The Books: At the Altar: ‘A Dinner of Herbs’ (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

At the Altar – ‘A Dinner of Herbs’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Speaking of maiden aunts! ‘A Dinner of Herbs’ is about a maiden aunt – who has elements of many other Lucy Maud heroines – Valancy from Blue Castle, Pat (stupid Pat) in her later years in Mistress Pat, and also Margaret in Tangled Web who ends up adopting a little boy and buying her own house – just to get away from being a maiden aunt in her bossy sister’s house.

Robin Lyle is a maiden aunt. She lives with her brother, his bossy wife – and their clattering chattering family of loud bossy horrible children. Robin is put-upon, bossed within an inch of her life, and has no privacy. She is just expected to be grateful that she has a roof over her head. However, naturally, Robin is a PERSON and has secret desires of her own. For example, she’s in love with Michael Stanislaws – the next-door neighbor – a guy who lives alone (well, he has 2 cats who follow him everywhere) – and has never married. They are good friends … in a kind of aloof way. Typical Lucy Maud: they never say just what they mean until the very last second. Michael is a very PROUD person – he’s poor, and I believe he’s lame? The story was written in 1928 – a post World War I story – so I believe he fought in the war and came home changed from it. He’s bitter. But Robin really likes him.

Anyhoo … at the time the story opens, Robin has been proposed to by Irving Keyes – a pompous asswipe – but she feels she must say yes because … she’s a maiden aunt … what other choice does she have? Oh – and she has also been informed by her horrible sister-in-law that she will now have to share a room with Gladys, her teenage niece. They need the room – they no longer can give Robin her own room. This is the main reason that she actually considers marrying the odious Irving Keyes – so she won’t have to endure yet another chipping away of her privacy.

There’s something I really like about the writing in this story. I can see why she used most of this stuff in later novels – it’s good. The dialogue is good, the characters clear … good writing.

Excerpt from At the Altar – ‘A Dinner of Herbs’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Robin went to her room – the only spot on earth she had ever been able to call her own. And, as always when she went into it, the peace and dignity and beauty of it seemed to envelop her like a charm. She was in a different world – a world where George and Myra could not quarrel or the hired girl be impertinent to her; and the everlasting noise and racket of the household died away at its threshold like the spent wave of a troubled sea. For years all that had supported her through the drudgery of days spent waiting on a querulous invalid was the certainty of finding herself alone in her dear room at night where dreams gae some mysterious strength for another day.

The north window looked down on leagues of ripped sea and distant, misty, fairy-like coasts. Between it and the sand-dunes was only a dwindling grove of ragged old spruces.

The west window looked out on Owl’s Roost, with its orchard and garden, where First and Second Peter prowled darkly, and Michael himself played the violin at hours when all decent people should be in bed. Sometimes, too, he ate his slender meals in the orchard, under an enormous apple tree, never dreaming that Robin Lyle was watching him from her window, and wishing shamelessly that she might play “Thou” to his crust of bread and jug of milk. Nor was the book of verse wanting. Michael read as he ate, propping his book up against the jug.

And now all this would be taken from her. She knew exactly what rooming with Gladys and her shrieking chums would mean. No more dreaming; no more shadowy hours of listening to Michael’s stormy music in the orchard; no more early dawns watching the silent mysterious ships drift by the dunes to the harbour; never again alone with the night.

No, she could not endure it. Even sleek, prosperous Irving Keyes would be better than that.

“Life isn’t fair,” said Robin drearily, as if there was any use in saying it.

She went to the glass and looked at herself. She looked at her straight, black, bobbed hair, dark blue eyes and white, heart-shaped face; at her wide mouth quirked up at the corners so that she always seemed to be laughing even when very sad. And she thought of Blanche Foster’s red-gold hair and flashing black eyes and brilliant complexion. Blanche Foster, who had always made Robin feel old and dowdy and silly. It was amazing that Irving Keyes didn’t prefer her, but since he didnt …

Robin shivered a little and sat down by the west window in the moonlight. The window was open, and the faint, cold, sweet perfumes of night drifted in – blent with the whiff of Michael Stanislaw’s pipe, neither faint nor sweet, but very alluring. Once, when she was eighteen, she had had a fleeting fancy for Irving Keyes – and he knew it. Even yet he was attractive – until he spoke. But his funny vulgar stories and his great haw-haws! And his love for practical jokes! He still thought it a joke to stick o ut his foot and trip somebody up. And he still thought it wit to call eggs cackleberries.

Irving Keyes had been heard to boast that he had got everything he wanted in life. And now he wanted Robin Lyle. Robin thought he would get that too, despite his roars of laughter and the jigarees on his house.

What else was there for her? Arnold Clive? No! She shivered again. Austere, religious Arnold with the face of a fanatic: high, narrow brow, deep-set intolerant eyes, merciless mouth – quite out of the question! And, after all, she liked Irving very well.

She looked over at Owl’s Roost. What a nice, gentle little old house it was; a nice lazy old house – a house that had folded its hands and said “I will rest.” It had none of the Lyle efficiency and up-to-dateness about it, with a sly little eyebrow window above the porch roof and the magic of trees around it. She loved the trees around Owl’s Roost. There were no trees around George’s house. Myra thought shade unsanitary.

