The Books: Against the Odds: ‘Their Girl Josie’ (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement – ‘Their Girl Josie’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Time to start with the daily excerpt again. More Lucy Maud. Another story from the collection Against All Odds (which is not my favorite of the posthumous collections.) It’s not my favorite because many of the stories seem made to order. They’re plot heavy, and many of them depend on a completely unbelievable coincidence for the resolution of the story. I’m more into her character-based stories … of which today’s excerpt is one.

Cyrus and Deborah Morgan were not only horrified when their son – THEIR SON – married an actress – AN ACTRESS – but it put in their staunch Presbyterian hearts a hatred of “play-acting” and theatre for all time. They are rigid, unforgiving – and although they have never actually gone to see a play, it doesn’t matter. Anyone who is involved in theatre is pretty much evil and not respectable. They pretty much disowned their son – who went off in a huff – leaving them with silence, no news of him. Then came word that within a short period of time their son and his wife had died – and they left behind their child, now an orphan – a baby girl with the actress-y name of Joscelyn. Cyrus and Deborah, now elderly, stepped up – and took the child in. (The actress mother’s actress sister had wanted to take the baby but the grandparents refused. Their grandchild should not be raised by an actress.) Their granddaughter. They did not approve of her parents – and they certainly did not approve of her name … but they raised Joscelyn, and of course, they love her DEARLY. However, Cyrus has let Joscelyn know from a very early age that she will NOT be an actress, like her mother. He watches over Joscelyn nervously, for any signs of “play-acting” tendencies. It is his worst fear that she will go into the theatre. So Joscelyn was forced to have a very narrow rigid childhood – but even with those limitations, she blossomed into a beautiful young woman. She was a voracious reader. She had the signs of a great beauty. Cyrus and Deborah were proud of her, proud of her smarts, her cleverness … they hemmed her in for her own good (or so they thought.)

Eventually, though, there is a revelation (and that’s the scene below): Cyrus and Deborah surprise Joscelyn one day, they come home when they were not expected – and they find Joscelyn (age 17) dressed up in a costume of some kind – declaiming a monologue, acting up a storm through the old-fashioned sitting room – completely lost in her fantasy.

Cyrus and Deborah are HORRIFIED. You have to take this seriously. Theatre is still seen as a barely respectable way to spend your time, even when you make money at it. Even with all of their warnings and limits … here is the “acting gene” come out.

Eventually there is a confrontation – and Joscelyn, who knows her own mind, runs away and goes into theatre. This, of course, means that Cyrus and Deborah completely cut her off, they want to hear no more of her, she has completely betrayed them. The end of the story comes, though, when Cyrus (not a bad old chap, really – he’s just strict and kind of close-minded) hears that Joscelyn will be appearing in a play in a nearby town. She has since become famous … and it is an event – Local girl come back to her hometown, etc. Cyrus, who has never been to a play, who truly thinks that theatre is Satanic, can’t help himself. He buys a ticket and he goes to see it. And he sits in the theatre and watches Joscelyn – in this part – not a lascivious evil part, not a Satanic part – but a wife and mother, and instead of finding himself confronted with evil … Cyrus gets swept away in the sweet normal story, about sweet normal people. He forgets that Joscelyn is Joscelyn. He roots for her. He weeps tears for her. He laughs when she gets the better of someone. He glowers with rage when she is treated badly. Etc. And by the end of the play, he is overwhelmed with pride for her gift … and he sees what her gift is. That it is, indeed, a gift – and she MUST share it.

End of story.

I do like this story, of course, because of the theatrical nature of it – she’s written a couple of stories about performers – usually singers – but there are a couple of stories about actresses (Sophie Sinclair in Windy Poplars?) – and I always love those – just because Lucy Maud “gets” it. She gets what the whole thing is about. It’s a gift, like any other – like a painter, a writer, a poet.

So anyway, here’s the moment when Cyrus and Deborah catch Joscelyn in the act.

Excerpt from Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement – ‘Their Girl Josie’ – by L.M. Montgomery

When Joscelyn was seventeen Deborah Morgan noticed a change in her. The girl became quieter and more brooding, falling at times into strange, idle reveries, with her hands clasped over her knee and her big eyes fixed unseeingly on space; or she would creep away for solitary rambles in the beech wood, going away droopingly and returning with a dusky glowing cheeks and a nameless radiance, as of some newly discovered power, shining through every muscle and motion. Mrs. Morgan thought the child needed a tonic and gave her sulphur and molasses.

One day the revelation came. Cyrus and Deborah had driven across the valley to visit their married daughter. Not finding her at home they returned. Mrs. Morgan went into the house while her husband went to the stable. Joscelyn was not in the kitchen, but the grandmother heard the sound of voices and laughter in the sitting room across the hall.

“What company has Josie got?” she wondered, as she opened the hall door and paused for a moment on the threshold to listen. As she listened her old face grew grey and pinched; she turned noiselessly and left the house, and flew to her husband as one distracted.

“Cyrus, Josie is play-acting in the room … laughing and reciting and going on. I heard her. Oh, I’ve always feared it would break out in her and it has! Come you and listen to her.”

The old couple crept through the kitchen and across the hall to the open parlour door as if they were stalking a thief. Joscelyn’s laugh rang out as they did so … a mocking triumphant peal. Cyrus and Deborah shivered as if they had heard sacrilege.

