“What are you dreaming of, Anne?”
The two girls were loitering one evening in a fairy hollow of the brook. Ferns
nodded in it, and little grasses were green, and wild pears hung
finely-scented, white curtains around it.
Anne roused herself from her reverie with a happy sigh.
“I was thinking out my story, Diana.”
“Oh, have you really begun it?” cried Diana, all alight with eager
interest in a moment.
“Yes, I have only a few pages written, but I have it all pretty well
thought out. I’ve had such a time to get a suitable plot. None of the
plots that suggested themselves suited a girl named Averil.”
“Couldn’t you have changed her name?”
“No, the thing was impossible. I tried to, but I couldn’t do it,
any more than I could change yours. Averil was so real to me that no
matter what other name I tried to give her I just thought of her as
Averil behind it all. But finally I got a plot that matched her. Then
came the excitement of choosing names for all my characters. You have no idea
how fascinating that is. I’ve lain awake for hours thinking over those
names. The hero’s name is Perceval Dalrymple.”
“Have you named all the characters?” asked Diana wistfully.
“If you hadn’t I was going to ask you to let me name one—just
some unimportant person. I’d feel as if I had a share in the story
then.”
“You may name the little hired boy who lived with the
Lesters,” conceded Anne. “He is not very important, but he
is the only one left unnamed.”
“Call him Raymond Fitzosborne,” suggested Diana, who had a
store of such names laid away in her memory, relics of the old “Story
Club,” which she and Anne and Jane Andrews and Ruby Gillis had had in
their schooldays.
Anne shook her head doubtfully.
“I’m afraid that is too aristocratic a name for a chore boy, Diana.
I couldn’t imagine a Fitzosborne feeding pigs and picking up chips, could
you?”
Diana didn’t see why, if you had an imagination at all, you
couldn’t stretch it to that extent; but probably Anne knew best, and the
chore boy was finally christened Robert Ray, to be called Bobby
should occasion require.
“How much do you suppose you’ll get for it?” asked Diana.
But Anne had not thought about this at all. She was in pursuit of fame, not
filthy lucre, and her literary dreams were as yet untainted by mercenary
considerations.
“You’ll let me read it, won’t you?” pleaded Diana.
“When it is finished I’ll read it to you and Mr. Harrison, and I
shall want you to criticize it severely. No one else shall see it until
it is published.”
“How are you going to end it—happily or unhappily?”
“I’m not sure. I’d like it to end unhappily, because that
would be so much more romantic. But I understand editors have a prejudice
against sad endings. I heard Professor Hamilton say once that nobody but a
genius should try to write an unhappy ending. And,” concluded Anne
modestly, “I’m anything but a genius.”
“Oh I like happy endings best. You’d better let him marry
her,” said Diana, who, especially since her engagement to Fred, thought
this was how every story should end.
“But you like to cry over stories?”
“Oh, yes, in the middle of them. But I like everything to come right at
last.”
“I must have one pathetic scene in it,” said Anne thoughtfully.
“I might let Robert Ray be injured in an accident and have a death
scene.”
“No, you mustn’t kill Bobby off,” declared Diana,
laughing. “He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish. Kill
somebody else if you have to.”
For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to mood, in her
literary pursuits. Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now
despairing because some contrary character would not behave properly.
Diana could not understand this.
“Make them do as you want them to,” she said.
“I can’t,” mourned Anne. “Averil is such an
unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to.
Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over
again.”
Finally, however, the story was finished, and Anne read it to Diana in the
seclusion of the porch gable. She had achieved her “pathetic scene”
without sacrificing Robert Ray, and she kept a watchful eye on Diana as
she read it. Diana rose to the occasion and cried properly; but, when the end
came, she looked a little disappointed.
“Why did you kill Maurice Lennox?” she asked reproachfully.
“He was the villain,” protested Anne. “He had to be
punished.”
“I like him best of them all,” said unreasonable Diana.
“Well, he’s dead, and he’ll have to stay dead,” said
Anne, rather resentfully. “If I had let him live he’d have gone on
persecuting Averil and Perceval.”
“Yes—unless you had reformed him.”
“That wouldn’t have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made
the story too long.”
“Well, anyway, it’s a perfectly elegant story, Anne, and will make
you famous, of that I’m sure. Have you got a title for it?”
“Oh, I decided on the title long ago. I call it Averil’s
atonement. Doesn’t that sound nice and alliterative? Now, Diana, tell
me candidly, do you see any faults in my story?”
“Well,” hesitated Diana, “that part where Averil makes
the cake doesn’t seem to me quite romantic enough to match the rest.
It’s just what anybody might do. Heroines shouldn’t do cooking,
I think.”
“Why, that is where the humor comes in, and it’s one of the best
parts of the whole story,” said Anne. And it may be stated that in this
she was quite right.
Diana prudently refrained from any further criticism, but Mr. Harrison was much
harder to please. First he told her there was entirely too much description in
the story.
“Cut out all those flowery passages,” he said unfeelingly.
Anne had an uncomfortable conviction that Mr. Harrison was right, and she
forced herself to expunge most of her beloved descriptions, though it took
three re-writings before the story could be pruned down to please the
fastidious Mr. Harrison.
“I’ve left out all the descriptions but the sunset,”
she said at last. “I simply couldn’t let it go. It was the
best of them all.”
“It hasn’t anything to do with the story,” said Mr. Harrison,
“and you shouldn’t have laid the scene among rich city people. What
do you know of them? Why didn’t you lay it right here in
Avonlea—changing the name, of course, or else Mrs. Rachel Lynde would
probably think she was the heroine.”
