The Blythes Are Quoted (2 page)

However the earlier editors estimated the reading public and undervalued the full text of
The Blythes Are Quoted
, we are left—even with this full-text version—with a fascinating mystery: what did Montgomery intend
The Blythes Are Quoted
to show and to question? Why did she choose these stories and poems from among her hundreds and arrange them, with interludes, in this precise order?

Perhaps we are meant to feel Montgomery’s resistance to easy answers. No one who reads the poetry here and explores the stories’ carefully patterned alternations between the opti-mistic and the harsh is going to mistake this book for an easy endorsement of anything—whether it is war or romance. The two halves of the book comment on each other, and the stories, poems, and dialogues invite questions throughout about what lasts, what is inevitable, and what must change. Poems by the grieving mother Anne Blythe stand in stark contrast to her own early cheerful lyrics and those of Walter. We see how Anne’s poetry influenced Walter’s, and there is even one poem about mortality that Walter began and Anne has finished years after his death. Gilbert makes a comment, early in Part One, about memory and the need to forget; Jem quotes this comment at the book’s end, thinking about his own son. What is Montgomery saying about what is passed from one generation to another? It would have been easy to suggest that the world changed forever after the First World War, but the persistence of vision and themes in this novel, from one war to another, belies that view.

Perhaps by undercutting and alternating perspectives, Montgomery was also defying critics of her work—modernist or anti-Victorian and anti-Edwardian—who continued to misread her as some predictable, pre-war, naive romantic with only one way of writing. Belonging to the same often starkly realistic vision that created
Anne of Ingleside
(1939),
The Blythes Are Quoted
will stir up discussion and debate and deserves to take its rightful place in Montgomery’s list of works. There are now nine Anne books, not eight.

Montgomery makes her readers care about her characters, the world they inhabit, and our world in relationship to theirs. She attained world fame in her own lifetime (1874–1942) and has since been translated into more than thirty languages. Her fame is spreading to new audiences as more of her works are published for the first time and more is uncovered about her own life and thinking. The five published volumes of her diaries, her letters to two male pen-friends, her scrap-books that constitute visual autobiography—all of these works fuel biographies and incite debates over the complex interior life of one of the world’s best-loved authors. The intricate intertwining of ideas in
The Blythes Are Quoted
will add new material for the consideration of Montgomery’s life work.

The publication of the full text of
The Blythes Are Quoted
is a triumph of good sense and respectful high-mindedness on the part of Penguin Canada, and of scholarly persistence by Benjamin Lefebvre. Perhaps Montgomery intended this last story of Anne to be her farewell letter to a world she knew she was leaving soon. Perhaps this is why so many of the pieces are preoccupied with finding, feeling, and speaking truth and why Montgomery is at pains to show there is seldom one truth only. Montgomery the artist triumphs in shaping this final book: there is no easy closure for Anne’s story, and we care how and why this is so.

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Ph.D., is professor emerita of English at the University of Prince Edward Island and the founding chair of the L.M. Montgomery Institute. An internationally recognized scholar, she is the author of numerous articles and books on Montgomery, the most recent being
Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery

The first half of this book deals with life before the First World War.

The second part deals with it after the war.

In my books
Rainbow Valley
and
Rilla of Ingleside
, a poem is mentioned, “The Piper,” supposed to have been written and published by Walter Blythe before his death in the First World War. Although the poem had no real existence many people have written me, asking me where they could get it. It has been written recently, but seems even more appropriate now than then.

One day the Piper came down the Glen ...

Sweet and long and low played he!

The children followed from door to door,

No matter how those who loved might implore,

So wiling the song of his melody

As the song of a woodland rill.

Some day the Piper will come again

To pipe to the sons of the maple tree!

You and I will follow from door to door,

Many of us will come back no more ...

What matter that if Freedom still

Be the crown of each native hill?

“You are going to board at Long Alec’s!” exclaimed Mr. Sheldon in amazement.

