The Books: “Along the Shore – ‘The Waking of Helen’” (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Along the Shore – ‘The Waking of Helen’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Okay, so after the TERRIBLE story from yesterday – now we come to ‘The Waking of Helen’ which is one of my favorites of this collection – and it’s interesting, in and of itself, because it is one of the only stories of hers I can think of – that has a truly tragic ending. Tragedy (or at least long-lasting tragedy) was never Lucy Maud’s bag … but this story is sad. And you know what? Lucy Maud is amazing here. It’s completely believable. It actually reminds me of a short story by, oh, Doris Lessing. It has that kind of bleak outlook … and it ends with a suicide. A woman who gladly embraces death. It is her only option and she throws herself at it with open arms. But this story has no melodrama to it. You know how some of her stories are ONLY the plot? They’re my least favorites of her stories … but when she focuses on the CHARACTER – she’s at her best. And that’s what’s going on in this story. It’s about this Helen girl. She’s quite different from any of her other heroines – I can’t think of anyone analogous in any of Lucy Maud’s other stories or novels. Helen stands alone. She is a sulky sullen unattractive misfit. And yet – with Lucy Maud’s insight and compassion – we see what it is like for her, who she is, what is going on inside of this misfit … and we know … we just know that she is not going to make it.

The story is this:

A man named Robert Reeves has gone to spend the summer at a place like the Bay of Fundy (uhm – Siobhan??) – a place “noted for its tides”. Reeves is a painter. He has heard about the beauty of light and shadow on this large bay and wants to spend the summer painting them. He boards with a local farmer and his wife – the Frasers. They are quiet rough people. No soft edges. They have a niece who lives with them, her parents are dead – Helen. She’s probably 20 years old. She’s unattractive, not at all verbal – never speaks … and sits at the table, staring down at her plate. The girl has no future, really … she lives in this isolated area, her uncle and aunt are gruff and unloving towards her … and she’s no beauty. But she knows the bay inside and out – so she accompanies Reeves on one of his jaunts. Reeves also wants to do a painting of her – standing on the shore. He just needs her as a figure in the painting … he will pay for her time … she says yes. She tells him stories of people getting trapped in some of the coves – and drowning – because they can’t get out, and the tides are extreme … they rise 20 feet at times … So she warns him about certain areas, and when the tides come in and out …

Reeves is kind to Helen, not realizing how dangerous this will be. He’s kind to her not because he’s interested in her romantically. He’s kind to her because he is a kind man. And he likes her stories about the shore – and he actually finds her to be kind of an interesting person once she gets away from her uncle and aunt. But oh no … what happens when a girl like this “wakes up”, like the title says? She “wakes up” … and falls in love with him … (none of this is said – she never declares herself – but Reeves eventually intuits that she has become too attached to him … just from one look she gives him, a look where her face is full and lit-up with emotion and love for him.) Reeves is horrified. He realizes he has been playing with fire. The girl has woken up … and now he must crush her. So he tries to be gentle and kind … and casually mentions his fiance in conversation … “I’m looking forward to getting back to the city … my fiance misses me …” or whatever. Helen doesn’t freak. She sits beside him, silently, listening. (The point of view of this story is mainly from Reeves’ side … although the narrator is rather omniscent – but we are never inside Helen’s head). Anyway, Helen listens, quiet, nothing happens. And Reeves is relieved. He thinks maybe he mistook the look he saw on her face. Maybe she wasn’t in love with him. He can now leave with a clear conscience. And on the day he leaves, Helen goes off for a walk on the shore, walks into one of the coves – one of the dangerous coves she had warned him about – and sits down, and waits for the tide. Waits for the tide to come in, and rise. The last image in the story is chilling: as the water starts to lap at Helen’s skirt, higher by the minute … Helen smiles.

That’s the end of the story.

It’s wonderful work – I think Lucy Maud is at her best here. And this story stands alone in all of her work. It has a different feel, it really does. And yet it doesn’t seem artificial, or like Lucy Maud is “experimenting” in a form and doesn’t really know her way around. It feels quite natural.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the story:

Excerpt from Along the Shore – ‘The Waking of Helen’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Reeves told Helen of his plan himself, meeting her in the evening as she was bringing the cows home from the low shore pastures beyond the marsh. He was surprised at the sudden illumination of her face. It almost transfigured her from a plain sulky-looking girl into a beautiful woman.

But the glow passed quickly. She assented to his plan quietly, almost lifelessly. He walked home with her behind the cows and talked of the sunset and the mysterious beauty of the bay and the purple splendour of the distant coasts. She listened in silence. Only once, when he spoke of the distant murmur of the open sea, she lifted her head and looked at him.

“What does it say to you?” she asked.

“It speaks of eternity. And to you?”

