L. M. MONTGOMERY Ultimate Collection: 20 Novels & 170+ Short Stories, Poems, Letters and Autobiography. Lucy Maud Montgomery
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An Adventure on the Tory Road
“Anne,” said Davy, sitting up in bed and propping his chin on his hands, “Anne, where is sleep? People go to sleep every night, and of course I know it’s the place where I do the things I dream, but I want to know WHERE it is and how I get there and back without knowing anything about it … and in my nighty too. Where is it?”
Anne was kneeling at the west gable window watching the sunset sky that was like a great flower with petals of crocus and a heart of fiery yellow. She turned her head at Davy’s question and answered dreamily,
“‘Over the mountains of the moon,
Down the valley of the shadow.’”
Paul Irving would have known the meaning of this, or made a meaning out of it for himself, if he didn’t; but practical Davy, who, as Anne often despairingly remarked, hadn’t a particle of imagination, was only puzzled and disgusted.
“Anne, I believe you’re just talking nonsense.”
“Of course, I was, dear boy. Don’t you know that it is only very foolish folk who talk sense all the time?”
“Well, I think you might give a sensible answer when I ask a sensible question,” said Davy in an injured tone.
“Oh, you are too little to understand,” said Anne. But she felt rather ashamed of saying it; for had she not, in keen remembrance of many similar snubs administered in her own early years, solemnly vowed that she would never tell any child it was too little to understand? Yet here she was doing it … so wide sometimes is the gulf between theory and practice.
“Well, I’m doing my best to grow,” said Davy, “but it’s a thing you can’t hurry much. If Marilla wasn’t so stingy with her jam I believe I’d grow a lot faster.”
“Marilla is not stingy, Davy,” said Anne severely. “It is very ungrateful of you to say such a thing.”
“There’s another word that means the same thing and sounds a lot better, but I don’t just remember it,” said Davy, frowning intently. “I heard Marilla say she was it, herself, the other day.”
“If you mean ECONOMICAL, it’s a VERY different thing from being stingy. It is an excellent trait in a person if she is economical. If Marilla had been stingy she wouldn’t have taken you and Dora when your mother died. Would you have liked to live with Mrs. Wiggins?”
“You just bet I wouldn’t!” Davy was emphatic on that point. “Nor I don’t want to go out to Uncle Richard neither. I’d far rather live here, even if Marilla is that long-tailed word when it comes to jam, ‘cause YOU’RE here, Anne. Say, Anne, won’t you tell me a story ‘fore I go to sleep? I don’t want a fairy story. They’re all right for girls, I s’pose, but I want something exciting … lots of killing and shooting in it, and a house on fire, and in’trusting things like that.”
Fortunately for Anne, Marilla called out at this moment from her room.
“Anne, Diana’s signaling at a great rate. You’d better see what she wants.”
Anne ran to the east gable and saw flashes of light coming through the twilight from Diana’s window in groups of five, which meant, according to their old childish code, “Come over at once for I have something important to reveal.” Anne threw her white shawl over her head and hastened through the Haunted Wood and across Mr. Bell’s pasture corner to Orchard Slope.
“I’ve good news for you, Anne,” said Diana. “Mother and I have just got home from Carmody, and I saw Mary Sentner from Spencer vale in Mr. Blair’s store. She says the old Copp girls on the Tory Road have a willowware platter and she thinks it’s exactly like the one we had at the supper. She says they’ll likely sell it, for Martha Copp has never been known to keep anything she COULD sell; but if they won’t there’s a platter at Wesley Keyson’s at Spencervale and she knows they’d sell it, but she isn’t sure it’s just the same kind as Aunt Josephine’s.”
“I’ll go right over to Spencervale after it tomorrow,” said Anne resolutely, “and you must come with me. It will be such a weight off my mind, for I have to go to town day after tomorrow and how can I face your Aunt Josephine without a willowware platter? It would be even worse than the time I had to confess about jumping on the spare room bed.”
Both girls laughed over the old memory … concerning which, if any of my readers are ignorant and curious, I must refer them to Anne’s earlier history.
The next afternoon the girls fared forth on their platter hunting expedition. It was ten miles to Spencervale and the day was not especially pleasant for traveling. It was very warm and windless, and the dust on the road was such as might have been expected after six weeks of dry weather.
“Oh, I do wish it would rain soon,” sighed Anne. “Everything is so parched up. The poor fields just seem pitiful to me and the trees seem to be stretching out their hands pleading for rain. As for my garden, it hurts me every time I go into it. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about a garden when the farmers’ crops are suffering so. Mr. Harrison says his pastures are so scorched up that his poor cows can hardly get a bite to eat and he feels guilty of cruelty to animals every time he meets their eyes.”
After a wearisome drive the girls reached Spencervale and turned down the “Tory” Road … a green, solitary highway where the strips of grass between the wheel tracks bore evidence to lack of travel. Along most of its extent it was lined with thickset young spruces crowding down to the roadway, with here and there a break where the back field of a Spencervale farm came out to the fence or an expanse of stumps was aflame with fireweed and goldenrod.
“Why is it called the Tory Road?” asked Anne.
“Mr. Allan says it is on the principle of calling a place a grove because there are no trees in it,” said Diana, “for nobody lives along the road except the Copp girls and old Martin Bovyer at the further end, who is a Liberal. The Tory government ran the road through when they were in power just to show they were doing something.”
Diana’s father was a Liberal, for which reason she and Anne never discussed politics. Green Gables folk had always been Conservatives.
Finally the girls came to the old Copp homestead … a place of such exceeding external neatness that even Green Gables would have suffered by contrast. The house was a very old-fashioned one, situated on a slope, which fact had necessitated the building of a stone basement under one end. The house and outbuildings were all whitewashed to a condition of blinding perfection and not a weed was visible in the prim kitchen garden surrounded by its white paling.
“The shades are all down,” said Diana ruefully. “I believe that nobody is home.”
This proved to be the case. The girls looked at each other in perplexity.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Anne. “If I were sure the platter was the right kind I would not mind waiting until they came home. But if it isn’t it may be too late to go to Wesley Keyson’s afterward.”
Diana looked at a certain little square window over the basement.
“That is the pantry window, I feel sure,” she said, “because this house is just like Uncle Charles’ at Newbridge, and that is their pantry window. The shade isn’t down, so if we climbed up on the roof of that little house we could look into the pantry and might be able to see the platter. Do you think it would be any harm?”
“No, I don’t think so,” decided Anne, after due reflection, “since our motive is not idle curiosity.”
This important point of ethics being settled, Anne prepared to mount the aforesaid “little house,” a construction of lathes, with a peaked roof, which had in times past served as a habitation for ducks. The Copp girls had