But everything in the landscape around them spoke4 of autumn. The sea was roaring hollowly in the distance, the fields were bare and sere5, scarfed with golden rod, the brook6 valley below Green Gables overflowed7 with asters of ethereal purple, and the Lake of Shining Waters was blue—blue—blue; not the changeful blue of spring, nor the pale azure8 of summer, but a clear, steadfast9, serene10 blue, as if the water were past all moods and tenses of emotion and had settled down to a tranquility unbroken by fickle11 dreams.
“It has been a nice summer,” said Diana, twisting the new ring on her left hand with a smile. “And Miss Lavendar’s wedding seemed to come as a sort of crown to it. I suppose Mr. and Mrs. Irving are on the Pacific coast now.”
“It seems to me they have been gone long enough to go around the world,” sighed Anne.
“I can’t believe it is only a week since they were married. Everything has changed. Miss Lavendar and Mr. and Mrs. Allan gone—how lonely the manse looks with the shutters13 all closed! I went past it last night, and it made me feel as if everybody in it had died.”
“We’ll never get another minister as nice as Mr. Allan,” said Diana, with gloomy conviction. “I suppose we’ll have all kinds of supplies this winter, and half the Sundays no preaching at all. And you and Gilbert gone—it will be awfully14 dull.”
“Fred will be here,” insinuated15 Anne slyly.
“When is Mrs. Lynde going to move up?” asked Diana, as if she had not heard Anne’s remark.
“Tomorrow. I’m glad she’s coming—but it will be another change. Marilla and I cleared everything out of the spare room yesterday. Do you know, I hated to do it? Of course, it was silly—but it did seem as if we were committing sacrilege. That old spare room has always seemed like a shrine16 to me. When I was a child I thought it the most wonderful apartment in the world. You remember what a consuming desire I had to sleep in a spare room bed—but not the Green Gables spare room. Oh, no, never there! It would have been too terrible—I couldn’t have slept a wink17 from awe18. I never WALKED through that room when Marilla sent me in on an errand—no, indeed, I tiptoed through it and held my breath, as if I were in church, and felt relieved when I got out of it. The pictures of George Whitefield and the Duke of Wellington hung there, one on each side of the mirror, and frowned so sternly at me all the time I was in, especially if I dared peep in the mirror, which was the only one in the house that didn’t twist my face a little. I always wondered how Marilla dared houseclean that room. And now it’s not only cleaned but stripped bare. George Whitefield and the Duke have been relegated19 to the upstairs hall. ‘So passes the glory of this world,’” concluded Anne, with a laugh in which there was a little note of regret. It is never pleasant to have our old shrines20 desecrated21, even when we have outgrown22 them.
“I’ll be so lonesome when you go,” moaned Diana for the hundredth time. “And to think you go next week!”
“But we’re together still,” said Anne cheerily. “We mustn’t let next week rob us of this week’s joy. I hate the thought of going myself—home and I are such good friends. Talk of being lonesome! It’s I who should groan23. YOU’LL be here with any number of your old friends—AND Fred! While I shall be alone among strangers, not knowing a soul!”
“EXCEPT Gilbert—AND Charlie Sloane,” said Diana, imitating Anne’s italics and slyness.
“Charlie Sloane will be a great comfort, of course,” agreed Anne sarcastically24; whereupon both those irresponsible damsels laughed. Diana knew exactly what Anne thought of Charlie Sloane; but, despite sundry25 confidential26 talks, she did not know just what Anne thought of Gilbert Blythe. To be sure, Anne herself did not know that.
“The boys may be boarding at the other end of Kingsport, for all I know,” Anne went on. “I am glad I’m going to Redmond, and I am sure I shall like it after a while. But for the first few weeks I know I won’t. I shan’t even have the comfort of looking forward to the weekend visit home, as I had when I went to Queen’s. Christmas will seem like a thousand years away.”
“Everything is changing—or going to change,” said Diana sadly. “I have a feeling that things will never be the same again, Anne.”
“We have come to a parting of the ways, I suppose,” said Anne thoughtfully. “We had to come to it. Do you think, Diana, that being grown-up is really as nice as we used to imagine it would be when we were children?”
“I don’t know—there are SOME nice things about it,” answered Diana, again caressing27 her ring with that little smile which always had the effect of making Anne feel suddenly left out and inexperienced. “But there are so many puzzling things, too. Sometimes I feel as if being grown-up just frightened me—and then I would give anything to be a little girl again.”
“I suppose we’ll get used to being grownup in time,” said Anne cheerfully. “There won’t be so many unexpected things about it by and by—though, after all, I fancy it’s the unexpected things that give spice to life. We’re eighteen, Diana. In two more years we’ll be twenty. When I was ten I thought twenty was a green old age. In no time you’ll be a staid, middle-aged28 matron, and I shall be nice, old maid Aunt Anne, coming to visit you on vacations. You’ll always keep a corner for me, won’t you, Di darling? Not the spare room, of course—old maids can’t aspire29 to spare rooms, and I shall be as ‘umble as Uriah Heep, and quite content with a little over-the-porch or off-the-parlor cubby hole.”
