The Complete Short Stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud Montgomery
Читать онлайн книгу.
Peter had finished his strawberries he folded his arms on the table and looked admiringly at Nancy.
“You look well at the head of a table, Nancy,” he said critically. “How is it that you haven’t been presiding at one of your own long before this? I thought you’d meet a lots of men out in the world that you’d like — men who talked good grammar.”
“Peter, don’t!” said Nancy, wincing. “I was a goose.”
“No, you were quite right. I was a tetchy fool. If I’d had any sense, I’d have felt thankful you thought enough of me to want to improve me, and I’d have tried to kerrect my mistakes instead of getting mad. It’s too late now, I suppose.”
“Too late for what?” said Nancy, plucking up heart of grace at something in Peter’s tone and look.
“For — kerrecting mistakes.”
“Grammatical ones?”
“Not exactly. I guess them mistakes are past kerrecting in an old fellow like me. Worse mistakes, Nancy. I wonder what you would say if I asked you to forgive me, and have me after all.”
“I’d snap you up before you’d have time to change your mind,” said Nancy brazenly. She tried to look Peter in the face, but her blue eyes, where tears and mirth were blending, faltered down before his gray ones.
Peter stood up, knocking over his chair, and strode around the table to her.
“Nancy, my girl!” he said.
FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA
CONTENTS
THE LITTLE BROWN BOOK OF MISS EMILY
THE CONSCIENCE CASE OF DAVID BELL
INTRODUCTION
It is no exaggeration to say that what Longfellow did for Acadia, Miss Montgomery has done for Prince Edward Island. More than a million readers, young people as well as their parents and uncles and aunts, possess in the picture-galleries of their memories the exquisite landscapes of Avonlea, limned with as poetic a pencil as Longfellow wielded when he told the ever-moving story of Grand Pre.
Only genius of the first water has the ability to conjure up such a character as Anne Shirley, the heroine of Miss Montgomery’s first novel, “Anne of Green Gables,” and to surround her with people so distinctive, so real, so true to psychology. Anne is as lovable a child as lives in all fiction. Natasha in Count Tolstoi’s great novel, “War and Peace,” dances into our ken, with something of the same buoyancy and naturalness; but into what a commonplace young woman she develops! Anne, whether as the gay little orphan in her conquest of the master and mistress of Green Gables, or as the maturing and self-forgetful maiden of Avonlea, keeps up to concert-pitch in her charm and her winsomeness. There is nothing in her to disappoint hope or imagination.
Part of the power of Miss Montgomery — and the largest part — is due to her skill in compounding humor and pathos. The humor is honest and golden; it never wearies the reader; the pathos is never sentimentalized, never degenerates into bathos, is never morbid. This combination holds throughout all her works, longer or shorter, and is particularly manifest in the present collection of fifteen short stories, which, together with those in the first volume of the Chronicles of Avonlea, present a series of piquant and fascinating pictures of life in Prince Edward Island.
The humor is shown not only in the presentation of quaint and unique characters, but also in the words which fall from their mouths. Aunt Cynthia “always gave you the impression of a full-rigged ship coming gallantly on before a favorable wind;” no further description is needed — only one such personage could be found in Avonlea. You would recognize her at sight. Ismay Meade’s disposition is summed up when we are told that she is “good at having presentiments — after things happen.” What cleverer embodiment of innate obstinacy than in Isabella Spencer—”a wisp of a woman who looked as if a breath would sway her but was so set in her ways that a tornado would hardly have caused her to swerve an inch from her chosen path;” or than in Mrs. Eben Andrews (in “Sara’s Way”) who “looked like a woman whose opinions were always very decided and warranted to wear!”
This gift of characterization in a few words is lavished also on material objects, as, for instance; what more is needed to describe the forlornness of the home from which Anne was rescued than the statement that even the trees around it “looked like orphans”?
The poetic touch, too, never fails in the right place and is never too frequently introduced in her descriptions. They throw a glamor over that Northern land which otherwise you might imagine as rather cold and barren. What charming Springs they must have there! One sees all the fruit-trees clad in bridal garments of pink and white; and what a translucent sky smiles down on the ponds and the reaches of bay and cove!
“The Eastern sky was a great arc of crystal, smitten through with auroral crimsonings.”
“She was as slim and lithe as a young white-stemmed birch-tree; her hair was like a soft dusky cloud, and her eyes were as blue as Avonlea Harbor in a fair twilight, when all the sky is a-bloom over it.”
Sentiment with a humorous touch to it prevails in the first two stories of the present book. The one relates to the disappearance of a valuable white Persian cat with a blue spot in its tail. “Fatima” is like the apple of her eye to the rich old aunt who leaves her with two nieces, with a stern injunction not to let her out of the house. Of course both Sue and Ismay detest cats; Ismay hates them, Sue loathes them; but Aunt Cynthia’s favor is worth preserving.