Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [17]
‘The Woman said I was big enough to sleep without a light. But I feel so small, Miss Shirley, because the night is so big and awful. And there is a stuffed crow in my room, and I am afraid of it. The Woman told me it would pick my eyes out if I cried. Of course, Miss Shirley, I don’t believe that, but still I’m scared. Things whisper so to each other at night. But in Tomorrow I’ll never be scared of anything – not even of being kidnapped.’
‘But there is no danger of your being kidnapped, Elizabeth.’
‘The Woman said there was if I went anywhere alone or talked to strange persons. But you are not a strange person, are you, Miss Shirley?’
‘No, darling. We’ve always known each other in Tomorrow,’ I said.
4
Windy Willows
Spook’s Lane
S’side
November 10
DEAREST,
It used to be that the person I hated most in the world was the person who spoiled my pen-nib. But I can’t hate Rebecca Dew in spite of her habit of using my pen to copy recipes when I’m in school. She’s been doing it again, and as a result you won’t get a long or a loving letter this time (belovedest).
The last cricket song has been sung. The evenings are so chilly now that I have a small, chubby, oblong wood-stove in my room. Rebecca Dew put it up – I forgive her the pen for it; there’s nothing that woman can’t do – and she always has a fire lit for me in it when I come home from school. It is the tiniest of stoves; I could pick it up in my hands. It looks just like a pert little black dog on its four bandy iron legs. But when you fill it with hardwood sticks it blooms rosy red and throws a wonderful heat, and you can’t think how cosy it is. I’m sitting before it now, with my feet on its tiny hearth, scribbling to you on my knee.
Everyone else in S’side – more or less – is at the Hardy Pringles’ dance. I was not invited. And Rebecca Dew is so cross about it that I’d hate to be Dusty Miller. But when I think of Hardy’s daughter Myra, beautiful and brainless, trying to prove in an examination paper that the angels at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal I forgive the entire Pringle clan. And last week she included ‘gallows-tree’ quite seriously in a list of trees! But, to be just, all the howlers don’t originate with the Pringles. Blake Fenton defined an alligator recently as ‘a large kind of insect’. Such are the highlights of a teacher’s life!
It feels like snow tonight. I like an evening when it feels like snow. The wind is blowing ‘in turret and tree’ and making my cosy room seem even cosier. The last golden leaf will be blown from the willows tonight.
I think I’ve been invited to supper everywhere by now – I mean, to the homes of all my pupils, both in town and country. And oh, Gilbert darling, I am so sick of pumpkin preserves! Never, never let us have pumpkin preserves in our house of dreams!
Almost everywhere I’ve gone for the last month I’ve had P.P. for supper. The first time I had it I loved it – it was so golden that I felt I was eating preserved sunshine – and I incautiously raved about it. It got bruited abroad that I was very fond of P.P., and people had it on purpose for me. Last night I was going to Mr Hamilton’s and Rebecca Dew assured me that I wouldn’t have to eat P.P. there because none of the Hamiltons liked it. But when we sat down to supper there on the sideboard was the inevitable cut-glass bowl full of P.P.
‘I hadn’t any pumpkin preserves of my own,’ said Mrs Hamilton, ladling me out a generous dishful, ‘but I heard you was terrible partial to it; so when I was to my cousin’s in Lowvale last Sunday I sez to her, “I’m having Miss Shirley to supper this week, and she’s terrible partial to pumpkin preserves. I wish you’d lend me a jar for her.” So she did, and here it is, and you can take home what’s left.’
You should have seen Rebecca Dew’s face when I arrived home from the Hamiltons’ bearing a glass jar two-thirds full of P.P.! Nobody likes