Chapter 39 Anne of Ingleside by Lucy Montgomery
A bitter east wind was snarling around Ingleside like a shrewish old woman. It was one of those chill, drizzly, late August days that take the heart out of you, one of those days when everything goes wrong . . . what in old Avonlea days had been called "a Jonah day." The new pup Gilbert had brought home for the boys had gnawed the enamel off the dining table leg . . . Susan had found that the moths had been having a Roman holiday in the blanket closet . . . Nan's new kitten had ruined the choicest fern . . . Jem and Bertie Shakespeare had been making the most abominable racket in the garret all the afternoon with tin pails for drums . . . Anne herself had broken a painted glass lampshade. But somehow it had done her good just to hear it smash! Rilla had had earache and Shirley had a mysterious rash on his neck, which worried Anne but at which Gilbert only glanced casually and said in an absent-minded voice that he didn't think it meant anything. Of course it didn't mean anything to him! Shirley was only his own son! And it didn't matter to him either that he had invited the Trents to dinner one evening last week and forgotten to tell Anne until they arrived. She and Susan had had an extra busy day and had planned a pick-up supper. And Mrs. Trent with the reputation of being Charlottetown's smartest hostess! Where were Walter's stockings with the black tops and the blue toes? "Do you think, Walter, that you could just for once put a thing where it belongs? Nan, I don't know where the Seven Seas are. For mercy's sake, stop asking questions! I don't wonder they poisoned Socrates. They ought to have."
Walter and Nan stared. Never had they heard their mother speak in such a tone before. Walter's look annoyed Anne still more.
"Diana, is it necessary to be forever reminding you not to twist your legs around the piano stool? Shirley, if you haven't got that new magazine all sticky with jam! And perhaps somebody would be kind enough to tell me where the prisms of the hanging lamp have gone!"
Nobody could tell her . . . Susan having unhooked them and taken them out to wash them . . . and Anne whisked herself upstairs to escape from the grieved eyes of her children. In her own room she paced up and down feverishly. What was the matter with her? Was she turning into one of those peevish creatures who had no patience with anybody? Everything annoyed her these days. A little mannerism of Gilbert's she had never minded before got on her nerves. She was sick-and-tired of never-ending, monotonous duties . . . sick-and-tired of catering to her family's whims. Once everything she did for her house and household gave her delight. Now she did not seem to care what she did. She felt all the time like a creature in a nightmare, trying to overtake someone with fettered feet.
The worst of it all was that Gilbert never noticed that there was any change in her. He was busy night and day and seemed to care for nothing but his work. The only thing he had said at dinner that day had been "Pass the mustard, please."
"I can talk to the chairs and table, of course," thought Anne bitterly. "We're just getting to be a sort of habit with each other . . . nothing else. He never noticed that I had on a new dress last night. And it's so long since he called me 'Anne-girl' that I've forgotten when. Well, I suppose all marriages come to this in the end. Probably most women go through this. He just takes me for granted. His work is the only thing that means anything to him now. Where is my handkerchief?"
Anne got her handkerchief and sat down in her chair to torture herself luxuriantly. Gilbert didn't love her any more. When he kissed her he kissed her absently . . . just "habit." All the glamour was gone. Old jokes they had laughed together over came up in recollection, charged with tragedy now. How could she ever have thought them funny? Monty Turner who kissed his wife systematically once a week . . . made a memorandum to remind him. ("Would any wife want such kisses?") Curtis Ames who met his wife in a new bonnet and didn't know her. Mrs. Clancy Dare who had said, "I don't care an awful lot about my husband but I'd miss him if he wasn't round." ("I suppose Gilbert would miss me if I weren't around! Has it come to that with us?") Nat Elliott who told his wife after ten years of marriage, "if you must know I'm just tired of being married." ("And we've been married fifteen years!") Well, perhaps all men were like that. Probably Miss Cornelia would say that they were. After a time they were hard to hold. ("If my husband has to be 'held' I don't want to hold him.") But there was Mrs. Theodore Clow who had said proudly at a Ladies' Aid, "We've been married twenty years and my husband loves me as much as he did on our wedding day." But perhaps she was deceiving herself or only "keeping face." And she looked every day of her age and more. ("I wonder if I am beginning to look old.")
