“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 the other rooms with scorn. It was a picture of palms around a spring in the desert, with a string of camels marching away in the distance. It literally fascinated me. I’ve always wanted to go and find it … I want to see the Southern Cross and the Taj Mahal and the pillars of Karnak. I want to know … not just believe … that the world is round. And I can never do it on a teacher’s salary. I’ll just have to go on forever, prating of King Henry the Eighth’s wives and the inexhaustible resources of the Dominion.”
Anne laughed. It was safe to laugh now, for the bitterness had gone out of Katherine’s voice. It sounded merely rueful and impatient.
“Anyhow, we’re going to be friends … and we’re going to have a jolly ten days here to begin our friendship. I’ve always wanted to be friends with you, Katherine … spelled with a K! I’ve always felt that underneath all your prickles was something that would make you worth while as a friend.”
“So that is what you’ve really thought of me? I’ve often wondered. Well, the leopard will have a go at changing its spots if it’s at all possible. Perhaps it is. I can believe almost anything at this Green Gables of yours. It’s the first place I’ve ever been in that felt like a home. I should like to be more like other people … if it isn’t too late. I’ll even practice a sunny smile for that Gilbert of yours when he arrives tomorrow night. Of course I’ve forgotten how to talk to young men … if I ever knew. He’ll just think me an old-maid gooseberry. I wonder if, when I go to bed tonight, I’ll feel furious with myself for pulling off my mask and letting you see into my shivering soul like this.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll think, ‘I’m glad she’s found out I’m human.’ We’re going to snuggle down among the warm fluffy blankets, probably with two hot-water bottles, for likely Marilla and Mrs. Lynde will each put one in for us for fear the other has forgotten it. And you’ll feel deliciously sleepy after this walk in the frosty moonshine … and first thing you’ll know, it will be morning and you’ll feel as if you were the first person to discover that the sky is blue. And you’ll grow learned in lore of plum puddings because you’re going to help me make one for Tuesday … a great big plummy one.”
Anne was amazed at Katherine’s good looks when they went in. Her complexion was radiant after her long walk in the keen air and color made all the difference in the world to her.
“Why, Katherine would be handsome if she wore the right kind of hats and dresses,” reflected Anne, trying to imagine Katherine with a certain dark, richly red velvet hat she had seen in a Summerside shop, on her black hair and pulled over her amber eyes. “I’ve simply got to see what can be done about it.”
Chapter VI
Saturday and Monday were full of gay doings at Green Gables. The plum pudding was concocted and the Christmas tree brought home. Katherine and Anne and Davy and Dora went to the woods for it … a beautiful little fir to whose cutting down Anne was only reconciled by the fact that it was in a little clearing of Mr. Harrison’s which was going to be stumped and plowed in the spring anyhow.
They wandered about, gathering creeping spruce and ground pine for wreaths … even some ferns that kept green in a certain deep hollow of the woods all