Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Woman Behind The Books - Memoirs & Private Letters (Including The Complete Anne of Green Gables Series, Emily Starr Trilogy & The Blue Castle). Lucy Maud Montgomery
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She has ears she needn’t be ashamed to show and the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen. Also, she has a well-cut mouth. But she dresses terribly. Seems to have a positive genius for getting the colors and lines she should not wear. Dull dark greens and drab grays, when she is too sallow for greens and grays, and stripes which make her tall, lean figure even taller and leaner. And her clothes always look as if she’d slept in them.
“Her manner is very repellent … as Rebecca Dew would say, she always has a chip on her shoulder. Every time I pass her on the stairs I feel that she is thinking horrid things about me. Every time I speak to her she makes me feel I’ve said the wrong thing. And yet I’m very sorry for her … though I know she would resent my pity furiously. And I can’t do anything to help her because she doesn’t want to be helped. She is really hateful to me. One day, when we three teachers were all in the staff room, I did something which, it seems, transgressed one of the unwritten laws of the school, and Katherine said cuttingly, ‘Perhaps you think you are above rules, Miss Shirley.’ At another time, when I was suggesting some changes which I thought would be for the good of the school, she said with a scornful smile, ‘I’m not interested in fairy tales.’ Once, when I said some nice things about her work and methods, she said, ‘And what is to be the pill in all this jam?’
“But the thing that annoyed me most … well, one day when I happened to pick up a book of hers in the staff room and glanced at the flyleaf I said,
“‘I’m glad you spell your name with a K. Katherine is so much more alluring than Catherine, just as K is ever so much gypsier a letter than smug C.’
“She made no response, but the next note she sent up was signed ‘Catherine Brooke’!
“I sneezed all the way home.
“I really would give up trying to be friends with her if I hadn’t a queer, unaccountable feeling that under all her bruskness and aloofness she is actually starved for companionship.
“Altogether, what with Katherine’s antagonism and the Pringle attitude, I don’t know just what I’d do if it wasn’t for dear Rebecca Dew and your letters … and little Elizabeth.
“Because I’ve got acquainted with little Elizabeth. And she is a darling.
“Three nights ago I took the glass of milk to the wall door and little Elizabeth herself was there to get it instead of the Woman, her head just coming above the solid part of the door, so that her face was framed in the ivy. She is small, pale, golden and wistful. Her eyes, looking at me through the autumn twilight, are large and golden-hazel. Her silver-gold hair was parted in the middle, sleeked plainly down over her head with a circular comb, and fell in waves on her shoulders. She wore a pale blue gingham dress and the expression of a princess of elfland. She had what Rebecca Dew calls ‘a delicate air,’ and gave me the impression of a child who was more or less undernourished … not in body, but in soul. More of a moonbeam than a sunbeam.
“‘And this is Elizabeth?’ I said.
“‘Not tonight,’ she answered gravely. ‘This is my night for being Betty because I love everything in the world tonight. I was Elizabeth last night and tomorrow night I’ll prob’ly be Beth. It all depends on how I feel.’
“There was the touch of the kindred spirit for you. I thrilled to it at once.
“‘How very nice to have a name you can change so easily and still feel it’s your own.’
“Little Elizabeth nodded.
“‘I can make so many names out of it. Elsie and Betty and Bess and Elisa and Lisbeth and Beth … but not Lizzie. I never can feel like Lizzie.’
“‘Who could?’ I said.
“‘Do you think it silly of me, Miss Shirley? Grandmother and the Woman do.’
“‘Not silly at all … very wise and very delightful,’ I said..
“Little Elizabeth made saucer eyes at me over the rim of her glass. I felt that I was being weighed in some secret spiritual balance and presently I realized thankfully that I had not been found wanting. For little Elizabeth asked a favor of me … and little Elizabeth does not ask favors of people she does not like.
“‘Would you mind lifting up the cat and letting me pat him?’ she asked shyly.
“Dusty Miller was rubbing against my legs. I lifted him and little Elizabeth put out a tiny hand and stroked his head delightedly.
“‘I like kittens better than babies,’ she said, looking at me with an odd little air of defiance, as if she knew I would be shocked but tell the truth she must.
“‘I suppose you’ve never had much to do with babies, so you don’t know how sweet they are,’ I said, smiling. ‘Have you a kitten of your own?’
“Elizabeth shook her head.
“‘Oh, no; Grandmother doesn’t like cats. And the Woman hates them. The Woman is out tonight, so that is why I could come for the milk. I love coming for the milk because Rebecca Dew is such an agree’ble person.’
“‘Are you sorry she didn’t come tonight?’ I laughed.
“Little Elizabeth shook her head.
“‘No. You are very agree’ble, too. I’ve been wanting to get ‘quainted with you but I was afraid it mightn’t happen before Tomorrow comes.’
“We stood there and talked while Elizabeth sipped her milk daintily and she told me all about Tomorrow. The Woman had told her that Tomorrow never comes, but Elizabeth knows better. It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen … wonderful things. She may even have a day to do exactly as she likes in, with nobody watching her … though I think Elizabeth feels that is too good to happen even in Tomorrow. Or she may find out what is at the end of the harbor road … that wandering, twisting road like a nice red snake, that leads, so Elizabeth thinks, to the end of the world. Perhaps the Island of Happiness is there. Elizabeth feels sure there is an Island of Happiness somewhere where all the ships that never come back are anchored, and she will find it when Tomorrow comes.
“‘And when Tomorrow comes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I will have a million dogs and forty-five cats. I told Grandmother that when she wouldn’t let me have a kitten, Miss Shirley, and she was angry and said, “I’m not ‘customed to be spoken to like that, Miss Impert’nence.” I was sent to bed without supper … but I didn’t mean to be impert’nent. And I couldn’t sleep, Miss Shirley, because the Woman told me that she knew a child once that died in her sleep after being impert’nent.’
“When Elizabeth had finished her milk there came a sharp tapping at some unseen window behind the spruces. I think we had been watched all the time. My elf-maiden ran, her golden head glimmering along the dark spruce aisle until she vanished.
“‘She’s a fanciful little creature,’ said Rebecca Dew when I told her of my adventure … really, it somehow had the quality of an adventure, Gilbert. ‘One day she said to me, “Are you scared of lions, Rebecca Dew?” “I never met any so I can’t tell you,” sez I. “There will be any amount of lions in Tomorrow,” sez she, “but they will be nice friendly lions.” “Child, you’ll turn into eyes if you look like that,” sez I. She was looking clean through me at something she saw in that Tomorrow of hers. “I’m thinking deep thoughts, Rebecca Dew,” she sez. The trouble with that child is she doesn’t laugh enough.’
“I remembered Elizabeth had never laughed once during our talk. I feel that she hasn’t learned how. The great house is so still and lonely and laughterless. It looks dull and gloomy even now when the world is a riot of autumn color. Little Elizabeth is doing too much listening to lost whispers.
“I think one of my missions in Summerside will be to teach her how to laugh.
“Your tenderest, most faithful