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12

Windy Willows

Spook’s Lane

May 30

DEAREST-AND-THEN-MORE-DEAR,

It’s spring!

Perhaps you, up to your eyes in a welter of exams in Kingsport, don’t know it. But I am aware of it from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes. Summerside is aware of it. Even the most unlovely streets are transfigured by arms of bloom reaching over old board fences and a ribbon of dandelions in the grass that borders the sidewalks. Even the china lady on my shelf is aware of it, and I know if I could only wake up quick enough some night I’d catch her dancing a pas seul in her pink, gilt-heeled shoes.

Everything is calling ‘spring’ to me – the little laughing brooks, the blue hazes on the Storm King, the maples in the grove where I go to read your letters, the white cherry-trees along Spook’s Lane, the sleek and saucy robins hopping defiance to Dusty Miller in the backyard, the creeper hanging greenly down over the half-door to which little Elizabeth comes for milk, the fir-trees preening in new tassel tips round the old graveyard, even the old graveyard itself, where all sorts of flowers planted at the heads of the graves are budding into leaf and bloom, as if to say, ‘Even here life is triumphant over death.’ I had a really lovely prowl about the graveyard the other night. (I’m sure Rebecca Dew thinks my taste in walks frightfully morbid. ‘I can’t think why you have such a hankering after that unchancy place,’ she says.) I roamed over it in the scented green cat’s light, and wondered if Stephen Pringle’s eyes were closed at last, and if Nathan Pringle’s wife really had tried to poison him. Her grave looked so innocent with its new grass and its June lilies that I concluded she had been entirely maligned.

Just another month and I’ll be home for vacation! I keep thinking of the old orchard at Green Gables, with its trees now in full snow, the old bridge over the Lake of Shining Waters, the murmur of the sea in your ears, a summer afternoon in Lovers’ Lane – and you!

I have just the right kind of a pen tonight, Gilbert, and so…

(Two pages omitted)

I was around to the Gibsons’ this evening for a call. Marilla asked me some time ago to look them up, because she once knew them when they lived in White Sands. Accordingly I looked them up, and have been looking them up weekly ever since, because Pauline seems to enjoy my visits, and I’m so sorry for her. She is simply a slave to her mother, who is a terrible old woman.

Mrs Adoniram Gibson is eighty, and spends her days in a wheelchair. They moved to Summerside fifteen years ago. Pauline, who is forty-five, is the youngest of the family, all her brothers and sisters being married, and all of them determined not to have Mrs Adoniram in their homes. She keeps the house and waits on her mother hand and foot. She is a little pale, fawn-eyed thing, with golden-brown hair that is glossy and pretty still. They are quite comfortably off, and if it was not for her mother Pauline could have a very pleasant, easy life. She just loves church work, and would be perfectly happy attending Ladies’ Aids and Missionary Societies, planning for church suppers and Welcome socials, not to speak of exulting proudly in being the possessor of the finest wandering Jew in town. But she can hardly ever get away from the house, even to go to church on Sundays. I can’t see any way of escape for her, for old Mrs Gibson will probably live to be a hundred. And while she may not have the use of her legs, there is certainly nothing the matter with her tongue. It always fills me with helpless rage to sit there and hear her making poor Pauline the target for her sarcasm. And yet Pauline has told me that her mother ‘thinks quite highly’ of me, and is much nicer to her when I am around. If this be so, I shiver to think what she must be like when I am not around.

Pauline dares not do anything without asking her mother. She can’t even buy her own clothes – not so much as a pair of stockings. Everything has to be sent up for Mrs Gibson’s approval; everything has to be worn until it has been turned twice. Pauline has