Anne of Ingleside (11 page)

‘Do you really like to be called “girl” at your age, Annie? (Walter, you haven’t eaten all your bread and butter. Plenty of poor children would be glad to have it. James, dear, blow your nose and have it over with, I
cannot
endure sniffling.)’

But it was a gay and lovely Christmas. Even Aunt Mary Maria thawed out a little after dinner, said almost graciously that the presents given her had been quite nice, and endured the Shrimp with an air of patient martyrdom that made them all feel a little ashamed of loving him.

‘I think our little folk have had a nice time,’ said Anne happily that night, as she looked at the pattern of trees woven against the white hills and sunset sky, and the children out on the lawn busily scattering crumbs for birds over the snow. The wind was sighing softly in the boughs, sending flurries over the lawn and promising more storm for the morrow, but Ingleside had had its day.

‘I suppose they had,’ agreed Aunt Mary Maria. ‘I’m sure they did enough squealing anyhow. As for what they have eaten… ah, well, you’re only young once, and I suppose you have plenty of castor oil in the house.’

It was what Susan called a streaky winter… all thaws and freezes that kept Ingleside decorated with fantastic fringes of icicles. The children fed seven blue-jays who came regularly to the orchard for their rations and let Jem pick them up, though they flew from everybody else. Anne sat up o’ nights to pore over seed catalogues in January and February. Then the winds of March swirled over the dunes and up the harbour and over the hills. Rabbits, said Susan, were laying Easter eggs.

‘Isn’t March an
in
citing month, Mummy?’ cried Jem, who was a little brother to all the winds that blew.

They could have spared the ‘incitement’ of Jem scratching his hand on a rusty nail and having a nasty time of it for some days, while Aunt Mary Maria told all the stories of blood-poisoning she had ever heard. But that, Anne reflected when the danger was over, was what you must expect with a small son who was always trying experiments.

And lo, it was April! With the laughter of April rain… the whisper of April rain… the trickle, the sweep, the drive, the lash, the dance, the splash of April rain. ‘Oh, Mummy, hasn’t the world got its face washed nice and clean?’ cried Di, on the morning sunshine returned.

There were pale spring stars shining over the fields of mist, there were pussy willows in the marsh. Even the little twigs on the trees seemed all at once to have lost their clear, cold quality and to have become soft and languorous. The first robin was an event; the Hollow was once more a place full of wild free delights; Jem brought his mother the first may-flowers… rather to Aunt Mary Maria’s offence, since she thought they should have been offered to
her;
Susan began sorting over the attic shelves, and Anne, who had hardly had a minute to herself all winter, put on spring gladness as a garment and literally lived in her garden, while the Shrimp showed his spring raptures by writhing all over the paths.

‘You care more for the garden than you do for your husband, Annie,’ said Aunt Mary Maria.

‘My garden is so kind to me,’ answered Anne dreamily… then, realizing the implications that might be taken out of her remark, began to laugh.

‘You do say the most extraordinary things, Annie. Of course
I
know you don’t mean that Gilbert isn’t kind… but what if a stranger heard you say such a thing?’

‘Dear Aunt Mary Maria,’ said Anne gaily, ‘I’m really not responsible for the things I say this time of the year. Everybody around here knows that. I’m always a little mad in spring. But it’s such a divine madness. Do you notice those mists over the dune like dancing witches? And the daffodils? We’ve never had such a show of daffodils at Ingleside before.’

‘I don’t care much for daffodils. They are such flaunting things,’ said Aunt Mary Maria, drawing her shawl around her and going indoors to protect her back.

‘Do you know, Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan ominously, ‘what has become of those new irises you wanted to plant in that shady corner?
She
planted them this afternoon, when you were out, right in the sunniest part of the backyard.’

‘Oh, Susan! And we can’t move them because she’d be so hurt!’

‘If you will just give
me
the word, Mrs Doctor dear…’

‘No, no, Susan, we’ll leave them there for the time being. She cried, you remember, when I hinted that she shouldn’t have pruned the spirea
before
blooming.’

