Anne of Windy Poplars

Chapter 12

“Windy Poplars,

“Spook’s Lane,

“May 30th.

“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 suddenly 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 when 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 back yard, the creeper hanging greenly down over the half-door to which little Elizabeth comes for milk, the fir trees preening in new tassel tips around 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 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 Lover’s Lane... and you!

“I have just the right kind of pen tonight, Gilbert, and so...

(Two pages omitted.)

“I was around at 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 wheel-chair. 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 still glossy and pretty. They are quite comfortably off and if it were 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 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 worn the same hat for four years.

“Mrs. Gibson can’t bear any noise in the house or a breath of fresh air. It is said she never smiled in her life... I’ve never caught her at it, anyway, and when I look at her I find myself wondering what would happen to her face if she did smile. Pauline can’t even have a room to herself. She has to sleep in the same room with her mother and be up almost every hour of the night rubbing Mrs. Gibson’s back or giving her a pill or getting a hot-water bottle for her... hot, not lukewarm!... or changing her pillows or seeing what that mysterious noise is in the back yard. Mrs. Gibson does her sleeping in the afternoons and spends her nights devising tasks for Pauline.

“Yet nothing has ever made Pauline bitter. She is sweet and unselfish and patient and I am glad she has a dog to love. The only thing she has ever had her own way about is keeping that dog... and then only because there was a burglary somewhere in town and Mrs. Gibson thought it would be a protection. Pauline never dares to let her mother see how much she loves the dog. Mrs. Gibson hates him and complains of his bringing bones in but she never actually says he must go, for her own selfish reason.

“But at last I have a chance to give Pauline something and I’m going to do it. I’m going to give her a day, though it will mean giving up my next week-end at Green Gables.

“Tonight when I went in I could see that Pauline had been crying. Mrs. Gibson did not long leave me in doubt why.

“‘Pauline wants to go and leave me, Miss Shirley,’ she said. ‘Nice, grateful daughter I’ve got, haven’t I?’

“‘Only for a day, Ma,’ said Pauline, swallowing a sob and trying to smile.

“‘Only for a day,’ says she! ‘Well, you know what my days are like, Miss Shirley... every one knows what my days are like. But you don’t know... yet... Miss Shirley, and I hope you never will, how long a day can be when you are suf…