The Books: Anne of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/children’s books:

Next book on the shelf is Anne of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables, No. 6) by L.M. Montgomery.

Sixth in the Anne series – but I think this was one of the last books she wrote. I’ll have to check. [Checked: It was the second to last. Her last book was “Jane of Lantern Hill” (excerpt here)] Anne of Ingleside was published in 1939 – which always amazes me. What a horrible year that was. A horrible year for the world. There are a couple of foreshadowing moments in this book – because, after all, she has already written Rilla of Ingleside (excerpt here) – so she knows what happens. There’s a moment when Anne sees a shadow of a cross over her son Walter’s bed – and “later she would look back on that ….” etc.

Anne of Ingleside is the story of Anne and Gilbert raising their brood of children. Each child has his or her own big episode in the book – and the narrative is told from that child’s point of view. So we’re inside Jem’s head, or Walter’s head, or whatever. We see Anne and Gilbert, characters we now love and feel we know, through their kids eyes – as parents. They’re called “Mother” and “Dad”. I admit that when I was a teenager, reading the books for the first time, I got kind of frustrated. Because … where is Anne??? What’s going on with HER? But as an adult, it seems right. Anne is in the book, as herself, with her point of view, in the beginning, and intermittently throughout – and then there’s a huge brou-haha that takes up the end of the book – where Anne feels that Gilbert is neglecting her, and then she becomes convinced that Gilbert still pines for his college girlfriend Christine. This is really the only hint we ever get that Anne and Gilbert ever have marital strife. Or – not even strife – how ’bout an ARGUMENT? How ’bout a little reality? Lucy Maud’s marriage was so bad and so … shameful to her (mental illness being so stigmatized) that she never really wrote about marriage – I think it was too hot to go near. Leslie Moore is tragic and interesting (excerpt from Anne’s House of Dreams here) – and then she gets married and we never hear of her again. Lucy Maud’s books END with marriages. I’m not saying there’s anything bad with that – it just becomes noticeable as a theme. Anne and Gilbert are the only married couple that we really follow through their marriage, we see from the inside out, and Lucy Maud turns her focus onto the kids, rather than onto the grown-ups. In a way, this was VERY smart of her – because it kept the interest going for new generations. Anyway, just an observation.

Some of my favorite episodes in this book:

— the nightmare of Aunt Mary Maria – who comes to stay and then just won’t go home. What a drip. I was frustrated with Gilbert for not standing up to her.

— the tragic chapter where Nan becomes convinced (because a little evil child TOLD her) that she was adopted – that she is actually the daughter of a horrible old fishwife down on the shore

— when Walter walks all the way home because he’s convinced that something bad is happening at home … Turns out Anne is just having another baby – named Marilla – who eventually will star in her own book Rilla of Ingleside.

— Anne’s disastrous match-making attempt – very very funny

And frankly, I’m gonna be honest here: I just flipped through this book this morning and remembered a lot of it – but it’s not lodged in my memory the way the events of some of the other books are. But the excerpt I chose? It’s in my head forever. I probably think about this episode, oh, once a month? Seriously. It comes floating through my mind, and I sit, and ponder it for a second, before moving on. I remember the details – the descriptions – but mostly I remember the EVENT. Lucy Maud gets DARK here, and maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly. Not sure.

Anyway – Walter (Anne’s son) asks her, after overhearing someone mention it: “What happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral?”

Anne refuses to tell him. It is not a story for children. But then, in a moment of reflection, she sits and remembers it, thinks back on it.

In my opinion, this is Lucy Maud at her best. All the names, the gossip, the stories, the glimpses into other people’s hearts …

Excerpt from Anne of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables, No. 6) by L.M. Montgomery.

It had been in November … the first November they had spent at Ingleside … following a week of Indian summer days. The Kirks lived at Mowbray Narrows but came to the Glen church and Gilbert was their doctor; so he and Anne both went to the funeral.

It had been, she remembered, a mild, calm, pearl-grey day. All around them had been the lonely brown-and-purple landscape of November, with patches of sunlight here and there on upland and slope where the sun shone through a rift in the clouds. “Kirkwynd” was so near the shore that a breath of salt win blew through the grim firs behind it. It was a big, prosperous-looking house but Anne always thought that the gable of the L looked exactly like a long, narrow, spiteful face.

Anne paused to speak to a little knot of women on the stiff flowerless lawn. They were all good hard-working souls to whom a funeral was a not unpleasant excitement.

“I forgot to bring a handkerchief,” Mrs. Bryan Blake was saying plaintively. “Whatever will I do when I cry?”