Michael was smoking his pipe at the fence with an orchard full of mysterious moonlit delights behind him. Robin wished she could go down and talk with him. She had sometimes talked with him over the fence. Not often, and yet she felt curiously well acquainted with him. They had laughed together the first time they had talked, and when two peoplel have laughed – really laughed – together they are good friends for life.

Though Michael did not laugh much. If anything, he was bitter. But there was something stimulating and pungent about his bitterness – like choke-cherries. They puckered your mouth horribly, but still you hankered for them.

“I wonder what he is thinking of,” thought Robin.

She knew she only thought it. Yet a voice drifted up to her from the orchard.

“I’m thinking how very silvery that dark cloud must be on the moon side,” said the voice. “Come down here and help me watch it leaving the moon. It’s as good as an eclipse.”

Robin flew downstairs, out of the side door and along the brick walk, worn by many feet. Michael was hanging over the fence. First Peter sat hunched up beside him, and Second Peter smoothed about his shoulder. First Peter always let Robin stroke him, but Second Peter swore at her. Second Peter was not to be hoodwinked.

Robin stood beside Michael on the other side of the fence, where the moonlight would lie white as snow on the flagged walk when the cloud passed. She had never been through the fence. There was no gate between the Lyle yard and the old orchard, lying fragrant and velvety under the enchantment of night.

They stood there together in a wonderful silence until the cloud had passed.

” ‘He who has seen the full moon break forth from behind a dark cloud at night, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world,’ ” quoted Michael, whacking his pipe on the fence and putting it in his pocket. “Wasn’t it worth watching, Miss Lyle?”

If there was one thing she hated more than another, it was having Michael call her “Miss Lyle”. She hated it so much that she answered “Yes”, stiffly and unenthusiastically.

“It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that something is bothering you,” said Michael. “Tell First Peter about it and I’ll listen in.”

A perfectly crazy impulse mastered Robin. She would tell him. She had to tell soembody.

“I can’t make up my mind which of two men to marry,” she said bluntly.

Michael was silent for an appreciable space. All the soundsaudible were First Peter purring and a dog taking the countryside into his confidence two farms away. His silence got on Robin’s nerves.

“That wasn’t quite true,” she said crossly. “There are two – but there’s only one I could really consider possible. And the trouble is I don’t want to marry him – or anyone,” she added hastily, telling a second tarradiddle.

“Then why marry him?” said Michael. “Why marry at all if you don’t want to, in this day of woman’s emancipation?”

“The trouble is – I’m not emancipated,” sighed Robin, wishing that First Peter would stop purring. It was outrageous that a cat should be so blatantly happy. Though why shouldn’t he be happy? Couldn’t he sit on Michael’s shoulder and snuggle his nose against Michael’s face? Wasn’t he doing it now, darn him? Yet she was still talking on. “I’m twenty years behind the times. I’m thirty-three and I’m not trained to do anything. I’ve no special gift. I can’t sew or teach or pound a typewriter. All I can do, or want to do, is keep house. And I must marry – or room witih Gladys.”

“Do you think Irving Keyes would be a more agreeable room-mate?” said Michael sarcastically – though she had not said anything about Irving Keyes.

“Well, he won’t plaster my dressing table with powder – or raise Cain when he can’t find his hairpins – or yell to Baal if he has chilblains – or look in the mirror the same time I do – purposely,” said Robin defiantly.

“I think I see what you’re up against,” said Michael, beginning to fill his pipe again.

“You don’t – not fully – a man couldn’t,” snapped Robin. “Gladys will talk me to death about her beaus. Gladys thinks there’s no fun in having a beau unless you can tell everybody about him and what he said and what he did. She’ll laugh at my funny old pictures with big sleeves and hats high on the head. She’ll come in and wake me up in the wee sma’s. She’ll insist on having the most awful silver pig with a blue velvet pincushion on his back on my table. She’ll bring her rampageous school chums in and chitter-chatter for hours. And everything will be either wonderful or priceless. I’ll never be alone any more,” concluded Robin pathetically.

“That gets me,” said Michael. “And the alternative is Irving Keyes. A handsome fellow with gobs of money. Why don’t you like him?”

“I do. But I don’t feel like marrying him, for several reasons.”

“For instance …”

“He likes bread thick, and I like it thin,” said Robin flippantly. She felt she had been absurd in telling Michael as much as she had.

“Every proper man likes bread thick. I’ve no sympathy with you there.”

“Our taste in jokes is entirely different.”

“Ah, that’s serious,” said Michael, not sounding serious.

“And …” Robin looked at another cloud that was creeping over the moon. “I – I want someone else.”

“Oh!” Second Peter snarled, as if he had been pushed aside with a foot.

“He’s the only man in the world for me,” said Robin, looking straight at Michael.

“That’s a large order out of approximately five hundred million men,” said Michael drily.

He began to smoke insolently. The cloud was over the moon, and the world was dark. Robin felt cold and old and silly and empty.

“I must go in,” she said.

“Wait a sec.” Michael was rummaging in his pocket. “Here’s something for your rose-jar.”

He handed her over a paper bag full of dried rose-leaves.

“All I can give any woman now – withered rose leaves,” he said lightly. “Irving’s a good fellow. Perhaps you can teach him to laugh in the right place. I’d have a try.”