The old minister of the Methodist Mowbray Narrows congregation and the new minister were in the little church classroom. The old minister ... who was retiring ... had looked kindly at the new minister ... kindly and rather wistfully. This boy was so like what he had been himself forty years before ... young, enthusiastic, full of hope, energy and high purpose. Good-looking, too. Mr. Sheldon smiled a bit in the back of his mind and wondered if Curtis Burns were engaged. Probably. Most young ministers were. If not, there would be some fluttering in the girlish hearts of Mowbray Narrows. And small blame to them.

The reception had been held in the afternoon and had been followed by a supper in the basement. Curtis Burns had met the most of his people and shaken hands with them. He was feeling a little confused and bewildered and rather glad to find himself in the vine-shaded classroom with old Mr. Sheldon, his saintly predecessor, who had decided to spend the rest of his days in Glen St. Mary, the neighbouring settlement. People said it was because he felt he could not get along without Dr. Gilbert Blythe of Ingleside. Some of the older Methodists said it disapprovingly. They had always thought he ought to patronize the Methodist doctor of Lowbridge.

“You have a good church and a loyal people here, Mr. Burns,” Mr. Sheldon was saying. “I hope your ministry among them will be happy and blessed.”

Curtis Burns smiled. When he smiled his cheeks dimpled, which gave him a boyish, irresponsible look. Mr. Sheldon felt a momentary doubt. He could not recall any minister of his acquaintance with dimples, not even a Presbyterian one. Was it fitting? But Curtis Burns was saying, with just the right shade of diffidence and modesty, “I am sure it will be my own fault, Mr. Sheldon, if it is not. I feel my lack of experience. May I draw on you occasionally for advice and help?”

“I shall be very glad to give you any assistance in my power,” said Mr. Sheldon, his doubts promptly disappearing. “As for advice bushels of it are at your disposal. I shall hand you out a piece at once. If you need a doctor always send for the Methodist one.
I
got in very wrong through my friendship with Dr. Blythe. And go into the parsonage ... don’t board.”

Curtis shook his brown head ruefully.

“I can’t ... Mr. Sheldon ... not right away. I haven’t a cent ... and I have some borrowed money to repay. I’ll have to wait until I have paid my debts and saved enough money to pay for a housekeeper.”

So he was not contemplating matrimony.

“Oh, well, of course if you can’t, you can’t. But do it as soon as you can. There is no place for a minister like his own home. The Mowbray Narrows parsonage is a nice house although it is old. It was a very happy home for me ... at first ... until the death of my dear wife two years ago. Since then I have been very lonely. If it had not been for my friendship with the Blythes ... but a good many people disapproved of that because they were Presbyterians. However, you will have a
good boarding place with Mrs. Richards. She will make you very comfortable.”

“Unfortunately Mrs. Richards cannot take me after all. She has to go to the hospital for a rather serious operation. I am going to board at Mr. Field’s ... Long Alec, I believe he is called. You seem to have odd nicknames in Mowbray Narrows ... I’ve heard a few already.”

And then Mr. Sheldon had exclaimed, with something more than surprise in his tone,

“Long Alec’s!”

“Yes, I prevailed on him and his sister to take me in for a few weeks, at least, on promise of good behaviour. I’m in luck. It’s the only other place near the church. I had hard work to get them to consent.”

“But ... Long Alec’s!” said Mr. Sheldon again.

It struck Curtis that Mr. Sheldon’s surprise was rather surprising. And there had been the same note in Dr. Blythe’s voice when he had told him.

Why shouldn’t he board at Long Alec’s?

Long Alec seemed a most respectable and a rather attractive youngish man, with his fine-cut aquiline features and soft, dreamy grey eyes. And the sister ... a sweet, little brown thing, rather tired-looking, with a flute-like voice. Her face was as brown as a nut, her hair and eyes were brown, her lips scarlet. Of all the girls that had clustered, flowerlike, about the basement that day, casting shy glances of admiration at the handsome young minister, he remembered nothing. But somehow he remembered Lucia Field.

“Why not Long Alec’s?” he said.

Recalling, too, that a few other people besides Dr. Blythe had seemed taken aback when he had mentioned his change
of boarding house. Why ... why? Long Alec was on the board of managers. He must be respectable.

Mr. Sheldon looked embarrassed.

