The Books: The Blue Castle (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

The Blue Castle – by L.M. Montgomery. Another excerpt! It will be the last. Sniff. We must leave our Blue Castle behind. Valancy and Barney go along with their lives – in a montage of the seasons … and then comes the big moment. The revelation moment. Valancy had been told by her doctor that her heart was so bad that any sudden shock could kill her instantly. She is always aware of keeping her stress level down – which, of course, on Barney’s island, is not hard at all. But one day – Valancy and Barney are walking home from town, along the railroad tracks, and Valancy’s heel gets caught in the rails … and naturally, at that moment, a train decides to suddenly appear around the corner, bearing down right at them. Valancy is stuck! Damsel in distress! She calls out to Barney – who drops everything and runs to her, desperately trying to get her heel loose. Valancy, panicked, begs Barney to save himself – let her die – she who is going to die soon anyway – but to save himself! Barney, of course, ignores this and keeps tugging at her foot. With seconds to spare – or milliseconds – Barney frees Valancy’s foot and pulls her away – just as the train races by. Okay, so this is the big moment. The two of them stroll home, lost in their own thoughts. Valancy is thinking, with a sick kind of realization: I can’t have a bad heart … because if that moment didn’t kill me … if that moment wasn’t a “sudden shock” I don’t know what is … the doctor must have made a mistake … This makes her sick to her stomach because her whole marriage to Barney is based on the fact that she is going to die in about a year. If she’s not going to die? Would Barney think she had tricked him into marrying her? Etc. Valancy feels ill. And Barney is lost in thought, too. Valancy assumes that he is thinking what she is thinking: If THAT didn’t kill her, then she can’t be all that sick … However, it turns out (we find this out later) – that Barney is actually lost in thought, and kind of distant – because he realized, in a flash, at the prospect of losing Valancy – that he was in love with her. Instead of declaring himself, he instead becomes consumed by the thought that he must go talk to doctors about her heart condition, get the best specialists, try to save her, do anything … ANYthing to save her! But he doesn’t tell Valancy any of this. He just disappears into the night. The next day, Valancy goes to visit the doctor who gave her the diagnosis – and she asks him if there could be any error … and blah blah … turns out, he was flustered on that day he saw her – for personal reasons – and gave her the diagnosis meant for another woman, who had a similar name. Valancy had nothing wrong with her heart, then. And would probably live a very long and healthy life. Instead of jumping for joy at this news, Valancy is horrified. Full of dread. To avoid the confrontation with Barney, she writes him a note – telling him what happened – and that she didn’t mean to trick him – and leaves her Blue Castle, and goes home to live with her horrible mother. Valancy is so changed now – she has known love and freedom – she has shed her old dowdy skin. She bobbed her hair. She bought a bathing suit. She tramps through the woods on snowshoes. She reads all day long if she feels like it. But now, there is nothing for her to do but go home. Her heart is broken. It is a defeat of her spirit. And her mother is so smugly self-satisfied when “Doss” returns. Her mother is a “serves you right” type of moron.

This last excerpt is Valancy, staring around her old room, saying good-bye to her happy life with Barney.

Naturally – through twists and turns of the plot – it all works out in the end … but those chapters are more plot-driven than character-driven (as well they should be) … and so not as excerpt-able, in my opinion.

Here is Valancy. “Home” again. Knowing she will not live a long long life … and yet without Barney, without the beautiful island … she will live a long life, trapped in the bosom of her horrible family. The dream is over.

Excerpt from The Blue Castle – by L.M. Montgomery.

Valancy looked dully about her old room. It, too, was so exactly the same that it seemed almost impossible to believe in the changes that had come to her since she had last slept in it. It seemed – somehow – indecent that it should be so much the same. There was Queen Louise everlastingly coming down the stairway, and nobody had let the forlorn puppy in out of the rain. Here was the purple paper blind and the greenish mirror. Outside, the old carriage-shop with its blatant advertisements. Beyond it, the station with the same derelicts and flirtatious flappers.

Here the old life waited for her, like some grim ogre that bided his time and licked his chops. A monstrous horror of it suddenly possessed her. When night fell and she had undressed and got into bed, the merciful numbness passed away and she lay in anguish and thought of her island under the stars. The camp-fires – all their little household jokes and phrases and catch words – their furry beautiful cats – the lights agleam on the fairy islands – canoes skimming over Mistawis in the magic of morning – white birches shining among the dark spruces like beautiful women’s bodies – winter snows and rose-red sunset fires – lakes drunken with moonshine – all the delights of her lost paradise. She would not let herself think of Barney. Only of these lesser things. She could not endure to think of Barney.

Then she thought of him inescapably. She ached for him. She wanted his arms around her – his face against hers – his whispers in her ear. She recalled all his friendly looks and quips and jests – his little compliments – his caresses. She counted them all over as a woman might count her jewels – not one did she miss from the first day they had met. These memories were all she could have now. She shut her eyes and prayed.

“Let me remember every one. God! Let me never forget one of them!”

Yet it would be better to forget. This agony of longing and loneliness would not be so terrible if one could forget. And Ethel Traverse. That shimmering witch woman with her white skin and black eyes and shining hair. The woman Barney had loved. The woman whom he still loved. Hadn’t he told her he never changed his mind? Who was waiting for him in Montreal. Who was the right wife for a rich and famous man. Barney would marry her, of course, when he got his divorce. How Valancy hated her! And envied her! Barney had said, “I love you,” to her. Valancy had wondered what tone Barney would say “I love you” in – how his dark-blue eyes would look when he said it. Ethel Traverse knew. Valancy hated her for the knowledge – hated and envied her.

“She can never have those hours in the Blue Castle. They are mine,” thought Valancy savagely. Ethel would never make strawberry jam or dance to old Abel’s fiddle or fry bacon for Barney over a camp-fire. She would never come to the little Mistawis shack at all.

What was Barney doing – thinking – feeling now? Had he come home and found her letter? Was he still angry with her? Or a little pitiful. Was he lying on their bed looking out on stormy Mistawis and listening to the rain streaming down on the roof? Or was he still wandering in the wilderness, raging at the predicament in which he found himself? Hating her? Pain took her and wrung her like some great pitiless giant. She got up and walked the floor. Would morning never come to end this hideous night? And yet what could morning bring her? The old life without the old stagnation that was at least bearable. The old life with the new memories, the new longings, the new anguish.

“Oh, why can’t I die?” moaned Valancy.