‘Why will you have to cry?” bluntly asked her sister-in-law Camilla Blake. Camilla had no use for women who cried too easily. “Peter Kirk is no relation to you and you never liked him.”

“I think it is proper to cry at a funeral,” said Mrs. Blake stiffly. “It shows feeling when a neighbour has been summoned to his long home.”

“If nobody cries at Peter’s funeral except those who liked him there won’t be many wet eyes,” said Mrs. Curtis Rodd drily. “That is the truth and why mince it? He was a pious old humbug and I know it if nobody else does. Who is that coming at the little gate? Don’t … don’t tell me it’s Clara Wilson.”

“It is,” whispered Mrs. Bryan incredulously.

“Well, you know after Peter’s first wife died she told him she would never enter his house again until she came to his funeral and she’s kept her word,” said Camilla Blake. “She’s a sister of Peter’s first wife …” In an explanatory aside to Anne, who looked curiously at Clara Wilson as she swept past them, unseeing, her smouldering topaz eyes staring straight ahead. She was a thin slip of a woman with a dark-browed, tragic face and black hair under one of the absurd bonnets elderly women still wore … a thing of feathers and “bugles” with a skimpy nose veil. She looked at and spoke to no one, as her long black taffeta skirt swished over the grass and up the verandah steps.

“There’s Jed Clinton at the door, putting on his funeral face,” said Camilla sarcastically. “He’s evidently thinking it is time we went in. It’s always been his boast that at his funerals everything goes according to schedule. He’s never forgiven Winnie Clow for fainting before the sermon. It wouldn’t have been so bad afterwards. Well, nobody is likely to faint at this funeral. Olivia isn’t the fainting kind.”

“Jed Clinton … the Lowbridge undertaker,” said Mrs. Reese. “Why didn’t they have the Glen man?”

“Who? Carter Flagg? Why, woman dear, Peter and him have been at daggers drawn all their lives. Carter wanted Amy Wilson, you know.”

“A good many wanted her,” said Camilla. “She was a very pretty girl, with her coppery red hair and inky black eyes. Though people thought Clara the handsomer of the two then. It’s odd she never married. There’s the minister at last … and the Rev. Mr. Owen of Lowbridge with him. Of course he is Olivia’s cousin. All right except that he puts too many ‘Oh’s’ in his prayers. We’d better go in or Jed will have a conniption.”

Anne paused to look at Peter Kirk on her way to a chair. She had never liked him. “He has a cruel face,” she thought, the first time she had ever seen him. Handsome, yes … but with cold steely eyes even then becoming pouchy, and the thin pinched merciless mouth of a miser. He was known to be selfish and arrogant in his dealings with his fellow-men in spite of his profession of piety and his unctuous prayers. “Always feels his importance,” she had heard someone say once. Yet, on the whole, he had been respected and looked up to,.

He was as arrogant in his death as in his life and there was something about the too-long fingers clasped over his still breast that made Anne shudder. She thought of a woman’s heart being held in them and glanced at Olivia Kirk, sitting opposite to her in her mourning. Olivia was a tall, fair, handsome woman with large blue eyes … “no ugly woman for me,” Peter Kirk had said once … and her face was composed and expressionless. There was no apparent trace of tears … but then, Olivia had been a Random and the Randoms were not emotional. At least she sat decorously and the most heartbroken in the world could not have worn heavier weeds.

The air was cloyed with the perfume of the flowers that banked the coffin … for Peter Kirk, who had never known flowers existed. His lodge had sent a wreath, the church had sent one, the Conservative Assocation had sent one, the school trustees had sent one, the Cheese Board had sent one. His oine, long-alienated son had sent nothing, but the Kirk clan at large had sent a huge anchor of white roses with “Harbour At Last” in red rosebuds across it, and there was one from Olivia herself .. .a pillow of calla-lilies. Camilla Blake’s face twitched as she loked at it and Anne remembered that she had once heard Camilla say that she had been at Kirkwynd soon after Peter’s second marriage when Peter had fired out of the window a potted calla-lily which the bride had brought with her. He wasn’t, so he said, going to have his house cluttered up with weeds.

Olivia had apparently taken it very coolly and there had been no more calla-lilies at Kirkwynd. Could it be possible that Olivia … but Anne looked at Mrs. Kirk’s placid face and dismissed the suspicion. After all, it was generally the florist who suggested the flowers.

The choir sang “Death like a narrow sea divides that heavenly land from ours” and Anne caught Camilla’s eye and knew they were both wondering just how Peter Kirk would fit into that heavenly land. Anne could almost hear Camilla saying, “Fancy Peter Kirk with a harp and halo if you dare.”

