Anne of Ingleside (28 page)

There were many things to be settled. Who should sit by whom? It was essential that Mrs Simon Millison should not be asked to sit beside Mrs William McCreery, for they never spoke to each other because of some obscure old feud dating back to school days. Then there was the question of whom to invite, for it was the hostess’s privilege to ask a few guests apart from the members of the Aid.

‘I’m going to have Mrs Best and Mrs Campbell,’ said Anne.

Susan looked doubtful.

‘They are newcomers, Mrs Doctor dear’… much as she might have said, ‘They are crocodiles.’

‘The Doctor and I were newcomers once, Susan.’

‘But the Doctor’s uncle was here for years before that. Nobody knows anything about these Bests and Campbells. But it is your house, Mrs Doctor dear, and who am I to object to anyone you wish to have? I remember one quilting at Mrs Carter Flagg’s many years ago when Mrs Flagg invited a strange woman. She came in
wincey
, Mrs Doctor dear… said she didn’t think a Ladies’ Aid worth dressing up for! At least there will be no fear of that with Mrs Campbell. She is very dressy… though I could never see myself wearing hydrangea blue to church.’

Anne could not either, but she dared not smile.

‘I thought that dress was lovely with Mrs Campbell’s silver hair, Susan. And by the way, she wants your recipe for spiced gooseberry relish, Susan. She says she had some of it at the Harvest Home supper and it was delicious.’

‘Oh, well, Mrs Doctor dear, it is not everyone who can make spiced gooseberry’… and no more disapproval was expressed of hydrangea blue dresses. Mrs Campbell might henceforth appear out in the costume of a Fiji Islander if she chose and Susan would find excuses for it.

The young months had grown old, but autumn was still remembering summer and the quilting day was more like June than October. Every member of the Ladies’ Aid who could possibly come came, looking forward pleasurably to a good dish of gossip and an Ingleside supper, besides seeing some sweet new thing in fashions, since the Doctor’s wife had recently been to town.

Susan, unbowed by the culinary cares that were heaped upon her, stalked about, showing the ladies to the guest-room, serene in the knowledge that not one of them possessed an apron trimmed with crochet lace five inches deep made from Number One Hundred thread. Susan had captured first prize at the Charlottetown Exhibition the week before with that lace. She and Rebecca Dew had trysted there and made a day of it, and Susan had come home that night the proudest woman in Prince Edward Island.

Susan’s face was perfectly controlled, but her thoughts were her own, sometimes spiced with a trifle of mild malice.

Celia Reese is here, looking for something to laugh at as usual. Well, she will not find it at our supper table and that you may tie to. Myra Murray in red velvet… a little too sumptuous for a quilting in my opinion, but I am not denying she looks well in it. At least it is not wincey. Agatha Drew… and her glasses tied on with a string as usual… Sarah Taylor… it may be her last quilting… she has got a terrible heart, the doctor says, but the
spirit of her! Mrs Donald Reese… thank the Good Lord she didn’t bring Mary Anna with her, but no doubt we will hear plenty. Jane Burr from the Upper Glen. She isn’t a member of the Aid. Well, I shall count the spoons after supper and that you may tie to. That family were all light-fingered. Candace Crawford… she doesn’t often trouble an Aid meeting, but a quilting is a good place to show off her pretty hands and her diamond ring. Emma Pollock, with her petticoat showing below her dress of course. A pretty woman, but flimsy minded like all that tribe. Tillie MacAllister, don’t you go and upset the jelly on the tablecloth like you did at Mrs Palmer’s quilting. Martha Crothers, you will have a decent meal for once. It is too bad your husband could not have come too… I hear he has to live on nuts or something like that. Mrs Elder Baxter… I hear the elder has scared Harold Reese away from Mina at last. Harold always had a wishbone in place of a backbone, and faint heart never won fair lady, as the Good Book says. Well, we have enough for two quilts and some over to thread needles.

The quilts were set up on the broad veranda and everyone was busy with fingers and tongues. Anne and Susan were deep in preparations for supper in the kitchen, and Walter, who had been kept home from school that morning because of a slight sore throat, was squatted on the veranda steps, screened from view of the quilters by a curtain of vines. He always liked to listen to older people talking. They said such surprising, mysterious things… things you could think over afterwards and weave into the very stuff of drama, things that reflected the colours and shadows, the comedies and tragedies, the jests and the sorrows, of every Four Winds clan.

