The Books: Further Chronicles of Avonlea: ‘The Materializing of Cecil’ (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Further Chronicles of Avonlea – “The Materializing of Cecil” – by L.M. Montgomery

Second story in this collection – it’s hysterical. It’s almost like a Three’s Company episode (sorry for the low-brow comparison, but it’s true.)

Charlotte Holmes is a spinster. Or – gentler term – an old maid. One time, long long ago, a boy wrote a poem to her – while in grade school. That is the extent of her romantic associations. She is known as an old maid. It’s over for her – she’s 40 years old, whatever, she’s not bitter. She admits to herself that it’s not that she had thwarted her chances. She knows in her heart that she never “met the right guy” – she just never had her heart engaged with anyone, so she’s an old maid now. She’s fine with her life. She loves sewing, her cats, church, she loves to write poetry, she’s not bitter. The only thing that bugs her is the PITY. People in Avonlea PITY old maids (uhm, that shit is still going on, Lucy Maud – the smug pity of married people with kids – it’s still odious!!). Charlotte doesn’t want to be pitied because she is quite happy! But then, on her 40th birthday, she is at a sewing circle with a bunch of younger women, who are all chattering about their beaus. She doesn’t mind. She sits, listening, pleasantly … until one of them asks her, out of the blue, “Have you ever had a beau, Miss Holmes?”

And a small demon suddenly enters the placid Charlotte Holmes – she tells a lie – an out and out lie – and eventually … all freakin’ hell breaks loose. It’s hilarious (mainly because I didn’t have to go thru it!! I’m sure I wouldn’t find it hilarious if I had had to LIVE it) – like: the thought of getting so BUSTED in your pathetic lie …

Great story.

Here’s an excerpt from the sewing circle when Charlotte, nice sweet old maid Charlotte, suddenly becomes a demon and begins to weave a web of evil lies.

Excerpt from Further Chronicles of Avonlea – “The Materializing of Cecil” – by L.M. Montgomery

I was sitting by the window and Wilhelmina Mercer, Maggie Henderson, Susette Cross, and Georgie Hall were in a little group just before me. I wasn’t listening to their chatter at all, but presently Georgie exclaimed teasingly:

“Miss Charlotte is laughing at us. I suppose she thinks we are awfully silly to be talking about beaux.”

The truth was that I was simply smiling over some very pretty thoughts that had come to me about the roses which were climbing over Mary Gillespie’s sill. I meant to inscribe them in the little blank book when I went home. Georgie’s speech brought me back to harsh realities with a jolt. It hurt me, as such speeches always did.

“Didn’t you ever have a beau, Miss Holmes?” said Wilhelmina laughingly.

Just as it happened, a silence had fallen over the room for a moment, and everybody in it heard Wilhelmina’s question.

I really do not know what got into me and possessed me. I have never been able to account for what I said and did, because I am naturally a truthful person and hate all deceit. It seemed to me that I simply could not say “No” to Wilhelmina before that whole roomful of women. It was too humiliating. I suppose all the prickles and stings and slurs I had endured for fifteen years on account of never having had a lover had what the new doctor calls “a cumulative effect” and came to a head then and there.

“Yes, I had one once, my dear,” I said calmly.

For once in my life I made a sensation. Every woman in that room stopped sewing and stared at me. Most of them, I saw, didn’t believe me, but Wilhelmina did. Her pretty face lighted up with interest.

“Oh, won’t you tell us about him, Miss Holmes?” she coaxed, “and why you didn’t marry him?”

“That is right, Miss Mercer,” said Josephine Cameron, with a nasty little laugh. “Make her tell. We’re all interested. It’s news to us that Charlotte ever had a beau.”

If Josephine had not said that, I might not have gone on. But she did say it, and moreover, I caught Mary Gillespie and Adella Gilbert exchanging significant smiles. That settled it, and made me quite reckless. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” thought I, and I said with a pensive smile:

“Nobody here knew anything about him, and it was all long, long ago.”

“What was his name?” asked Wilhelmina.

“Cecil Fenwick,” I answered promptly. Cecil had always been my favorite name for a man; it figured quite frequently in the blank book. As for the Fenwick part of it, I had a bit of newspaper in my hand, measuring a hem, with “Try Fenwick’s Porous Plasters” printed across it, and I simply joined the two in sudden and irrevocable matrimony.

“Where did you meet him?” asked Georgie.

I hastily reviewed my past. There was only one place to locate Cecil Fenwick. The only time I had ever been far enough away from Avonlea in my life was when I was eighteen and had gone to visit an aunt in New Brunswick.

“In Blakely, New Brunswick,” I said, almost believeing that I had when I saw how they all took it in unsuspectingly. “I was just eighteen and he was twenty-three.”

“What did he look like?” Susette wanted to know.

“Oh, he was very handsome.” I proceeded glibly to sketch my ideal. To tell the dreadful truth, I was enjoying myself; I could see respect dawning in those girls’ eyes, and I knew that I had forever thrown off my reproach. Henceforth I should be a woman with a romantic past, faithful to the one love of her life – a very, very different thing from an old maid who had never had a lover.

“He was tall and dark, with lovely, curly black hair and brilliant, piercing eyes. He had a splendid chin, and a fine nose, and the most fascinating smile!”

“What was he?” asked Maggie.

“A young lawyer,” I said, my choice of profession decided by an enlarged crayon portrait of Mary Gillespie’s deceased brother on an easel before me. He had been a lawyer.

“Why didn’t you marry him?” demanded Susette.

“We quarreled,” I answered sadly. “A terribly bitter quarrel. Oh, we were both so young and so foolish. It was my fault. I vexed Cecil by flirting with another man” — wasn’t I coming on! — “and he was jealous and angry. He went out West and never came back. I have never seen him since, and I do not even know if he is alive. But — but — I could never care for another man.”

“Oh, how interesting!” sighed Wilhelmina. “I do so love sad stories. But perhaps he will come back some day yet, Miss Holmes.”

“Oh, no, never now,” I said, shaking my head. “He has forgotten all about me, I dare say. Or if he hasn’t, he has never forgiven me.”

Mary Gillespie’s Susan Jane announced tea at this moment, and I was thankful, for my imagination was giving out, and I didn’t know what question those girls would ask next. But I felt already a change in the mental atmosphere surrounding me, and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation. Repentant? Ashamed? Not a bit of it! I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.

When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly and said:

“You look like a girl to-night, Miss Charlotte.”

“I feel like one,” I said, laughing, and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before — wrote a second poem in the same day. I had to have some outlet for my feelings. I called it “In Summer Days of Love Ago”, and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.