn’t often known to tell the truth.’

‘Come, come, Cornelia, I think he generally tells the truth, but he changes his opinion so often it sometimes sounds as if he didn’t.’

‘It sounds like it mighty often, believe
me
. But trust one man to excuse another. I have no use for Robert Baxter. He turned Methodist just because the Presbyterian choir happened to be singing “Behold the bridegroom cometh” for a collection piece when him and Margaret walked up the aisle the Sunday after they were married. Served him right for being late! He always insisted the choir did it on purpose to insult him, as if he was of that much importance. But that family always thought they were much bigger potatoes than they really were. His brother Eliphalet imagined the devil was always at his elbow – but
I
never believed the devil wasted that much time on him.’

‘I – don’t – know,’ said Captain Jim thoughtfully. ‘Eliphalet Baxter lived too much alone – hadn’t even a cat or dog to keep him human. When a man is alone he’s mighty apt to be with the devil – if he ain’t with God. He has to choose which company he’ll keep, I reckon. If the devil always was at Life Baxter’s elbow it must have been because Life liked to have him there.’

‘Man-like,’ said Miss Cornelia, and subsided into silence over a complicated arrangement of tucks until Captain Jim deliberately stirred her up again by remarking in a casual way:

‘I was up to the Methodist church last Sunday morning.’

‘You’d better have been home reading your Bible,’ was Miss Cornelia’s retort.

‘Come, now, Cornelia,
I
can’t see any harm in going to the Methodist church when there’s no preaching in your own. I’ve been a Presbyterian for seventy-six years, and it isn’t likely my theology will hoist anchor at this late day.’

‘It’s setting a bad example,’ said Miss Cornelia grimly.

‘Besides,’ continued wicked Captain Jim, ‘I wanted to hear some good singing. The Methodists have a good choir; and you can’t deny, Cornelia, that the singing in our church is awful since the split in the choir?’

‘What if the singing isn’t good? They’re doing their best, and God sees no difference between the voice of a crow and the voice of a nightingale.’

‘Come, come, Cornelia,’ said Captain Jim mildly, ‘I’ve a better opinion of the Almighty’s ear for music than
that
.’

‘What caused the trouble in our choir?’ asked Gilbert, who was suffering from suppressed laughter.

‘It dates back to the new church, three years ago,’ answered Captain Jim. ‘We had a fearful time over the building of that church – fell out over the question of a new site. The two sites wasn’t more’n two hundred yards apart, but you’d have thought they was a thousand by the bitterness of that fight. We was split up into three factions – one wanted the east site and one the south, and one held to the old. It was fought out in bed and at board, and in church and at market. All the old scandals of three generations were dragged out of their graves and aired. Three matches was broken up by it. And the meetings we had to try to settle the question! Cornelia, will you ever forget the one when old Luther Burns got up and made a speech?
He
stated his opinions forcibly.’

‘Call a spade a spade, Captain. You mean he got red-mad and raked them all, fore and aft. They deserved it too – a pack of incapables. But what would you expect of a committee of men? That building committee held twenty-seven meetings, and at the end of the twenty-seventh weren’t no nearer having a church than when they begun – not so near, for a fact, for in one fit of hurrying things along they’d gone to work and tore the old church down, so there we were, without a church, and no place but the hall to worship in.’

‘The Methodists offered us their church, Cornelia.’

‘The Glen St Mary church wouldn’t have been built to this day,’ went on Miss Cornelia, ignoring Captain Jim, ‘if we women hadn’t just started in and took charge. We said
we
meant to have a church, if the men meant to quarrel till doomsday, and we were tired of being a laughing-stock for the Methodists. We held
one
meeting and elected a committee and canvassed for subscriptions. We got them, too. When any of the men tried to sass us we told them they’d tried for two years to build a church and it was our turn now. We shut them up close, believe
me
, and in six months we had our church. Of course, when the men saw we were determined they stopped fighting and went to work, man-like, as soon as they saw they had to, or quit bossing. Oh, women can’t preach or be elders; but they can build churches and scare up the money for them.’

‘The Methodists allow women to preach,’ said Captain Jim.

Miss Cornelia glared at him.

‘I never said the Methodists hadn’t common sense, Captain. What I say is, I doubt if they have much religion.’