Anne of Ingleside (4 page)

Gingerbread and whipped cream was Jem’s favourite dessert. But tonight it had no charm to soothe his stormy soul.

‘I don’t want any,’ he said sulkily. He got up and marched away from the table, turning at the door to hurl a final defiance.

‘I ain’t going to bed till nine o’clock anyhow. And when I’m grown up I’m
never
going to bed. I’m going to stay up all night, every night, and get tattooed
all over
. I’m just going to be as bad as bad can be. You’ll see.’

‘ “I’m not” would be so much better than “ain’t”, dear,’ said Mother.

Could
nothing
make them feel?

‘I suppose nobody wants
my
opinion, Annie, but if I had talked to my parents like that when I was a child I would have been whipped within an inch of my life,’ said Aunt Mary Maria. ‘I think it is a great pity the birch rod is so neglected now in some homes.’

‘Little Jem is not to blame,’ snapped Susan, seeing that Dr and Mrs Doctor were not going to say anything. But if Mary Maria Blythe was going to get away with that, she, Susan, would know the reason why. ‘Bertie Shakespeare Drew put him up to it, filling him up with what fun it would be to see Joe Drew tattooed. He was here all the afternoon and sneaked into the kitchen and took the best aluminium saucepan to use as a helmet. Said they were playing soldiers. Then they made boats out of shingles and got soaked to the bone sailing them in the Hollow brook. And after that they went hopping about the yard for a solid hour, making the weirdest noises, pretending they were frogs. Frogs! No wonder Little Jem is tired out and not himself. He is the best-behaved child that ever lived when he is not worn to a frazzle and that you may tie to.’

Aunt Mary Maria said nothing aggravatingly. She never talked to Susan Baker at meal-times, thus expressing her disapproval over Susan being allowed to ‘sit with the family’ at all.

Anne and Susan had thrashed that out before Aunt Mary Maria had come. Susan, who ‘knew her place’, never sat or expected to sit with the family when there was company at Ingleside.

‘But Aunt Mary Maria isn’t company,’ said Anne. ‘She’s just one of the family, and so are you, Susan.’

In the end Susan gave in, not without a secret satisfaction that Mary Maria Blythe would see that she was no common hired girl. Susan had never met Aunt Mary Maria, but a niece of Susan’s, the daughter of her sister Matilda, had worked for her in Charlottetown and had told Susan all about her.

‘I am not going to pretend to you, Susan, that I’m overjoyed at the prospect of a visit from Aunt Mary Maria, especially just now,’ said Anne frankly. ‘But she has written Gilbert asking if she may come for a few weeks… and you know how the doctor is about such things…

‘As he has a perfect right to be,’ said Susan staunchly. ‘What’s a man to do but stand by his own flesh and blood? But as for a few weeks… well, Mrs Doctor dear, I don’t want to look on the dark side of things… but my sister Matilda’s sister-in-law come to visit
her
for a few weeks and stayed for twenty years.’

‘I don’t think we need dread anything like that, Susan,’ smiled Anne. ‘Aunt Mary Maria has a very nice home of her own in Charlottetown. But she is finding it very big and lonely. Her mother died two years ago, you know… she was eighty-five, and Aunt Mary Maria was very good to her and misses her very much. Let’s make her visit as pleasant as we can, Susan.’

‘I’ll do what in me lies, Mrs Doctor dear. Of course, we must put another board in the table, but after all is said and done it’s better to be lengthening the table than shortening it down.’

‘We mustn’t have flowers on the table, Susan, because I understand they give her asthma. And pepper makes her sneeze, so we’d better not have it. She is subject to frequent bad headaches, too, so we must really try not to be noisy.’

‘Good grief! Well, I’ve never noticed you and the doctor making much noise. And if I want to yell I can go to the middle of the maple bush; but if our poor children have to keep quiet
all
the time because of Mary Maria Blythe’s headaches… you’ll excuse me for saying I think it’s going a little too far, Mrs Doctor dear.’

‘It’s just for a few weeks, Susan.’

‘Let us hope so. Oh, well, Mrs Doctor dear, we just have to take the lean streaks with the fat in this world,’ was Susan’s final word.

So Aunt Mary Maria came, demanding immediately upon her arrival if they had had the chimneys cleaned recently. She had, it appeared, a great dread of fire. ‘And I’ve always said that the chimneys of this house aren’t nearly tall enough. I hope my bed has been well aired, Annie. Damp bed linen is terrible.’