“What nonsense you do talk, Anne,” laughed Diana. “You’ll marry somebody splendid and handsome and rich—and no spare room in Avonlea will be half gorgeous enough for you—and you’ll turn up your nose at all the friends of your youth.”
“That would be a pity; my nose is quite nice, but I fear turning it up would spoil it,” said Anne, patting that shapely organ. “I haven’t so many good features that I could afford to spoil those I have; so, even if I should marry the King of the Cannibal Islands, I promise you I won’t turn up my nose at you, Diana.”
With another gay laugh the girls separated, Diana to return to Orchard Slope, Anne to walk to the Post Office. She found a letter awaiting her there, and when Gilbert Blythe overtook her on the bridge over the Lake of Shining Waters she was sparkling with the excitement of it.
“Priscilla Grant is going to Redmond, too,” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that splendid? I hoped she would, but she didn’t think her father would consent. He has, however, and we’re to board together. I feel that I can face an army with banners—or all the professors of Redmond in one fell phalanx—with a chum like Priscilla by my side.”
“I think we’ll like Kingsport,” said Gilbert. “It’s a nice old burg, they tell me, and has the finest natural park in the world. I’ve heard that the scenery in it is magnificent.”
“I wonder if it will be—can be—any more beautiful than this,” murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured30 eyes of those to whom “home” must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars.
They were leaning on the bridge of the old pond, drinking deep of the enchantment31 of the dusk, just at the spot where Anne had climbed from her sinking Dory on the day Elaine floated down to Camelot. The fine, empurpling dye of sunset still stained the western skies, but the moon was rising and the water lay like a great, silver dream in her light. Remembrance wove a sweet and subtle spell over the two young creatures.
“You are very quiet, Anne,” said Gilbert at last.
“I’m afraid to speak or move for fear all this wonderful beauty will vanish just like a broken silence,” breathed Anne.
Gilbert suddenly laid his hand over the slender white one lying on the rail of the bridge. His hazel eyes deepened into darkness, his still boyish lips opened to say something of the dream and hope that thrilled his soul. But Anne snatched her hand away and turned quickly. The spell of the dusk was broken for her.
“I must go home,” she exclaimed, with a rather overdone32 carelessness. “Marilla had a headache this afternoon, and I’m sure the twins will be in some dreadful mischief33 by this time. I really shouldn’t have stayed away so long.”
She chattered34 ceaselessly and inconsequently until they reached the Green Gables lane. Poor Gilbert hardly had a chance to get a word in edgewise. Anne felt rather relieved when they parted. There had been a new, secret self-consciousness in her heart with regard to Gilbert, ever since that fleeting35 moment of revelation in the garden of Echo Lodge36. Something alien had intruded37 into the old, perfect, school-day comradeship—something that threatened to mar12 it.
“I never felt glad to see Gilbert go before,” she thought, half-resentfully, half-sorrowfully, as she walked alone up the lane. “Our friendship will be spoiled if he goes on with this nonsense. It mustn’t be spoiled—I won’t let it. Oh, WHY can’t boys be just sensible!”
Anne had an uneasy doubt that it was not strictly38 “sensible” that she should still feel on her hand the warm pressure of Gilbert’s, as distinctly as she had felt it for the swift second his had rested there; and still less sensible that the sensation was far from being an unpleasant one—very different from that which had attended a similar demonstration39 on Charlie Sloane’s part, when she had been sitting out a dance with him at a White Sands party three nights before. Anne shivered over the disagreeable recollection. But all problems connected with infatuated swains vanished from her mind when she entered the homely40, unsentimental atmosphere of the Green Gables kitchen where an eight-year-old boy was crying grievously on the sofa.
“What is the matter, Davy?” asked Anne, taking him up in her arms. “Where are Marilla and Dora?”
“Marilla’s putting Dora to bed,” sobbed41 Davy, “and I’m crying ‘cause Dora fell down the outside cellar steps, heels over head, and scraped all the skin off her nose, and—”
“Oh, well, don’t cry about it, dear. Of course, you are sorry for her, but crying won’t help her any. She’ll be all right tomorrow. Crying never helps any one, Davy-boy, and—”
“I ain’t crying ‘cause Dora fell down cellar,” said Davy, cutting short Anne’s wellmeant preachment with increasing bitterness. “I’m crying, cause I wasn’t there to see her fall. I’m always missing some fun or other, seems to me.”
“Oh, Davy!” Anne choked back an unholy shriek42 of laughter. “Would you call it fun to see poor little Dora fall down the steps and get hurt?”
“She wasn’t MUCH hurt,” said Davy, defiantly43. “‘Course, if she’d been killed I’d have been real sorry, Anne. But the Keiths ain’t so easy killed. They’re like the Blewetts, I guess. Herb Blewett fell off the hayloft last Wednesday, and rolled right down through the turnip44 chute into the box stall, where they had a fearful wild, cross horse, and rolled right under his heels. And still he got out alive, with only three bones broke. Mrs. Lynde says there are some folks you can’t kill with a meat-axe. Is Mrs. Lynde coming here tomorrow, Anne?”
“Yes, Davy, and I hope you’ll be always very nice and good to her.”