‘But sneering at our daffodils, Mrs Doctor dear… and them famous all around the harbour…’

‘And deserve to be. Look at them laughing at you for minding Aunt Mary Maria. Susan, the nasturtiums are coming up in this corner after all. It’s such fun when you’ve given up hope of a thing to find it has suddenly popped up. I’m going to have a little rose garden made in the south-west corner. The very name of rose garden thrills me to my toes. Did you ever see such a
blue
blueness of the sky before, Susan? And if you listen very carefully now at night you can hear all the little brooks of the countryside gossiping. I’ve half a notion to sleep in the Hollow tonight with a pillow of wild violets.’

‘You would find it very damp,’ said Susan patiently. Mrs Doctor was always like this in the spring. She knew it would pass.

‘Susan,’ said Anne coaxingly, ‘I want to have a birthday party next week.’

‘Well, and why should you not?’ asked Susan. To be sure, none of the family had a birthday the last week in May, but if Mrs Doctor wanted a birthday party why boggle over that?

‘For Aunt Mary Maria,’ went on Anne, as one determined to get the worst over. ‘Her birthday is next week. Gilbert says she is fifty-five, and I’ve been thinking…’

‘Mrs Doctor dear, do you really mean to get up a party for that…’

‘Count a hundred, Susan… count a hundred, Susan, dear. It would please her so. What has she in life after all?’

‘That is her own fault…’

‘Perhaps so. But, Susan, I really want to do this for her.’

‘Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan ominously, ‘you have always been kind enough to give me a week’s vacation whenever I felt I needed it. Perhaps I had better take it next week! I will ask my niece Gladys to come and help you out. And then Miss Mary Maria Blythe can have a dozen birthday parties for all of me.’

‘If you feel like that about it, Susan, I’ll give up the idea, of course,’ said Anne slowly.

‘Mrs Doctor dear, that woman has foisted herself upon you and means to stay here for ever. She has worried you… and henpecked the doctor… and made the children’s lives miserable. I say nothing about myself, for who am I? She has scolded and nagged and insinuated and whined… and now you want to get up a birthday party for her! Well, all I can say is, if you want to do that… we’ll just have to go ahead and have it!’

‘Susan, you old duck!’

Plotting and planning followed. Susan, having yielded, was determined that for the honour of Ingleside the party must be something that even Mary Maria Blythe could not find fault with.

‘I think we’ll have a luncheon, Susan. Then they’ll be away early enough for me to go to the concert at Low-bridge with the doctor. We’ll keep it a secret and surprise her. She shan’t know a thing about it till the last minute. I’ll invite all the people in the Glen she likes…’

‘And who may
they
be, Mrs Doctor dear?’

‘Well, tolerates, then. And her cousin, Adella Carey from Low-bridge, and some people from town. We’ll have a big plump birthday cake with fifty-five candles on it…’

‘Which
I
am to make, of course…’

‘Susan, you
know
you make the best fruit-cake in P.E. Island…’

‘I know that I am as wax in your hands, Mrs Doctor dear.’

A mysterious week followed. An air of hush-hush pervaded Ingleside. Everybody was sworn not to give the secret away to Aunt Mary Maria. But Anne and Susan had reckoned without gossip. The night before the party Aunt Mary Maria came home from a call in the Glen to find them sitting rather wearily in the unlighted sun-room.

‘All in the dark, Annie? It beats me how anyone can like sitting in the dark. It gives me the blues.’

‘It isn’t dark… it’s twilight… there had been a love-match between light and dark, and beautiful exceedingly is the offspring thereof,’ said Anne, more to herself than anybody else.

‘I suppose you know what you mean yourself, Annie. And so you’re having a party tomorrow?’

Anne suddenly sat bolt upright. Susan, already sitting so, could not sit any uprighter.

‘Why… why… Auntie…’

‘You always leave me to hear things from outsiders,’ said Aunt Mary Maria, but seemingly more in sorrow than in anger.

‘We… we meant it for a surprise, Auntie…’

‘I don’t know what you want of a party this time of year when you can’t depend on the weather, Annie.’

Anne drew a breath of relief. Evidently Aunt Mary Maria knew only that there was to be a party, not that it had any connection with her.

‘… I wanted to have it before the spring flowers were done, Auntie.’

‘I shall wear my garnet taffeta. I suppose, Annie, if I had not heard of this in the village I should have been caught by all your fine friends tomorrow in a cotton dress.’

‘Oh, no, Auntie. We meant to tell you in time to dress, of course…’

‘Well, if my advice means anything to you, Annie… and sometimes I am almost compelled to think it does not… I would say that in future it would be better for you not to be
quite so secretive
about things. By the way, are you aware that they are saying in the village that it was Jem who threw the stone through the window of the Methodist church?’