For the first time her years felt like a weight. She went to the mirror and looked at herself critically. There were some tiny crow's-feet around her eyes but they were only visible in a strong light. Her chin lines were yet unblurred. She had always been pale. Her hair was thick and wavy without a grey thread. But did anybody really like red hair? Her nose was still definitely good. Anne patted it as a friend, recalling certain moments of life when her nose was all that carried her through. But Gilbert just took her nose for granted now. It might be crooked or pug, for all it mattered to him. Likely he had forgotten that she had a nose. Like Mrs. Dare, he might miss it if it wasn't there.
"Well, I must go and see to Rilla and Shirley," thought Anne drearily. "At least, they need me still, poor darlings. What made me so snappish with them? Oh, I suppose they're all saying behind my back, 'How cranky poor Mother is getting!'"
It continued to rain and the wind continued to wail. The fantasia of tin pans in the garret had stopped but the ceaseless chirping of a solitary cricket in the living-room nearly drove her mad. The noon mail brought her two letters. One was from Marilla . . . but Anne sighed as she folded it up. Marilla's handwriting was getting so frail and shaky. The other letter was from Mrs. Barrett Fowler of Charlottetown whom Anne knew very slightly. And Mrs. Barrett Fowler wanted Dr. and Mrs. Blythe to dine with her next Tuesday night at seven o'clock "to meet your old friend, Mrs. Andrew Dawson of Winnipeg, nee Christine Stuart."
Anne dropped the letter. A flood of old memories poured over her . . . some of them decidedly unpleasant. Christine Stuart of Redmond . . . the girl to whom people had once said Gilbert was engaged . . . the girl of whom she had once been so bitterly jealous . . . yes, she admitted it now, twenty years after . . . she had been jealous . . . she had hated Christine Stuart. She had not thought of Christine for years but she remembered her distinctly. A tall, ivory-white girl with great dark-blue eyes and blue-black masses of hair. And a certain air of distinction. But with a long nose . . . yes, definitely a long nose. Handsome . . . oh, you couldn't deny that Christine had been very handsome. She remembered hearing many years ago that Christine had "married well" and gone West.
Gilbert came in for a hurried bite of supper . . . there was an epidemic of measles in the Upper Glen . . . and Anne silently handed him Mrs. Fowler's letter.
"Christine Stuart! Of course we'll go. I'd like to see her for old sake's sake," he said, with the first appearance of admiration he had shown for weeks. "Poor girl, she has had her own troubles. She lost her husband four years ago, you know."
Anne didn't know. And how came Gilbert to know? Why had he never told her? And had he forgotten that next Tuesday was the anniversary of their own wedding day? A day on which they had never accepted any invitation but went off on a little bat of their own. Well, she wouldn't remind him. He could see his Christine if he wanted to. What had a girl at Redmond once said to her darkly, "There was a good deal more between Gilbert and Christine than you ever knew, Anne." She had merely laughed at it at the time . . . Claire Hallett was a spiteful thing. But perhaps there had been something in it. Anne suddenly remembered, with a little chill of the spirit, that not long after her marriage she had found a small photograph of Christine in an old pocketbook of Gilbert's. Gilbert had seemed quite indifferent and said he'd wondered where that old snap had got to. But . . . was it one of those unimportant things that are significant of things tremendously important? Was it possible . . . had Gilbert ever loved Christine? Was she, Anne, only a second choice? The consolation prize?
"Surely I'm not . . . jealous," thought Anne, trying to laugh. It was all very ridiculous. What more natural than that Gilbert should like the idea of meeting an old Redmond friend? What more natural than that a busy man, married for fifteen years, should forget times and seasons and days and months? Anne wrote to Mrs. Fowler, accepting her invitation . . . and then put in the three days before Tuesday hoping desperately that somebody in the Upper Glen would start having a baby Tuesday afternoon about half past five.