“Oh, it is all right, I suppose. Only ... I shouldn’t have thought them likely to take a boarder. Lucia has her hands full as it is. You may have heard there is an invalid cousin there?”

“Yes, Dr. Blythe mentioned her. And I called to see her. What a tragedy ... that sweet, beautiful woman!”

“A beautiful woman indeed,” said Mr. Sheldon emphatically. “She is a wonderful woman, one of the greatest powers for good in Mowbray Narrows. They call her the angel of the community. I tell you, Mr. Burns, the influence that Alice Harper wields from that bed of helplessness is amazing. I cannot tell you what she has been to me during my pastorate here. And every other minister will tell you the same. Her wonderful life is an inspiration. The young girls of the congregation worship her. Do you know that for eight years she has taught a teenage class of girls? They go over to her room after the opening exercises of the Sunday school here. She enters into their lives ... they take all their problems and perplexities to her. They say she has made more matches than Mrs. Blythe ... and
that
is saying something. And it was entirely due to her that the church here was not hopelessly disrupted when Deacon North went on a rampage because Lucia Field played a sacred violin solo for a collection piece one day. Alice sent for the deacon and talked him into sanity. She told me the whole interview in confidence later, with her own inimitable little humorous touches. It was rich. If the deacon could have heard her! She is full of fun. She suffers indescribably at times but no one has ever heard her utter a word of complaint.”

“Has she always been so?”

“Oh, no. She fell from the barn loft ten years ago. Hunting for eggs or something. She was unconscious for hours ... and has been paralyzed from the hips down ever since.”

“Have they had good medical advice?”

“The best. Winthrop Field ... Long Alec’s father ... had specialists from everywhere. They could do nothing for her. She was the daughter of Winthrop’s sister. Her father and mother died when she was a baby ... her father was a clever scamp who died a dipsomaniac, like his father before him ... and the Fields brought her up. Before her accident she was a slim, pretty, shy girl who liked to keep in the background and seldom went about with the other young people. I don’t know that her existence on her uncle’s charity was altogether easy. She feels her helplessness keenly. She can’t even turn herself in bed, Mr. Burns. And she feels that she is a burden on Alec and Lucia. They are very good to her ... I feel sure of that ... but young and healthy people cannot understand fully. Winthrop Field died seven years ago and his wife the next year. Then Lucia gave up her work in Charlottetown ... she was a teacher in the High School ... and came home to keep house for Alec and wait on Alice ... who can’t bear to have strangers handling her, poor soul.”

“Rather hard on Lucia,” commented Curtis.

“Well, yes, of course. She is a good girl, I think ... the Blythes think there is no one like her ... and Alec is a fine fellow in many ways. A little stubborn, perhaps. I’ve heard some talk of his being engaged to Edna Pollock ... I know Mrs. Dr. Blythe favours that match ... but it never comes to anything. Well, it’s a fine old place ... the Field farm is the best
in Mowbray Narrows ... and Lucia is a good housekeeper.

I hope you’ll be comfortable ... but ...”

Mr. Sheldon stopped abruptly and stood up.

“Mr. Sheldon, what do you mean by that ‘but’?” said Curtis resolutely. “Some of the rest looked ‘but,’ too ... especially Dr. Blythe ... though they didn’t say it. I want to understand. I don’t like mysteries.”

“Then you shouldn’t go to board at Long Alec’s,” said Mr. Sheldon dryly.

“Why not? Surely there’s no great mystery connected with the family on a farm in Mowbray Narrows?”

“I suppose I’d better tell you. I’d rather you asked Dr. Blythe, though. It always makes me feel like a fool. As you say a plain farm in Mowbray Narrows is no place for any insoluble mystery. Yet there it is. Mr. Burns, there is something very strange about the old Field place. Mowbray Narrows people will tell you that it is ... haunted.”

“Haunted!” Curtis could not help laughing. “Mr. Sheldon,
you
don’t tell me that!”

“I once said ‘haunted’ in just the same tone,” said Mr. Sheldon a little sharply. Even if he were a saint he did not care to be laughed at by boys just out of college. “I never said it so after I spent a certain night there.”