Of all the women present Walter liked Mrs Myra Murray best, with her easy, infectious laugh and the jolly little wrinkles round her eyes. She could tell the simplest story and make it seem dramatic and vital; she gladdened life wherever she went; and she did look so pretty in her cherry-red velvet, with the smooth ripples in her black hair, and the little red drops in her ears. Mrs Tom Chubb, who was thin as a needle, he liked least… perhaps because he had once heard her calling him ‘a sickly child’. He thought Mrs Allan Milgrave looked just like a sleek grey hen, and that Mrs Grant Clow was like nothing so much as a barrel on legs. Young Mrs David Ransome, with her taffy-coloured hair, was very handsome… ‘too handsome for a farm’, Susan had said when Dave married her. The young bride, Mrs Morton MacDougall, looked like a sleepy white poppy. Edith Bailey, the Glen dressmaker, with her misty silvery curls and humorous black eyes, didn’t look as if she could be ‘an old maid’. He liked Mrs Meade, the oldest woman there, who had gentle, tolerant eyes and listened far more than she talked, and he did not like Celia Reese, with her sly, amused look, as if she were laughing at everybody.

The quilters had not really started talking yet… they were discussing the weather and deciding whether to quilt in fans or diamonds, so Walter was thinking of the beauty of the ripened day, the big lawn with its magnificent trees, and the world that looked as if some great kind Being had put golden arms about it. The tinted leaves were drifting slowly down, but the knightly hollyhocks were still gay against the brick wall and the poplars wove sorcery of aspen along the path to the barn. Walter was so absorbed in the loveliness around him that the quilting conversation was in full swing before he was recalled to consciousness of it by Mrs Simon Millison’s pronouncement.

‘That clan were noted for their sensational funerals. Will any of you who were there ever forget what happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral?’

Walter pricked up his ears. This sounded interesting. But much to his disappointment, Mrs Simon did not go on to tell what had happened. Everybody must have been at the funeral or heard the story.

(But why are they all looking so uncomfortable about it?)

‘There is no doubt that everything Clara Wilson said about Peter was true, but he is in his grave, poor man, so let us leave him there,’ said Mrs Tom Chubb self-righteously… as if somebody had proposed exhuming him.

‘Mary Anna is always saying such clever things,’ said Mrs Reese. ‘Do you know what she said the other day when we were starting to Margaret Hollister’s funeral? “Ma,” she said, “will there be any ice-cream at the funeral?” ’

A few women exchanged furtive amused smiles. The most of them ignored Mrs Donald. It was really the only thing to do when she began dragging Mary Anna into the conversation as she invariably did, in season and out of season. If you gave her the least encouragement she was maddening. ‘Do you know what Mary Anna said?’ was a standing catchword in the Glen.

‘Talking of funerals,’ said Celia Reese, ‘there was a queer one in Mowbray Narrows when I was a girl. Stanton Lane had gone out west and word came back that he had died. His folks wired to have the body sent home, so it was, but Wallace MacAllister, the undertaker, advised them against opening the casket. The funeral had just got off to a good start when in walked Stanton Lane himself, hale and hearty. It was never found out who the corpse really was.’

‘What did they do with him?’ queried Agatha Drew.

‘Oh, they buried him. Wallace said it couldn’t be put off. But you couldn’t rightly call it a funeral, with everyone so happy over Stanton’s return. Mr Dawson changed the last hymn from “Take Comfort, Christians”, to “Sometimes a Light Surprises”, but most people thought he’d better have left well enough alone.’

‘Do you know what Mary Anna said to me the other day? She said, “Ma, do the ministers know
everything?
” ’

‘Mr Dawson always lost his head in a crisis,’ said Jane Burr. ‘The Upper Glen was part of his charge then and I remember one Sunday he dismissed the congregation and then remembered that the collection hadn’t been taken up. So what does he do but grab a collection plate and run round the yard with it. To be sure,’ added Jane, ‘people gave that day who never gave before or after. They didn’t like to refuse the minister. But it was hardly dignified of him.’

‘What I had against Mr Dawson,’ said Miss Cornelia, ‘was the unmerciful length of his prayers at a funeral. It actually came to such a pass that people said they envied the corpse. He surpassed himself at Letty Grant’s funeral. I saw her mother was on the point of fainting, so I gave him a nudge and told him he’d prayed long enough.’

