and stood in silence, leaning against the old mossy fence and looked at the brooding, motherly old house seen dimly through its veil of trees. How beautiful Green Gables was on a winter night!
Below it the Lake of Shining Waters was locked in ice, patterned around its edges with tree shadows. Silence was everywhere, save for the staccato clip of a horse trotting over the bridge. Anne smiled to recall how often she had heard that sound as she lay in her gable room and pretended to herself that it was the gallop of fairy horses passing in the night.
Suddenly another sound broke the stillness.
“Katherine … you’re … why, you’re not crying!”
Somehow, it seemed impossible to think of Katherine crying. But she was. And her tears suddenly humanized her. Anne no longer felt afraid of her.
“Katherine … dear Katherine … what is the matter? Can I help?”
“Oh … you can’t understand!” gasped Katherine. “Things have always been made easy for you. You … you seem to live in a little enchanted circle of beauty and romance. ‘I wonder what delightful discovery I’ll make today’ … that seems to be your attitude to life, Anne. As for me, I’ve forgotten how to live … no, I never knew how. I’m … I’m like a creature caught in a trap. I can never get out … and it seems to me that somebody is always poking sticks at me through the bars. And you … you have more happiness than you know what to do with … friends everywhere, a lover! Not that I want a lover … I hate men … but if I died tonight, not one living soul would miss me. How would you like to be absolutely friendless in the world?”
Katherine’s voice broke in another sob.
“Katherine, you say you like frankness. I’m going to be frank. If you are as friendless as you say, it is your own fault. I’ve wanted to be friends with you. But you’ve been all prickles and stings.”
“Oh, I know … I know. How I hated you when you came first! Flaunting your circlet of pearls …”
“Katherine, I didn’t ‘flaunt’ it!”
“Oh, I suppose not. That’s just my natural hatefulness. But it seemed to flaunt itself … not that I envied you your beau … I’ve never wanted to be married … I saw enough of that with father and mother … but I hated your being over me when you were younger than I … I was glad when the Pringles made trouble for you. You seemed to have everything I hadn’t … charm … friendship … youth. Youth! I never had anything but starved youth. You know nothing about it. You don’t know … you haven’t the least idea what it is like not to be wanted by any one … any one!”
“Oh, haven’t I?” cried Anne.
In a few poignant sentences she sketched her childhood before coming to Green Gables.
“I wish I’d known that,” said Katherine. “It would have made a difference. To me you seemed one of the favorites of fortune. I’ve been eating my heart out with envy of you. You got the position I wanted … oh, I know you’re better qualified than I am, but there it was. You’re pretty … at least you make people believe you’re pretty. My earliest recollection is of some one saying, ‘What an ugly child!’ You come into a room delightfully … oh, I remember how you came into school that first morning. But I think the real reason I’ve hated you so is that you always seemed to have some secret delight … as if every day of life was an adventure. In spite of my hatred there were times when I acknowledged to myself that you might just have come from some far-off star.”
“Really, Katherine, you take my breath with all these compliments. But you don’t hate me any longer, do you? We can be friends now.”
“I don’t know … I’ve never had a friend of any kind, much less one of anything like my own age. I don’t belong anywhere … never have belonged. I don’t think I know how to be a friend. No, I don’t hate you any longer … I don’t know how I feel about you … oh, I suppose it’s your noted charm beginning to work on me. I only know that I feel I’d like to tell you what my life has been like. I could never have told you if you hadn’t told me about your life before you came to Green Gables. I want you to understand what has made me as I am. I don’t know why I should want you to understand … but I do.”
“Tell me, Katherine dear. I do want to understand you.”
“You do know what it is like not to be wanted, I admit … but not what it is like to know that your father and mother don’t want you. Mine didn’t. They hated me from the moment I was born … and before … and they hated each other. Yes, they did. They quarreled continually … just mean, nagging, petty quarrels. My childhood was a nightmare. They died when I was seven and I went to live with Uncle Henry’s family. They didn’t want me either. They all looked down on me because I was ‘living on their charity.’ I remember all the snubs I got … every one. I can’t remember a single kind word. I had to wear my cousins’ castoff clothes. I remember one hat in particular … it made me look like a mushroom. And they made fun of me whenever I put it on. One day I tore it off and threw it on the fire. I had to wear the most awful old tam to church all the rest of the winter. I never even had a dog … and I wanted one so. I had some brains … I longed so for a B.A. course … but naturally I might just as well have yearned for the moon. However, Uncle Henry agreed to put me through Queen’s if I would pay him back when I got a school. He paid my board in a miserable third-rate boardinghouse where I had a room over the kitchen that was ice cold in winter and boiling hot in summer, and full of stale cooking smells in all seasons. And the clothes I had to wear to Queen’s! But I got my license and I got the second room in Summerside High … the only bit of luck I’ve ever had. Even since then I’ve been pinching and scrimping to pay Uncle Henry … not only what he spent putting me through Queen’s, but what my board through all the years I lived there cost him. I was determined I would not owe him one cent. That is why I’ve boarded with Mrs. Dennis and dressed shabbily. And I’ve just finished paying him. For the first time in my life I feel free. But meanwhile I’ve developed the wrong way. I know I’m unsocial … I know I can never think of the right thing to say. I know it’s my own fault that I’m always neglected and overlooked at social functions. I know I’ve made being disagreeable into a fine art. I know I’m sarcastic. I know I’m regarded as a tyrant by my pupils. I know they hate me. Do you think it doesn’t hurt me to know it? They always look afraid of me … I hate people who look as if they were afraid of me. Oh, Anne … hate’s got to be a disease with me. I do want to be like other people … and I never can now. That is what makes me so bitter.”
“Oh, but you can!” Anne put her arm about Katherine. “You can put hate out of your mind … cure yourself of it. Life is only beginning for you now … since at last you’re quite free and independent. And you never know what may be around the next bend in the road.”
“I’ve heard you say that before … I’ve laughed at your ‘bend in the road.’ But the trouble is there aren’t any bends in my road. I can see it stretching straight out before me to the sky-line … endless monotony. Oh, does life ever frighten you, Anne, with its blankness … its swarms of cold, uninteresting people? No, of course it doesn’t. You don’t have to go on teaching all the rest of your life. And you seem to find everybody interesting, even that little round red being you call Rebecca Dew. The truth is, I hate teaching … and there’s nothing else I can do. A schoolteacher is simply a slave of time. Oh, I know you like it … I don’t see how you can. Anne, I want to travel. It’s the one thing I’ve always longed for. I remember the one and only picture that hung on the wall of my attic room at Uncle Henry’s … a faded old print that had been discarded from
