Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [73]
At night there might be a line of wild geese flying across a low red moon and Jem, when he saw them, ached mysteriously to fly away with them too, to unknown shores and bring back monkeys… leopards… parrots… things like that… to explore the Spanish Main… some phrases like ‘the Spanish Main’ always sounded irresistibly alluring to Jem… ‘secrets of the sea’ was another. To be caught in the deadly coils of a python, and have a combat with a wounded rhinoceros was all in the day’s work with Jem. And the very word ‘dragon’ gave him a tremendous thrill. His favourite picture, tacked on the wall at the foot of his bed, was a knight in armour on a beautiful plump white horse, standing on its hind legs while its rider speared a dragon who had a lovely tail flowing behind him in kinks and loops, ending with a fork. A lady in a pink robe knelt peacefully and composedly in the background with clasped hands. There was no doubt in the world that the said lady looked a good deal like Maybelle Reese for whose nine-year-old favour lances were already being shattered in the Glen school. Even Susan noticed the resemblance and teased the furiously blushing Jem about it. But the dragon was really a little disappointing, it looked so small and insignificant under the huge horse. There didn’t seem to be any special valour about spearing it. The dragons from which Jem rescued Maybelle in secret dreams were much more dragonish. He had rescued her last Monday from old Sarah Palmer’s gander. Peradventure… ah, ‘peradventure’ had a good smack!… she had noticed the lordly air with which he had caught the hissing creature by its snaky neck and flung it over the fence. But a gander was, somehow, not nearly so romantic as a dragon.
It was an October of winds, small winds that purred in the valley and big ones that lashed the maple tops, winds that howled along the sand shore, but crouched when they came to the rocks… crouched and sprang. The nights, with their sleepy red hunter’s moon, were cool enough to make the thought of a warm bed pleasant, the blueberry bushes turned scarlet, the dead ferns were a rich red-brown, sumacs burned behind the barn, green pastures lay here and there like patches on the sere harvest fields of the upper Glen and there were gold and russet chrysanthemums in the spruce corner of the lawn. There were squirrels chattering joyfully everywhere and cricket fiddlers for fairy dances on a thousand hills. There were apples to be picked, carrots to be dug. Sometimes the boys went digging ‘cow-hawks’ with Captain Malachi when the mysterious ‘tides’ permitted… tides that came in to caress the land, but slipped back to their own deep sea. There was a reek of leaf fires all through the Glen, a heap of big yellow pumpkins in the barn, and Susan made the first cranberry pies.
Ingleside rang with laughter from dawn to sunset. Even when the older children were in school Shirley and Rilla were big enough now to keep up the tradition of laughter. Even Gilbert laughed more than usual this autumn. ‘I like a dad who can laugh,’ Jem reflected. Dr Bronson of Mowbray Narrows never laughed. He was said to have built up his practice entirely on his owlish look of wisdom; but Dad had a better practice still, and people were pretty far gone when they couldn’t laugh over one of his jokes.
Anne was busy in her garden every warm day, drinking in colour like wine, where the late sunshine fell on crimson maples, revelling in the exquisite sadness of fleeting beauty. One gold-grey, smoky afternoon she and Jem planted all the tulip bulbs, that would have a resurrection of rose and scarlet and purple and gold in June. ‘Isn’t it nice to be preparing for spring when you know you’ve got to face the winter, Jem?’ ‘And it’s nice to be making the garden beautiful,’ said Jem. ‘Susan says it is God who makes everything beautiful, but we can help Him out a bit, can’t we, Mums?’
‘Always… always, Jem. He shares that privilege with us.’
Still, nothing is ever quite perfect.