The Rev. and Mrs. Owen read a chapter and prayed, with many “Oh’s” and many entreaties that sorrowing hearts might be comforted. The Glen minister gave an address which many privately considered entirely too fulsome, even allowing for the fact that you had to say something good of the dead. To hear Peter Kirk called an affectionate father and a tender husband, a kind neighbour and an earnest Christian was, they felt, a misuse of language. Camilla took refuge behind her handkerchief, not to shed tears, and Stephen Macdonald cleared his throat once or twice. Mrs. Bryan must have borrowed a handkerchief from someone, for she was weeping into it, but Olivia’s down-dropped blue eyes remained tearless.

Jed Clinton drew a breath of relief. All had gone beautifully. Another hymn … the customary parade for a last look at “the remains” … and another successful funeral would be added to his long list.

There was a slight disturbance in a corner of the large room and Clara Wilson made her way through the maze of chairs to the table beside the casket. She turned there and faced the assembly. Her absurd bonnet had slipped a trifle to one side and a loose end of heavy black hair had escaped from its coil and hung down on her shoulder. But nobody thought Clara Wilson looked absurd. Her long sallow face was flushed, her haunted tragic eyes were flaming. She was a woman possessed. Bitterness, like some gnawing incurable disease, seemed to pervade her being.

“You have listend to a pack of lies … you people who have come here ‘to pay your respects’ … or glut your curiosity, whicher it was. Now I shall tell you the truth about Peter Kirk. I am no hypocrite … I never feared him living and I do not fear him now that he is dead. Nobody has ever dared to tell the truth about him to his face but it is going to be told now … here at his funeral where he has been called a good husband and a kind neighbour. A good husband! He married my sister Amy … my beautiful sister, Amy. You all know how sweet and lovely she was. He made her life a misery to her. He tortured and humiliated her … he liked to do it. Oh, he went to church regularly … and made long prayers … and paid his debts. But he was a tyrant and a bully … his very dog ran when he heard him coming.

“I told Amy she would repent marrying him. I helped her make her wedding dress … I’d rather have made her shroud. She was wild about him then, poor thing, but she hadn’t been his wife a week before she knew what he was. His mother had been a slave and he expected his wife to be one. ‘There will be no arguments in my household,’ he told her. She hadn’t the spirit to argue … her heart was broken. Oh, I know what she went through, my poor pretty darling. He crossed her in everything. She couldn’t have a flower-garden … she couldn’t even have a kitten … I gave her one and he drowned it. She had to account to him for every cent she spent. Did ever any of you see her in a decent stitch of clothes? He would fault her for wearing her best hat if it looked like rain. Rain couldn’t hurt any hat she had, poor soul. Her that loved pretty clothes! He was always sneering at her people. He never laughed in his life … did any of you ever hear him really laugh? He smiled … oh yes, he always smiled, calmly and sweetly when he was doing the most maddening things. He smiled when he told her after her little baby was born dead that she might as well have died, too, if she couldn’t have anything but dead brats. She died after ten years of it … and I was glad she had escaped him. I told him then I’d never enter his house again till I came to his funeral. Some of you heard me. I’ve kept my word and now I’ve come and told the truth about him. It is the truth … you know it” … she pointed fiercely at Stephen Macdonald … “you know it” … the long finger darted at Camilla Blake … “you know it” … Olivia Kirk did not move a muscle … “you know it” … the poor minister himself felt as if that finger stabbed completely through him. “I cried at Peter Kirk’s wedding but I told him I’d laugh at his funeral. And I am going to do it.”

She swished furiously about and bent over the casket. Wrongs that had festered for years had been avenged. She had wreaked her hatred at last. Her whole body vibrated with triumph and satisfaction as she looked down at the cold quiet face of a dead man. Everybody listened for the burst of vindictive laughter. It did not come. Clara Wilson’s angry face suddenly changed … twisted … crumpled up like a child’s. Clara was … crying.

She turned, with the tears streaming down her ravaged cheeks, to leave the room. But Olivia Kirk rose before her and laid a hand on her arm. For a moment the two women looked at each other. The room was engulfed in a silence that seemed like a personal presence.

“Thank you, Clara Wilson,” said Olivia Kirk. Her face was as inscrutable as ever but there was an undertone in her calm, even voice that made Anne shudder. She felt as if a pit had suddenly opened before her eyes. Clara Wilson might hate Peter Kirk, alive and dead, but Anne felt that her hatred was a pale thing compared to Olivia Kirk’s.