She took possession of the Ingleside guest-room… and incidentally of all the other rooms in the house except Susan’s. Nobody hailed her arrival with frantic delight. Jem, after one look at her, slipped out to the kitchen and whispered to Susan, ‘Can we laugh while she’s here, Susan?’ Walter’s eyes brimmed with tears at sight of her and he had to be hustled ignominiously out of the room. The twins did not wait to be hustled, but ran of their own accord. Even the Shrimp, Susan averred, went and had a fit in the backyard. Only Shirley stood his ground, gazing fearlessly at her out of his round brown eyes from the safe anchorage of Susan’s lap and arm. Aunt Mary Maria thought the Ingleside children had very bad manners. But what could you expect when they had a mother who ‘wrote for the papers’ and a father who thought they were perfection just because they were
his
children and a hired girl like Susan Baker who never knew her place. But she, Mary Maria Blythe, would do her best for poor Cousin John’s grandchildren as long as she was at Ingleside.

‘Your grace is much too short, Gilbert,’ she said disapprovingly at her first meal. ‘Would you like me to say grace for you while I am here? It will be a better example to your family.’

Much to Susan’s horror Gilbert said he would, and Aunt Mary Maria said grace at supper. ‘More like a prayer than a grace,’ Susan sniffed over her dishes. Susan privately agreed with her niece’s description of Mary Maria Blythe. ‘She always seems to be smelling a bad smell, Aunt Susan. Not an unpleasant odour… just a bad smell.’ Gladys had a way of putting things, Susan reflected. And yet, to anyone less prejudiced than Susan, Miss Mary Maria Blythe was not ill-looking for a lady of fifty-five. She had what she believed were ‘aristocratic features’, framed by always sleek grey crimps which seemed to insult Susan’s spiky little knob of grey hair. She dressed very nicely, wore long jet earrings in her ears and fashionably high-boned net collars on her lean throat.

‘At least, we don’t need to be ashamed of her appearance,’ reflected Susan. But what Aunt Mary Maria would have thought if she had known Susan was consoling herself on such grounds must be left to the imagination.

Anne was cutting a vaseful of June lilies for her room and another of Susan’s peonies for Gilbert’s desk in the library… the milky-white peonies with the blood-red neck at their hearts, like a god’s kiss. The air was coming alive after the unusually hot June day and one could hardly tell whether the harbour were silver or gold.

‘There’s going to be a wonderful sunset tonight, Susan,’ she said, looking in at the kitchen window as she passed it.

‘I cannot admire the sunset until I have got my dishes washed, Mrs Doctor dear,’ protested Susan.

‘It will be gone by that time, Susan. Look at that enormous white cloud towering up over the Hollow, with its rosy pink top. Wouldn’t you like to fly up and light on it?’

Susan had a vision of herself flying up over the glen, dish-cloth in hand, to that cloud. It did not appeal to her. But allowances must be made for Mrs Doctor just now.

‘There’s a new, vicious kind of bug eating the rose-bushes,’ went on Anne. ‘I must spray them tomorrow. I’d like to do it tonight… this is just the kind of evening I love to work in the garden. Things are growing tonight. I hope there’ll be gardens in heaven, Susan… gardens we can work in, I mean, and help things to grow.’

‘But not bugs, surely,’ protested Susan.

‘No-o-o, I suppose not. But a
completed
garden wouldn’t really be any fun, Susan. You have to work in a garden yourself or you miss its meaning. I want to weed and dig and transplant and change and prune. And I want the flowers I love in heaven… I’d rather my own pansies than the asphodel, Susan.’

‘Why can’t you put in the evening as you want to?’ broke in Susan, who thought Mrs Doctor was really getting a little wild.

‘Because the doctor wants me to go for a drive with him. He is going to see poor old Mrs John Paxton. She is dying… he can’t do her any good… he has done everything he can… but she does like to have him drop in.’

‘Oh, well, Mrs Doctor dear, we all know that nobody can die or be born without him hereabouts, and it is a nice evening for a drive. I think I’ll take a walk down to the village myself and replenish our pantry after I put the twins and Shirley to bed and manure Mrs Aaron Ward. She isn’t blooming as she ought to. Miss Blythe has just gone upstairs, sighing at every step, saying one of her headaches is coming on, so there’ll be a little peace and quiet for the evening at least.’

‘See that Jem goes to bed in good time, will you, Susan?’ said Anne, as she went away through the evening that was like a cup of fragrance that had spilled over. ‘He’s really much tireder than he thinks he is. And he never wants to go to bed. Walter is not coming home tonight; Leslie asked if he might stay there.’