“I’ll be nice and good. But will she ever put me to bed at nights, Anne?”
“Perhaps. Why?”
“‘Cause,” said Davy very decidedly, “if she does I won’t say my prayers before her like I do before you, Anne.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause I don’t think it would be nice to talk to God before strangers, Anne. Dora can say hers to Mrs. Lynde if she likes, but I won’t. I’ll wait till she’s gone and then say ‘em. Won’t that be all right, Anne?”
“Yes, if you are sure you won’t forget to say them, Davy-boy.”
“Oh, I won’t forget, you bet. I think saying my prayers is great fun. But it won’t be as good fun saying them alone as saying them to you. I wish you’d stay home, Anne. I don’t see what you want to go away and leave us for.”
“I don’t exactly WANT to, Davy, but I feel I ought to go.”
“If you don’t want to go you needn’t. You’re grown up. When I’m grown up I’m not going to do one single thing I don’t want to do, Anne.”
“All your life, Davy, you’ll find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.”
“I won’t,” said Davy flatly. “Catch me! I have to do things I don’t want to now ‘cause you and Marilla’ll send me to bed if I don’t. But when I grow up you can’t do that, and there’ll be nobody to tell me not to do things. Won’t I have the time! Say, Anne, Milty Boulter says his mother says you’re going to college to see if you can catch a man. Are you, Anne? I want to know.”
For a second Anne burned with resentment45. Then she laughed, reminding herself that Mrs. Boulter’s crude vulgarity of thought and speech could not harm her.
“No, Davy, I’m not. I’m going to study and grow and learn about many things.”
“What things?”
“‘Shoes and ships and sealing wax
And cabbages and kings,’”
quoted Anne.
“But if you DID want to catch a man how would you go about it? I want to know,” persisted Davy, for whom the subject evidently possessed46 a certain fascination47.
“You’d better ask Mrs. Boulter,” said Anne thoughtlessly. “I think it’s likely she knows more about the process than I do.”
“I will, the next time I see her,” said Davy gravely.
“Davy! If you do!” cried Anne, realizing her mistake.
“It’s time you went to bed,” decreed Anne, by way of getting out of the scrape.
After Davy had gone to bed Anne wandered down to Victoria Island and sat there alone, curtained with fine-spun49, moonlit gloom, while the water laughed around her in a duet of brook and wind. Anne had always loved that brook. Many a dream had she spun over its sparkling water in days gone by. She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious50 neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of “faery lands forlorn,” where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart’s Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
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1
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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2
labors
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| v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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4
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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sere
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| adj.干枯的；n.演替系列 | |
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brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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7
overflowed
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| 溢出的 | |
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8
azure
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| adj.天蓝色的，蔚蓝色的 | |
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9
steadfast
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| adj.固定的，不变的，不动摇的；忠实的；坚贞不移的 | |
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10
serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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11
fickle
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| adj.(爱情或友谊上)易变的，不坚定的 | |
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12
mar
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| vt.破坏，毁坏，弄糟 | |
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13
shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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14
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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15
insinuated
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| v.暗示( insinuate的过去式和过去分词 )；巧妙或迂回地潜入；（使）缓慢进入；慢慢伸入 | |
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16
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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17
wink
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| n.眨眼，使眼色，瞬间；v.眨眼，使眼色，闪烁 | |
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18
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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relegated
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| v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类 | |
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20
shrines
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| 圣地，圣坛，神圣场所( shrine的名词复数 ) | |
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21
desecrated
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| 毁坏或亵渎( desecrate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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outgrown
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| 长[发展] 得超过（某物）的范围( outgrow的过去分词 )； 长[发展]得不能再要（某物）； 长得比…快； 生长速度超过 | |
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23
groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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24
sarcastically
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| adv.挖苦地，讽刺地 | |
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25
sundry
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| adj.各式各样的，种种的 | |
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confidential
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| adj.秘（机）密的，表示信任的，担任机密工作的 | |
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caressing
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| 爱抚的，表现爱情的，亲切的 | |
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28
middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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aspire
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| vi.(to，after)渴望，追求，有志于 | |
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enraptured
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| v.使狂喜( enrapture的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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enchantment
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| n.迷惑，妖术，魅力 | |
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32
overdone
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| v.做得过分( overdo的过去分词 )；太夸张；把…煮得太久；（工作等）过度 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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34
chattered
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| （人）喋喋不休( chatter的过去式 )； 唠叨； （牙齿）打战； （机器）震颤 | |
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35
fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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36
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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37
intruded
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| n.侵入的，推进的v.侵入，侵扰，打扰( intrude的过去式和过去分词 )；把…强加于 | |
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38
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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39
demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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40
homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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41
sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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42
shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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43
defiantly
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| adv.挑战地，大胆对抗地 | |
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44
turnip
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| n.萝卜，芜菁 | |
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45
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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46
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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47
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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48
aggrieved
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| adj.愤愤不平的，受委屈的；悲痛的；（在合法权利方面）受侵害的v.令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式)；令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式和过去分词) | |
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49
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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50
malicious
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| adj.有恶意的，心怀恶意的 | |
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