“Oh, that would never have done,” protested Anne. “Avonlea is
the dearest place in the world, but it isn’t quite romantic enough for
the scene of a story.”
“I daresay there’s been many a romance in Avonlea—and many a
tragedy, too,” said Mr. Harrison drily. “But your folks ain’t
like real folks anywhere. They talk too much and use too high-flown language.
There’s one place where that Dalrymple chap talks even on for two
pages, and never lets the girl get a word in edgewise. If he’d done that
in real life she’d have pitched him.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Anne flatly. In her secret soul
she thought that the beautiful, poetical things said to Averil would win
any girl’s heart completely. Besides, it was gruesome to hear of
Averil, the stately, queen-like Averil, “pitching”
any one. Averil “declined her suitors.”
“Anyhow,” resumed the merciless Mr. Harrison, “I don’t
see why Maurice Lennox didn’t get her. He was twice the man the
other is. He did bad things, but he did them. Perceval hadn’t time for
anything but mooning.”
“Mooning.” That was even worse than “pitching!”
“Maurice Lennox was the villain,” said Anne indignantly.
“I don’t see why every one likes him better than
Perceval.”
“Perceval is too good. He’s aggravating. Next time you write about
a hero put a little spice of human nature in him.”
“Averil couldn’t have married Maurice. He was
bad.”
“She’d have reformed him. You can reform a man; you can’t
reform a jelly-fish, of course. Your story isn’t bad—it’s
kind of interesting, I’ll admit. But you’re too young to write a
story that would be worth while. Wait ten years.”
Anne made up her mind that the next time she wrote a story she wouldn’t
ask anybody to criticize it. It was too discouraging. She would not read the
story to Gilbert, although she told him about it.
“If it is a success you’ll see it when it is published, Gilbert,
but if it is a failure nobody shall ever see it.”
Marilla knew nothing about the venture. In imagination Anne saw herself reading
a story out of a magazine to Marilla, entrapping her into praise of
it—for in imagination all things are possible—and then triumphantly
announcing herself the author.
One day Anne took to the Post Office a long, bulky envelope, addressed, with
the delightful confidence of youth and inexperience, to the very biggest of the
“big” magazines. Diana was as excited over it as Anne herself.
“How long do you suppose it will be before you hear from it?” she
asked.
“It shouldn’t be longer than a fortnight. Oh, how happy and proud I
shall be if it is accepted!”
“Of course it will be accepted, and they will likely ask you to send them
more. You may be as famous as Mrs. Morgan some day, Anne, and then how proud
I’ll be of knowing you,” said Diana, who possessed, at least, the
striking merit of an unselfish admiration of the gifts and graces of her
friends.
A week of delightful dreaming followed, and then came a bitter awakening. One
evening Diana found Anne in the porch gable, with suspicious-looking eyes. On
the table lay a long envelope and a crumpled manuscript.
“Anne, your story hasn’t come back?” cried Diana
incredulously.
“Yes, it has,” said Anne shortly.
“Well, that editor must be crazy. What reason did he give?”
“No reason at all. There is just a printed slip saying that it
wasn’t found acceptable.”
“I never thought much of that magazine, anyway,” said Diana hotly.
“The stories in it are not half as interesting as those in the
Canadian Woman, although it costs so much more. I suppose the editor is
prejudiced against any one who isn’t a Yankee. Don’t be
discouraged, Anne. Remember how Mrs. Morgan’s stories came back. Send
yours to the Canadian Woman.”
“I believe I will,” said Anne, plucking up heart. “And if it
is published I’ll send that American editor a marked copy. But I’ll
cut the sunset out. I believe Mr. Harrison was right.”
Out came the sunset; but in spite of this heroic mutilation the editor of the
Canadian Woman sent Averil’s Atonement back so promptly that the
indignant Diana declared that it couldn’t have been read at all, and
vowed she was going to stop her subscription immediately. Anne took this second
rejection with the calmness of despair. She locked the story away in the garret
trunk where the old Story Club tales reposed; but first she yielded to
Diana’s entreaties and gave her a copy.
“This is the end of my literary ambitions,” she said bitterly.
She never mentioned the matter to Mr. Harrison, but one evening he asked her
bluntly if her story had been accepted.
“No, the editor wouldn’t take it,” she answered briefly.
Mr. Harrison looked sidewise at the flushed, delicate profile.
“Well, I suppose you’ll keep on writing them,” he said
encouragingly.
“No, I shall never try to write a story again,” declared Anne, with
the hopeless finality of nineteen when a door is shut in its face.
“I wouldn’t give up altogether,” said Mr. Harrison
reflectively. “I’d write a story once in a while, but I
wouldn’t pester editors with it. I’d write of people and places
like I knew, and I’d make my characters talk everyday English; and
I’d let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss
over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I’d give them a chance,
Anne—I’d give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the
world, I suppose, but you’d have to go a long piece to find
them—though Mrs. Lynde believes we’re all bad. But most of us have
got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.”
“No. It was very foolish of me to attempt it. When I’m through
Redmond I’ll stick to teaching. I can teach. I can’t write
stories.”
“It’ll be time for you to be getting a husband when you’re
through Redmond,” said Mr. Harrison. “I don’t believe in
putting marrying off too long—like I did.”
Anne got up and marched home. There were times when Mr. Harrison was really
intolerable. “Pitching,” “mooning,” and “getting
a husband.” Ow!!