Joscelyn had put on a trailing, clinging black skirt which her aunt had sent her a year ago and which she had never been permitted to wear. It transformed her into a woman. She had cast aside her waist of dark plum-coloured homespun and wrapped a silken shawk about herself until only her beautiful arms and shoulders were left bare. Her hair, glossy and brown, with burnished red lights where the rays of the dull autumn sun struck on it through the window, was heaped high on her head and held in place by a fillet of pearl beads. Her cheeks were crimson, her whole body from head to foot instinct and alive with a beauty that to Cyrus and Deborah, as they stood mute with horror in the open doorway, seemed akin to some devilish enchantment.

Joscelyn, rapt away from her surroundings, did not perceive her grandparents. Her face was turned from them and she was addressing an unseen auditor in passionate denunciation. She spoke, moved, posed, gesticulated, with an inborn genius shining through every motion and tone like an illuminating lamp.

“Josie, what are you doing?”

It was Cyrus who spoke, advancing into the room like a stern, hard impersonation of judgment. Joscelyn’s outstretched arm fell to her side and she turned sharply around; fear came into her face and the light went out of it. A moment before she had been a woman, splendid, unafraid; now she was again the schoolgirl, too confused and shamed to speak.

“What are you doing, Josie?” asked her grandfather again, “dressed up in that indecent manner and talking and twisting to yourself?”

Joscelyn’s face, that had grown pale, flamed scarlet again. She lifted her head proudly.

“I was trying Aunt Annice’s part in her new play,” she answered. “I have not been doing anything wrong, Grandfather.”

‘Wrong! It’s your mother’s blood coming out in you, girl, in spite of all our care! Where did you get that play?”

“Aunt Annice sent it to me,” answered Joscelyn, casting a quick glance at the book on the table. Then, when her grandfather picked it up gingerly, as if he feared contamination, she added quickly, “Oh, give it to me, please, Grandfather. Don’t take it away.”

“I am going to burn it,” said Cyrus Morgan sternly.

“Oh, don’t, Grandfather,” cried Joscelyn, with a sob in her voice. “Don’t burn it, please. I … I … won’t practise out of it anymore. I’m sorry I’ve displeased you. Please give me my book.”

“No,” was the stern reply. “Go to your room, girl, and take off that rig. There is to be no more play-acting in my house, remember that.”

He flung the book into the fire that was burning in the grate. For the first time in her life Joscelyn flamed out into passionate defiance.

“You are cruel and unjust, Grandfather. I have done no wrong … it is not doing wrong to develop the one gift I have. It’s the only thing I can do … and I am going to do it. My mother was an actress and a good woman. So is Aunt Annice. So I mean to be.”

“Oh, Josie, Josie,” said her grandmother in a scared voice. Her grandfather only repeated sternly, “Go, take that rig off, girl, and let us hear no more of this.”

Joscelyn went but she left consternation behind her. Cyrus and Debirah could not have been more shocked if they had discovered the girl robbing her grandfather’s desk. They talked the matter over bitterly at the kitchen hearth that night.

“We haven’t been strict enough with the girl, Mother,” said Cyrus angrily. “We’ll have to be stricter if we don’t want to have her disgracing us. Did you hear how she defied me? ‘So I mean to be,’ she says. Mother, we’ll have trouble with that girl yet.”

“Don’t be too harsh with her, Pa … it’ll maybe only drive her to worse,” sobbed Deborah.

“I ain’t going to be harsh. What I do for her is for her own good, you know that, Mother. Josie is as dear to me as she is to you, but we’ve got to be stricter with her.”

They were. From that day Josie was watched and distrusted. She was never permitted to be alone. There were no more solitary walks. She felt herself under the surveillance of cold, unsympathetic eyes every moment and her very soul writhed. Joscelyn Morgan, the high-spirited daughter of high-spirited parents, could not long submit to such treatment. It might have passed with a child; to a woman, thrilling with life and conscious power to her very fingertips, it was galling beyond measure. Joscelyn rebelled, but she did nothing secretly … that was not her nature. She wrote to her Aunt Annice, and when she received her reply she went straight and fearlessly to her grandparents with it.

“Grandfather, this letter is from my aunt. She wishes me to go and live with her and prepare for the stage. I told her I wished to do so. I am going.”

Cyrus and Deborah looked at her in mute dismay.

“I know you despise the profession of an actress,” the girl went on with heightened colour. “I am sorry you think so about it because it is the only one open to me. I must go … I must.”

“Yes, you must,” said Cyrus cruelly. “It’s in your blood … your bad blood, girl.”

“My blood isn’t bad,” cried Joscelyn proudly. “My mother was a sweet, true, good woman. You are unjust, Grandfather. But I don’t want you to be angry with me. I love you both and I am very grateful for all your kind ness to me. I wish that you could understand what …”

“We understand enough,” interrupted Cyrus harshly. “This is all I have to say. Go to your play-acting aunt if you want to. Your grandmother and me won’t hinder you. But you’ll come back here no more. We’ll have nothing further to do with you. You can choose your own way and walk in it.”

With this dictum Joscelyn went from Spring Valley. She clung to Deborah and wept at parting, but Cyrus did not even say goodbye to her.