‘He did not,’ said Anne quietly. ‘He told me he did not.’

‘Are you sure, Annie, dear, that he was not fibbing?’

‘Annie dear’ still spoke quietly.

‘Quite sure, Aunt Mary Maria. Jem has never told me an untruth in his life.’

‘Well, I thought you ought to know what was being said.’

Aunt Mary Maria stalked off in her usual gracious manner, ostentatiously avoiding the Shrimp, who was lying on his back on the floor entreating someone to tickle his stomach.

Susan and Anne drew a long breath.

‘I think I’ll go to bed, Susan. And I do hope it is going to be fine tomorrow. I don’t like the look of that dark cloud over the harbour.’

‘It will be fine, Mrs Doctor dear,’ reassured Susan. ‘The almanac says so.’

Susan had an almanac that foretold the whole year’s weather and was right often enough to keep up its credit.

‘Leave the side door unlocked for the doctor, Susan. He may be late getting home from town. He went in for the roses… fifty-five golden roses, Susan… I’ve heard Aunt Mary Maria say that yellow roses were the only flowers she liked.’

Half an hour later, Susan, reading her nightly chapter in her Bible, came across the verse, ‘Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house lest he weary of thee and hate thee.’ She put a sprig of southernwood in it to mark the spot. ‘Even in those days,’ she reflected.

Anne and Susan were both up very early, desiring to complete certain last preparations before Aunt Mary Maria should be about. Anne always liked to get up early and catch that mystical half-hour before sunrise when the world belongs to the fairies and the old gods. She liked to see the morning sky of pale rose and gold behind the church spire, the thin, translucent glow of sunrise spreading over the dunes, the first violent spirals of smoke floating up from the village roofs.

‘It’s as if we had had a day made to order, Mrs Doctor dear,’ said Susan complacently, as she feathered an orange-frosted cake with coconut. ‘I will try my hand at them new-fangled butter-balls after breakfast, and I will phone Carter Flagg every half-hour to make sure that he will not forget the ice-cream. And there will be time to scrub the veranda steps.’

‘Is that necessary, Susan?’

‘Mrs Doctor dear, you have invited Mrs Marshall Elliott have you not?
She
shall not see
our
veranda steps otherwise than spotless. But you will see to the decorations, Mrs Doctor dear? I was not born with the gift of arranging flowers.’

‘Four cakes! Gee!’ said Jem.

‘When we give a party,’ said Susan grandly, ‘we
give
a party.’

The guests came in due time, and were received by Aunt Mary Maria in garnet taffeta, and by Anne in biscuit-coloured voile. Anne thought of putting on her white muslin for the day was summer warm, but decided otherwise.

‘Very sensible of you, Annie,’ commented Aunt Mary Maria. ‘White, I always say, is only for the young.’

Everything went according to schedule. The table looked beautiful, with Anne’s prettiest dishes and the exotic beauty of white and purple iris. Susan’s butter-balls made a sensation, nothing like them having been seen in the Glen before; her cream soup was the last word in soups: the chicken salad had been made of Ingleside ‘chickens that
are
chickens’; the badgered Carter Flagg sent up the ice-cream on the tick of the dot. Finally, Susan, bearing the birthday cake with its fifty-five lighted candles as if it were the Baptist’s head on a charger, marched in and set it down before Aunt Mary Maria.

Anne, outwardly the smiling, serene hostess, had been feeling very uncomfortable for some time. In spite of all outward smoothness she had an ever-deepening conviction that something had gone terribly wrong. On the guests’ arrival she had been too much occupied to notice the change that came over Aunt Mary Maria’s face when Mrs Marshall Elliott cordially wished her many happy returns of the day. But when they were all finally seated around the table Anne wakened up to the fact that Aunt Mary Maria was looking anything but pleased. She was actually white… it
couldn’t
be with fury!… and not one word did she say as the meal progressed, save curt replies to remarks addressed to her. She took only two teaspoonfuls of soup and three mouthfuls of salad; as for the ice-cream, she behaved to it as if it wasn’t there.

When Susan set the birthday cake, with its flickering candles, down before her Aunt Mary Maria gave a fearful gulp, which was not quite successful in swallowing a sob and consequently issued as a strangled whoop.