Jem was sitting on the steps of the side door, one bare foot hooked over his knee, scowling viciously at things in general and at an enormous moon behind the Glen church spire in particular. Jem didn’t like such big moons.

‘Take care your face doesn’t freeze like that,’ Aunt Mary Maria had said as she passed him on her way into the house.

Jem scowled more blackly than ever. He didn’t care if his face did freeze like that. He hoped it would. ‘Go ’way and don’t come tagging after me all the time,’ he told Nan, who had crept out to him after Father and Mother had driven away.

‘Cross-patch!’ said Nan. But before she trotted off she laid down on the step beside him the red candy lion she had brought out to him.

Jem ignored it. He felt more abused than ever. He wasn’t being used right. Everybody picked on him. Hadn’t Nan that very morning said, ‘
You
weren’t born at Ingleside like the rest of us.’ Di had et his chocolate rabbit that forenoon, though she
knew
it was his rabbit. Even Walter had deserted him, going away to dig wells in the sand with Ken and Persis Ford. Great fun that! And he wanted so much to go with Bertie to see the tattooing. Jem was sure he had never wanted anything so much in his life before. He wanted to see the wonderful, full-rigged ship that Bertie said was always on Captain Bill’s mantelpiece. It was a mean shame, that’s what it was.

Susan brought him out a big slice of cake covered with maple frosting and nuts, but… ‘No, thank you,’ said Jem stonily. Why hadn’t she saved some of the gingerbread and cream for him? S’pose the rest of them had et it all. Pigs! He plunged into a deeper gulf of gloom. The gang would be on their way to the Harbour Mouth by now. He just couldn’t bear the thought. He’d
got
to do something to get square with folks. S’posin’ he sliced Di’s sawdust giraffe open on the living-room rug? That would make old Susan mad… Susan with her nuts, when she knew he hated nuts in frosting. S’posin’ he went and drew a moustache on that picture of the cherub on the calendar in her room? He had always hated that fat, pink, smiling cherub because it looked just like Sissy Flagg, who had told round school that Jem Blythe was her beau. Hers! Sissy Flagg! But Susan thought that cherub lovely.

S’posin’ he scalped Nan’s doll? S’posin’ he wacked the nose off Gog or Magog… or both of them? Maybe that would make Mother see he wasn’t a boy any longer. Just wait till next spring. He had brought her mayflowers for years and years and years, ever since he was four, but he wouldn’t do it next spring. No, sir! S’posin’ he et a lot of the little green apples on the early tree and got nice and sick? Maybe
that
would scare them. S’posin’ he never washed behind his ears again? S’posin’ he made faces at everybody in church next Sunday? S’posin’ he put a caterpillar on Aunt Mary Maria… a big, striped, woolly caterpillar? S’posin’ he ran away to the harbour and hid in Captain David Reese’s ship and sailed out of the harbour in the morning on his way to South America? Would they be sorry
then?
S’posin’ he never came back? S’posin’ he went hunting jaggers in Brazil? Would they be sorry
then?
No, he bet they wouldn’t. Nobody loved him. There was a hole in his pants pocket. Nobody had mended it. Well,
he
didn’t care. He’d just show that hole to everybody in the Glen and let people see how neglected he was. His wrongs surged up and overwhelmed him.

Tick-tack… tick-tack… tick-tack… went the old grandfather clock in the hall that had been brought to Ingleside after Grandfather Blythe’s death… a deliberate old clock dating from the days when there was such a thing as time. Generally Jem loved it, now he hated it. It seemed to be laughing at him. ‘Ha, ha, bedtime is coming. The other fellows can go to the Harbour Mouth, but you go to bed. Ha, ha… ha, ha… ha, ha!’

Why
did he have to go to bed every night? Yes, why?

Susan came out on her way to the Glen and looked tenderly at the small, rebellious figure.

‘You needn’t go to bed till I get back, Little Jem,’ she said indulgently.

‘I ain’t going to bed tonight,’ said Jem fiercely. ‘
I
’m going to run away, that’s what I’m going to do, old Susan Baker. I’m going to go and jump into the pond, old Susan Baker.’

Susan did not enjoy being called old, even by Little Jem. She stalked away in a grim silence. He
did
need a bit of disciplining. The Shrimp, who had followed her out, feeling a yearning for companionship, squatted down on his black haunches before Jem, but got only a glare for his pains. ‘Clear out! Sitting there on your bottom, staring like Aunt Mary Maria! Scat! Oh, you won’t, won’t you! Then take that.’