Page:Everywoman's World, Volume 7, Number 7.djvu/18

THE ALPINE PATH

The Story of My Career

By L. M. MONTGOMERY

(Second Instalment)

The old orchard at Cavendish. This is one of the two orchards of which the "King Orchard" in "The Story Girl" ts a composite. The trees here were beautiful.

THE next summer, when I was six, I began to go to school, The Cavendish school-house was a white-washed, low-eaved building on the side of the road just outside our gate. To the west and south was a spruce grove, covering a sloping hill. That old spruce grove, with its sprinkling of maple, was a fairy realm of beauty and romance to my childish imagination. I shall always be thankful that my school was near a grove—a place with winding paths and treasure-trove of ferns and mosses and wood-flowers. It was a stronger and better educative influence in my life than the lessons learned at the desk in the school-house.

And there was a brook in it, too—a delightful brook, with a big, deep, clear spring—where we went for buckets of water, and no end of pools and nooks where the pupils put their bottles of milk to keep sweet and cold until dinner hour. Each pupil had his or her own particular place, and woe betide a lad or lass who usurped another's prescriptive spot. I, alas, had no rights in the brook. Not for me was the pleasure of "scooting" down the winding path before school-time to put my bottle against a mossy log, where the sunlit water might dance and ripple against its creamy whiteness.

I had to go home to my dinner every day, and I was scandalously ungrateful for the privilege. Of course, I realize now that I was very fortunate in being able to go home every day for a good, warm dinner. But I could not see it in that light then. It was not half so interesting as taking lunch to school and eating it in sociable rings on the playground, or in groups under the trees. Great was my delight on those few stormy winter days when I had to take my dinner, too. I was "one of the crowd" then, not set apart in any lonely distinction of superior advantages.

Another thing that worried me with a sense of unlikeness was the fact that I never allowed to go to school barefooted. All the other children went so, and I felt that this was a humiliating difference. At home I could run barefoot, but in school I must wear "buttoned boots." Not long ago, a girl who went to school with me confessed that she had always envied me those "lovely buttoned boots." Human nature always desirous of what it has not got! There was I, aching to go barefoot like my mates; there were they, resentfully thinking that it was bliss to wear buttoned boots!

I do not think that the majority of grown-ups have any real conception of the tortures sensitive children suffer over any marked difference between themselves and the other denizens of their small world. I remember one winter I was sent to school wearing a new style of apron. I think still that it was rather ugly. Then I thought it was hideous. It was a long, sack-like garment, with sleeves. Those sleeves were the crowning indignity. Nobody in school had ever worn aprons with sleeves before. When I went to school one of the girls sneeringly remarked that they were baby aprons. This capped all! I could not bear to wear them, but wear them I had to. The humiliation never grew less. To the end of their existence, and they did wear horribly well, those "baby" aprons marked for me the extreme limit of human endurance.

I have no especial remembrance of my first day in school. Aunt Emily took me down to the school-house and gave me into the charge of some of the "big girls," with whom I sat that day. But my second day—ah! I shall not forget it while life lasts. I was late and had to go in alone. Very shyly I slipped in and sat down beside a "big girl." At once a wave of laughter rippled over the room. I had come in with my hat on.

As I write, the fearful shame and humiliation I endured at that moment rushes over me again. I felt that I was a target for the ridicule of the universe. Never, I felt certain, could I live down such a dreadul mistake. I crept out to take off my hat, a crushed morsel of humanity.

My novelty with the "big girls"—they were ten years old and seemed all but grown-up to me—soon grew stale, and I gravitated down to the girls of my own age. We "did" sums, and learned the multiplication table, and wrote "copies," and read lessons, and repeated spellings. I could read and write when I went to school. There must have been a time when I learned, as a first step into an enchanted world, that A was A: but for all the recollection I have of the process I might as well have been born with a capacity for reading, as we are for breathing and eating.

I was in the second book of the old Royal Reader series. I had gone through the primer at home with all its cat and rat formula, and then had gone into the Second Reader, thus skipping the First Reader. When

I was in a pensive mood when this was taken, and just ten years old.

I went to school and found that there was a First Reader I felt greatly aggrieved to think that I had never gone through it. T seemed to have missed something, to suffer,

A view of my old home from a distance. The window of the gable was in my room where I sat to write my first four books. The "cross" is just above the sport on the dyke, under the old tamarack tree, where we saw our "ghost."

"The White Lady." I had a fancy about this beautiful white birch that she was beloved of all the park spruces near, and that they were rivals for her love.

in my own estimation at least, a certain loss of standing because I had never had it. To this day there is a queer, absurd regret in my soul over missing that First Reader.

Life from my seventh year, becomes more distinct in remembrance. In the winter following my seventh birthday, Aunt Emily married and went away. I remember her wedding as a exciting event, as well as the weeks of mysterious preparation before: all the baking and frosting and decorating of cakes which went on! Aunt Emily was only a young girl then, but in my eyes she was as ancient as all the other grown-ups. I had no conception of age at that time. Either you were grown-up or you were not, that was all there was about it.

The wedding was one of the good, old-fashioned kind that is not known nowadays, food, old-fashioned kind that is not known nowadays. All the big "connection" both sides were present, the ceremony at seven o'clock, supper immediately afterward, then dancing and games, with another big supper at one o'clock.

For once I was permitted to stay up, probably because there was no place where I could be put to bed, every room being used for some gala purpose, and between excitement and unwatched indulgence in good things I was done up for a week. But it was worth it! Also, I regret to say, I pounded my new uncle and told him I hated him because hew was taking Aunt Emily away.

The next summer two little boys came to beard at my grandfather's and attend school. Wellington and David Nelson, better known as "Well" and "Dave." Well was just my age. Dave, a year younger. They were my playmates for my playmates for three happy years: we did have fun in abundance, simple, wholesome, delightful fun, with our playhouse and our games in the beautiful summer twilights, when we ranged happily through field and orchards, or in the long winter evenings by the fire.

The first summer they came we built playhouse in the spruce grove to the west of our front orchard. It was in a little circle of young spruces. We built our house by driving stakes into the ground between the trees, and lacing fir boughs in and out. I was especially expert at this, and always won the boys' admiration by my knack of filling up obstreperous holes in our verdant castle. We also manufactured a door for it, a very rickety affair, consisting of rough boards nailed uncertainly across two others, and hung to a long-suffering birch tree by ragged leather hinges cut from old boots. But that door was as beautiful and precious in our eyes as the Gate Beautiful of the Temple, was to the Jews of old. You see, we had made it ourselves.

 

THEN we had a little garden, our pride and delight, albeit rewarded all our labour very meagrely. We planted live-forevers around all our beds, and they grew as only live-forevers can grow. They were almost the only things that did grow. Our carrots and parsnips, our lettuces and beets, our phlox and sweet-peas—either failed to come up at all, or dragged a pallid, spindling existence to an ignoble end, in spite of all our patient digging, manuring, weeding, and watering, or, perhaps, because of it, for I fear we were more zealous than wise. But worked persistently, and took our consolation out of a few hardy sunflowers which, sown in an uncared-for spot, throve better than all our petted darlings, and lighted up a corner of the spruce grove with their cheery golden lamps. I remember we were in great tribulation because our beans persisted in coming up with their skins over their heads. We (Continued on page 32)