XIII. A Golden Picnic
Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables, just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the Haunted Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad’s Bubble, where tiny ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from a nap.
“I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my birthday on Saturday,” said Anne.
“Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!”
“That wasn’t my fault,” laughed Anne. “If my parents had consulted me it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be born in spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their foster sister. But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring. Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane will be home. We’ll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden day making the acquaintance of the spring. We none of us really know her yet, but we’ll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else. I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at. We’ll make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”
“It SOUNDS awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of Anne’s magic of words. “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”
“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities. “And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I’m going to have the daintiest things possible … things that will match the spring, you understand … little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re NOT very poetical.”
Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic … a day of breeze and blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green.
Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter echoed down to him.
“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was saying, with true Anneish philosophy. “Let’s try to make this a really golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight. We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. ‘Begone, dull care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school yesterday.”
“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.
“Oh, I know the expression … I’ve felt it often enough on my own face. But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear. It will keep till Monday … or if it doesn’t so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery. When I’m eighty years old … if I ever am … I shall shut my eyes and see those violets just as I see them now. That’s the first good gift our day has given us.”
“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet,” said Priscilla.
Anne glowed.
“I’m so glad you SPOKE that thought, Priscilla, instead of just thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more interesting place … although it IS very interesting anyhow … if people spoke out their real thoughts.”
“It would be too hot to hold some folks,” quoted Jane sagely.
“I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just what comes into her head. THAT is conversation. Here’s a little path I never saw before. Let’s explore it.”
The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing things.
“What a lot of elephant’s ears,” exclaimed Diana. “I’m going to pick a big bunch, they’re so pretty.”
“How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a dreadful name?” asked Priscilla.
“Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at all or else far too much,” said Anne, “Oh, girls, look at that!”
“That” was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up and its place filled with a rank growth of ferns; but now it was a glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A ring of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its margin.
“HOW sweet!” said Jane.
“Let us dance around it like woodnymphs,” cried Anne, dropping her basket and extending her hands.
But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane’s rubbers came off.
“You can’t be a woodnymph if you have to wear rubbers,” was her decision.
“Well, we must name this place before we leave it,” said Anne, yielding to the indisputable logic of facts. “Everybody suggest a name and we’ll draw lots. Diana?”
“Birch Pool,” suggested Diana promptly.
“Crystal Lake,” said Jane.
Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with “Glimmer-glass.” Anne’s selection was “The Fairies’ Mirror.”
The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil Schoolma’am Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne’s hat. Then Priscilla shut her eyes and drew one. “Crystal Lake,” read Jane triumphantly. Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had played the pool a shabby trick she did not say so.
Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture. Across it they found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of wild cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of sky or sunlight to be seen.
“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne. “They are impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the sunshiny places.”
“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have three wishes granted you … or even only one? What would you wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I’d wish to be rich and beautiful and clever.”
“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.
“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla.