The Books: The Golden Road (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Next book on the shelf is The Golden Road by L.M. Montgomery.

The Golden Road is the second book in the series about “The Story Girl” (first excerpt here) – the second and final book. The melancholy that was only hinted at in the first book now comes much more to the forefront (you’ll see what I mean in the excerpt). “The golden road” means childhood – and in this book – the children are approaching the end of it. It’s like little Jackie Paper’s betrayal of Puff. That song always killed me as a little kid – because I was SO on Puff’s side. I would NEVER betray Puff, etc. But that’s what happens … you grow up … Puff is left behind. Lucy Maud remembers very well what that moment is like (so many people forget – and often it is up to authors to remind us) – and “The Golden Road” tells about that specific moment. The kids still cling to childhood – although life continues to intervene, pulling them forward.

The Story Girl’s father (who basically abandoned her) returns at the end of this book – and amazingly the Story Girl holds no resentment towards him (this is akin to Lucy Maud’s whole experience with her father) – she is overjoyed to see her father. But what the advent of her father means is that he is now going to take her away. She will be joining him now in his global gallivanting – and the little band of friends are going to be broken up. Bev and Felix also get the word from their father from Rio de Janiero that he will be coming to fetch them as well – he misses them desperately – and needs to have the family be together again. So everything is going to change … all at once.

But before that moment – the adventures continue. They get up a newspaper which they publish once a month. Every issue of this newspaper (with etiquette tips, and gossip columns, and “news” stories) is included in this book. Some of it is laugh out loud funny.

There are resolutions that come to mysteries and conundrums set up in the first book. The mysterious and dreamy Awkward Man (that is his name, apparently) finds his love and takes her home with him. He will be lonely no more. The kids finally get to hang out with Peg Bowen, the witch, up close and personal – when they take shelter in her hut during a blizzard. A couple of other loose ends are tied up, including the big ol’ loose end of what will happen to the Story Girl. Her humble homely aunts and uncles have a vague sense (even though they are strict unimaginative Presbyterians) that she could “be something” some day … that she needs to have an education … that the life of a housewife or a farmer’s wife is not for her … but who will give her this education? Who will provide for her?

At the end of the book – the Story Girl leaves – waving out the window of her buggy – tears streaming down her face – at all of her little friends and cousins, promising to keep in touch, even though now – she will be living in London and Paris with her father.

Childhood has ended. They have come to the end of the Golden Road. These are simple sweet books about childhood, with hilarious tales of mischief, and recipes gone bad, and dares gone haywire – but running through them is a yowl of pain, that all beautiful things must come to an end.

Here is a chapter that comes near the end of the book. The group of friends sense that their time of heavenly togetherness and blissful oblivion is coming to a close. So every moment they have together is piercingly sweet, and almost sad.

At the end of this excerpt comes a perfect example of what I meant when I said that the future flits across these books like a shadow. Bev, the narrator, is writing from the future. He knows the end. He knows what is going to happen. He never shows his cards, because that is not what the books are about – but the knowledge is still there.

Excerpt from The Golden Road by L.M. Montgomery.

“It’ll be awfully dull when you fellows go,” muttered Dan.

“I’m sure I don’t know what we’re ever going to do here this winter,” said Felicity, with the calmness of despair.

“Thank goodness there are no more fathers to come back,” breathed Cecily with a vicious earnestness that made us all laugh, even in the midst of our dismay.

We worked very half-heartedly the rest of the day, and it was not until we assembled in the orchard in the evening that our spirits recovered something like their wonted level. It was clear and slightly frosty; the sun had declined behind a birch on a distant hill and it seemed a tree with a blazing heart of fire. The great golden willow at the lane gate was laughter-shaken in the wind of evening. Even amid all the changes of our shifting world we could not be hopelessly low-spirited – except Sara Ray, who was often so, and Peter, who was rarely so. But Peter had been sorely vexed in spirit for several days. The time was approaching for the October issue of Our Magazine and he had no genuine fiction ready for it. He had taken so much to heart Felicity’s taunt that his stories were all true that he had determined to have a really-truly false one in the next number. But the difficulty was to get anyone to write it. He had asked the Story Girl to do it, but she refused; then he appealed to me and I shirked. Finally Peter determined to write a story himself.

“It oughtn’t to be any harder than writing a poem and I managed that,” he said dolefully.

He worked at it in the evenings in the granary loft, and the rest of us forebore to question him concerning it, because he evidently disliked talking about his lterary efforts. But this evening I had to ask him if he would soon have it ready, as I wanted to make up the paper.

“It’s done,” said Peter, with an air of gloomy triumph. “It don’t amount to much, but anyhow I made it all out of my own head. Not one word of it was ever printed or told before, and nobody can say there was.”

“Then I guess we have all the stuff in and I’ll have Our Magazine ready to read by tomorrow night,” I said.

“I s’pose it will be the last one we’ll have,” sighed Cecily. “We can’t carry it on after you all go, and it has been such fun.”

“Bev will be a real newspaper editor some day,” declared the Story Girl, on whom the spirit of prophecy suddenly descended that night.

She was swinging on the bough of an apple tree, with a crimson shawl wrapped about her head, and her eyes were bright with roguish fire.

“How do you know he will?” asked Felicity.

“Oh, I can tell futures,” answered the Story Girl mysteriously. “I know what’s going to happen to all of you. Shall I tell you?”

“Do, just for the fun of it,” I said. “Then some day we’ll know just how near you came to guessing right. Go on. What else about me?”

“You’ll write books, too, and travel all over the world,” continued the Story Girl. “Felix will be fat to the end of his life, and he will be a grandfather before he is fifty, and he will wear a long black beard.”

“I won’t,” cried Felix disgustedly. “I hate whiskers. Maybe I can’t help the grandfather part, but I can help having a beard.”

“You can’t. It’s written in the stars.”

“T’ain’t. The stars can’t prevent me from shaving.”

“Won’t Grandpa Felix sound awful funny?” reflected Felicity.

“Peter will be a minister,” went on the Story Girl.

“Well, I might be something worse,” remarked Peter, in a not ungratified tone.

“Dan will be a farmer and will marry a girl whose name begins with K and he will have eleven children. And he’ll vote Grit.”

“I won’t,” cried scandalized Dan. “You don’t know a thing about it. Catch me ever voting Grit! As for the rest of it – I don’t care. Farming’s well enough, though I’d rather be a sailor.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” protested Felicity sharply. “What on earth do you want to be a sailor for and be drowned?”

“All sailors aren’t drowned,” said Dan.

“Most of them are. Look at Uncle Stephen.”

“You ain’t sure he was drowned.”

“Well, he disappeared, and that is worse.”

“How do you know? Disappearing might be real easy.”

“It’s not very easy for your family.”

“Hush, let’s hear the rest of the predictions,” said Cecily.

“Felicity,” resumed the Story Girl gravely, “will marry a minister.”

Sara Ray giggled and Felicity blushed. Peter tried hard not to look too self-consciously delighted.

“She will be a perfect housekeeper and will teach a Sunday School class and be very happy all her life.”

“Will her husband be happy?” queried Dan solemnly.

“I guess he’ll be as happy as your wife,” retorted Felicity reddening.

“He’ll be the happiest man in the world,” declared Peter warmly.

“What about me?” asked Sara Ray.

The Story Girl looked rather puzzled. It was so hard to imagine Sara Ray as having any kind of future. Yet Sara was plainly anxious to have her fortune told and must be gratified.

“You’ll be married,” said the Story Girl recklessly, “and you’ll live to be nearly a hundred years old, and go to dozens of funerals and have a great many sick spells. You will learn not to cry after you are seventy; but your husband will never go to church.”

“I’m glad you warned me,” said Sara Ray solemnly, “because now I know I’ll make him promise before I marry him that he will go.”

“He won’t keep the promise,” said the Story Girl, shaking her head. “But it’s getting cold and Cecily is coughing. Let us go in.”

“You haven’t told my fortune,” protested Cecily disappointedly.

The Story Girl looked very tenderly at Cecily – at the smooth little brown head, at the soft, shining eyes, at the cheeks that were often over-rosy after slight exertion, at the little sunburned hands that were always busy doing faithful work or quiet kindnesses. A very strange look came over the Story Girl’s face, her eyes grew sad and far-reaching, as if of a verity they pierced beyond the mists of hidden years.

“I couldn’t tell any fortune half good enough for you, dearest,” she said, slipping her arm round Cecily. “You deserve everything good and lovely. But you know I’ve only been in fun – of course I don’t know anything about what’s going to happen to us.”

“Perhaps you know more than you think for,” said Sara Ray, who seemed much pleased with her fortune and anxious to believe it, despite the husband who wouldn’t go to church.

“But I’d like to be told my fortune, even in fun,” persisted Cecily.

“Everybody you meet will love you as long as you live,” said the Story Girl. “There that’s the very nicest fortune I can tell you, and it will come true whether the others do or not, and now we must go in.”

We went, Cecily still a little disappointed. In later years I often wondered why the Story Girl refused to tell her fortune that night. Did some strange gleam of foreknowledge fall for a moment across her mirth-making? Did she realize in a flash of prescience that there was no earthly future for our sweet Cecily? Not for her were to be the lengthening shadows or the fading garland. The end was to come while the rainbow still sparkled on her wine of life, ere a single peter had fallen from her rose of joy. Long life was before all the others who trysted that night in the old homestead orchard; but Cecily’s maiden feet were never to leave the golden road.