‘He buried my poor Jarvis,’ said Mrs George Carr, tears dropping down. She always cried when she spoke of her husband, although he had been dead for twenty years.

‘His brother was a minister, too,’ said Christine Marsh. ‘He was in the Glen when I was a girl. We had a concert in the hall one night and as he was one of the speakers he was sitting on the platform. He was as nervous as his brother and he kept fidgeting his chair farther and farther back and all at once he went, chair and all, clean over the edge on the bank of flowers and house-plants we had arranged around the base. All that could be seen of him was his feet sticking up above the platform. Somehow, it always spoiled his preaching for me after that. His feet were
so
big.’

‘The Lane funeral might have been a disappointment,’ said Emma Pollock, ‘but at least it was better than not having any funeral at all. You remember the Cromwell mix-up?’

There was a chorus of reminiscent laughter. ‘Let us hear the story,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘Remember, Mrs Pollock, I’m a stranger here, and all the family sagas are quite unknown to me.’

Emma didn’t know what ‘sagas’ meant, but she loved to tell a story.

‘Abner Cromwell lived over near Lowbridge on one of the biggest farms in that district and he was an M.P.P. in those days. He was one of the biggest frogs in the Tory puddle and acquainted with everybody of any importance on the Island. He was married to Julia Flagg, whose mother was a Reese and her grandmother was a Clow, so they were connected with almost every family in Four Winds as well. One day a notice came out in the
Daily Enterprise
… Mr Abner Cromwell had died suddenly at Lowbridge and his funeral would be held at two o’clock the next afternoon. Somehow the Abner Cromwells missed seeing the notice… and of course there were no rural telephones in those days. The next morning Abner left for Kingsport to attend a Liberal convention. At two o’clock people began arriving for the funeral, coming early to get a good seat, thinking there’d be such a crowd on account of Abner being such a prominent man. And a crowd there was, believe you me. For miles around the roads were just a string of buggies, and people kept pouring in till about three. Mrs Abner was just about crazy trying to make them believe her husband wasn’t dead. Some wouldn’t believe her at first… she said to me in tears that they seemed to think she’d made away with the corpse… and when they were convinced they acted as if they thought Abner ought to be dead. And they tramped all over the lawn flower-beds she was so proud of. Any number of distant relations arrived too, expecting supper and beds for the night, and she hadn’t much cooked… Julie was never very forehanded, that has to be admitted. When Abner arrived home two days afterwards he found her in bed with nervous prostration, and she was months getting over it. She didn’t eat a thing for six weeks… well, hardly anything. I heard she said if there really had been a funeral she couldn’t have been more upset. But I never believed she really did say it.’

‘You can’t be sure,’ said Mrs William McCreery. ‘People do say such awful things. When they’re upset the truth pops out. Julie’s sister Clarice actually went and sang in the choir as usual the first Sunday after her husband was buried.’

‘Not even a husband’s funeral could damp Clarice down long,’ said Agatha Drew. ‘There was nothing
solid
about her. Always dancing and singing.’

‘
I
used to dance and sing… on the shore, where nobody heard me,’ said Myra Murray.

‘Ah, but you’ve grow wiser since then,’ said Agatha.

‘No-o-o, foolisher,’ said Myra Murray slowly. ‘Too foolish now to dance along the shore.’

‘At first,’ said Emma, not to be cheated out of a complete story, ‘they thought the notice had been put in for a joke… because Abner had lost his election a few days before… but it turned out it was for an Amasa Cromwell, living away in the backwoods the other side of Lowbridge, no relation at all. He had really died. But it was a long time before people forgave Abner the disappointment, if they ever did.’

‘Well, it
was
a little inconvenient, driving all that distance, right in planting time, too, and finding you had your journey for your pains,’ said Mrs Tom Chubb defensively.

‘And people like funerals as a rule,’ said Mrs Donald Reese with spirit. ‘We’re all like children, I guess. I took Mary Anna to her Uncle Gordon’s funeral and she enjoyed it so. “Ma, couldn’t we dig him up and have the fun of burying him over again?” she said.’

They
did
laugh at this… everybody except Mrs Elder Baxter, who primmed up her long, thin face and jabbed the quilt mercilessly. Nothing was sacred nowadays. Everyone laughed at everything. But she, an elder’s wife, was not going to countenance any laughter connected with a funeral.