Anne of the Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery [short story to read TXT] 📗

“PROSPECT POINT, “August 20th.

“Dear Anne — spelled — with — an — E,” wrote Phil, “I must prop my eyelids open long enough to write you. I’ve neglected you shamefully this summer, honey, but all my other correspondents have been neglected, too. I have a huge pile of letters to answer, so I must gird up the loins of my mind and hoe in. Excuse my mixed metaphors. I’m fearfully sleepy. Last night Cousin Emily and I were calling at a neighbor’s. There were several other callers there, and as soon as those unfortunate creatures left, our hostess and her three daughters picked them all to pieces. I knew they would begin on Cousin Emily and me as soon as the door shut behind us. When we came home Mrs. Lilly informed us that the aforesaid neighbor’s hired boy was supposed to be down with scarlet fever. You can always trust Mrs. Lilly to tell you cheerful things like that. I have a horror of scarlet fever. I couldn’t sleep when I went to bed for thinking of it. I tossed and tumbled about, dreaming fearful dreams when I did snooze for a minute; and at three I wakened up with a high fever, a sore throat, and a raging headache. I knew I had scarlet fever; I got up in a panic and hunted up Cousin Emily’s ‘doctor book’ to read up the symptoms. Anne, I had them all. So I went back to bed, and knowing the worst, slept like a top the rest of the night. Though why a top should sleep sounder than anything else I never could understand. But this morning I was quite well, so it couldn’t have been the fever. I suppose if I did catch it last night it couldn’t have developed so soon. I can remember that in daytime, but at three o’clock at night I never can be logical.

“I suppose you wonder what I’m doing at Prospect Point. Well, I always like to spend a month of summer at the shore, and father insists that I come to his second-cousin Emily’s `select boardinghouse’ at Prospect Point. So a fortnight ago I came as usual. And as usual old `Uncle Mark Miller’ brought me from the station with his ancient buggy and what he calls his `generous purpose’ horse. He is a nice old man and gave me a handful of pink peppermints. Peppermints always seem to me such a religious sort of candy — I suppose because when I was a little girl Grandmother Gordon always gave them to me in church. Once I asked, referring to the smell of peppermints, `Is that the odor of sanctity?’ I didn’t like to eat Uncle Mark’s peppermints because he just fished them loose out of his pocket, and had to pick some rusty nails and other things from among them before he gave them to me. But I wouldn’t hurt his dear old feelings for anything, so I carefully sowed them along the road at intervals. When the last one was gone, Uncle Mark said, a little rebukingly, `Ye shouldn’t a’et all them candies to onct, Miss Phil. You’ll likely have the stummick-ache.’

“Cousin Emily has only five boarders besides myself — four old ladies and one young man. My right-hand neighbor is Mrs. Lilly. She is one of those people who seem to take a gruesome pleasure in detailing all their many aches and pains and sicknesses. You cannot mention any ailment but she says, shaking her head, `Ah, I know too well what that is’ — and then you get all the details. Jonas declares he once spoke of locomotor ataxia in hearing and she said she knew too well what that was. She suffered from it for ten years and was finally cured by a traveling doctor.

“Who is Jonas? Just wait, Anne Shirley. You’ll hear all about Jonas in the proper time and place. He is not to be mixed up with estimable old ladies.

“My left-hand neighbor at the table is Mrs. Phinney. She always speaks with a wailing, dolorous voice — you are nervously expecting her to burst into tears every moment. She gives you the impression that life to her is indeed a vale of tears, and that a smile, never to speak of a laugh, is a frivolity truly reprehensible. She has a worse opinion of me than Aunt Jamesina, and she doesn’t love me hard to atone for it, as Aunty J. does, either.

“Miss Maria Grimsby sits cati-corner from me. The first day I came I remarked to Miss Maria that it looked a little like rain — and Miss Maria laughed. I said the road from the station was very pretty — and Miss Maria laughed. I said there seemed to be a few mosquitoes left yet — and Miss Maria laughed. I said that Prospect Point was as beautiful as ever — and Miss Maria laughed. If I were to say to Miss Maria, `My father has hanged himself, my mother has taken poison, my brother is in the penitentiary, and I am in the last stages of consumption,’ Miss Maria would laugh. She can’t help it — she was born so; but is very sad and awful.

“The fifth old lady is Mrs. Grant. She is a sweet old thing; but she never says anything but good of anybody and so she is a very uninteresting conversationalist.

“And now for Jonas, Anne.

“That first day I came I saw a young man sitting opposite me at the table, smiling at me as if he had known me from my cradle. I knew, for Uncle Mark had told me, that his name was Jonas Blake, that he was a Theological Student from St. Columbia, and that he had taken charge of the Point Prospect Mission Church for the summer.

“He is a very ugly young man — really, the ugliest young man I’ve ever seen. He has a big, loose-jointed figure with absurdly long legs. His hair is tow-color and lank, his eyes are green, and his mouth is big, and his ears — but I never think about his ears if I can help it.

“He has a lovely voice — if you shut your eyes he is adorable — and he certainly has a beautiful soul and disposition.

“We were good chums right way. Of course he is a graduate of Redmond, and that is a link between us. We fished and boated together; and we walked on the sands by moonlight. He didn’t look so homely by moonlight and oh, he was nice. Niceness fairly exhaled from him. The old ladies — except Mrs. Grant — don’t approve of Jonas, because he laughs and jokes — and because he evidently likes the society of frivolous me better than theirs.

“Somehow, Anne, I don’t want him to think me frivolous. This is ridiculous. Why should I care what a tow-haired person called Jonas, whom I never saw before thinks of me?

“Last Sunday Jonas preached in the village church. I went, of course, but I couldn’t realize that Jonas was going to preach. The fact that he was a minister — or going to be one — persisted in seeming a huge joke to me.

“Well, Jonas preached. And, by the time he had preached ten minutes, I felt so small and insignificant that I thought I must be invisible to the naked eye. Jonas never said a word about women and he never looked at me. But I realized then and there what a pitiful, frivilous, small-souled little butterfly I was, and how horribly different I must be from Jonas’ ideal woman. SHE would be grand and strong and noble. He was so earnest and tender and true. He was everything a minister ought to be. I wondered how I could ever have thought him ugly — but he really is! — with those inspired eyes and that intellectual brow which the roughly-falling hair hid on week days.

“It was a splendid sermon and I could have listened to it forever, and it made me feel utterly wretched. Oh, I wish I was like YOU, Anne.

“He caught up with me on the road home, and grinned as cheerfully as usual. But his grin could never deceive me again. I had seen the REAL Jonas. I wondered if he could ever see the REAL PHIL — whom NOBODY, not even you, Anne, has ever seen yet.

“`Jonas,’ I said — I forgot to call him Mr. Blake. Wasn’t it dreadful? But there are times when things like that don’t matter — `Jonas, you were born to be a minister. You COULDN’T be anything else.’

“`No, I couldn’t,’ he said soberly. `I tried to be something else for a long time — I didn’t want to be a minister. But I came to see at last that it was the work given me to do —