“It calls me,” she answered simply, “and then I want to go out and meet it – and it hurts me too. I can’t tell how or why. Sometimes it makes me feel as if I were asleep and wanted to wake and didn’t know how.”

She turned and looked out over the bay. A dying gleam of sunset broke through a cloud and fell across her hair. For a moment she seemed the spirit of the shore personified – all its mystery, all its uncertainty, all its elusive charm.

She has possibilities, thought Reeves.

Next day he began his picture. At first he had thought of painting her as the incarnation of a sea spirit, but decided that her moods were too fitful. So he began to sketch her as “Waiting” – a woman looking out across the bay with a world of hopeless longing in her eyes. The subject suited her well, and the picture grew apace.

When he was tired of work he made her walk around the shore with him, or row up the head of the bay in her own boat. He tried to draw her out, at first with indifferent success. She seemed to be frightened of him. He talked to her of many things – the far outer world whose echoes never reached her, foreign lands where he had traveled, famous men and women whom he had met, music, art, and books. When he spoke of books he touched the right chord. One of those transfiguring flashes he delighted to evoke now passed over her plain face.

“That is what I’ve always wanted,” she said hungrily, “and I never get them. Aunt hates to see me reading. She says it is a waste of time. And I love it so. I read every scrap of paper I can get hold of, but I hardly ever see a book.”

The next day Reeves took his Tennyson to the shore and began to read the Idylls of the King to her.

“It is beautiful,” was her sole verbal comment, but her rapt eyes said everything.

After that he never went out with her without a book – now one of the poets, now some prose classic. He was surprised by her quick appreciation of and sympathy with the finest passages. Gradually, too, she forgot her shyness and began to talk. She knew nothing of his world, but her own world she knew and knew well. She was a mine of traditional history about the bay. She knew the rocky coast by heart, and every old legend that clung to it. They drifted into making excursions along the shore and explored its wildest retreats. The girl had an artist’s eye for scenery and colour effect.

“You should have been an artist,” Reeves told her one day when she had pointed out to him the exquisite loveliness of a shaft of light falling through a cleft in the rocks across a dark-green pool at their base.

“I would rather be a writer,” she said slowly, “if I could only write something like those books you have read to me. What a glorious destiny it must be to have something to say that the whole world is listening for, and to be able to say it in words that will live forever! It must be the noblest human lot.”

“Yet some of those men and women were neither good nor noble,” said Reeves gently, “and many of them were unhappy.”

Helen dismissed the subject as abruptly as she always did when the conversation touched too nearly on the sensitive edge of her soul dreams.

“Do you know where I am taking you today?” she said.

“No – where?”

“To what the people here call the Kelpy’s Cave. I hate to go there. I believe there is something uncanny about it, but I think you will like to see it. It is a dark little cave in the curve of a small cove, and on each side the headlands of rock run far out. At low tide we can walk right around, but when the tide comes in it fills the Kelpy’s Cave. If you were there and let the tide come past the points, you would be drowned unless you could swim, for the rocks are so steep and high it is impossible to climb them.”

Reeves was interested.

“Was anyone ever caught by the tide?”

“Yes,” returned Helen, with a shudder. “Once, long ago, before I was born, a girl went around the shore to the cave and fell asleep there – and the tide came in and she was drowned. She was young and very pretty, and was to have been married the next week. I’ve been afraid of the place ever since.”

The treacherous cave proved to be a picturesque and innocent-looking spot, with the beach of glittering sand before it and the high gloomy walls of rock on either hand.

“I must come here some day and sketch it,” said Reeves enthusiastically, “and you must be the Kelpy, Helen, and sit in the cave with your hair wrapped about you and seaweed clinging to it.”

“Do you think a kelpy would look like that?” said the girl dreamily. “I don’t. I think it is a wild, wicked little sea imp, malicious and mocking and cruel, and it sits here and watches for victims.”

“Well, never mind your sea kelpies,” Reeves said, fishing out his Longfellow. “They are a tricky folk, if all tales be true, and it is supposed to be a very rash thing to talk about them in their own haunts. I want to read you ‘The Building of the Ship.’ You will like it, I’m sure.”

When the tide turned they went home.

“We haven’t seen the kelpy after all,” said Reeves.

“I think I shall see him some day,” said Helen gravely. “I think he is waiting for me there in that gloomy cave of his, and some time or other he will get me.”

Reeves smiled at the gloomy fancy, and Helen smiled back at him with one of her sudden radiances. The tide was creeping swiftly up over the white sands. The sun was low and the bay was swimming in a pale blue glory. They parted at Clam Point, Helen to go for the cows and Reeves to wander on up the shore. He thought of Helen at first, and the wonderful change that had come over her of late; then he began to think of another face – a marvellously lovely one with blue eyes as tender as the waters before him. Then Helen was forgotten.