When a West Wind Blows
The first time she took my hand in hers, I felt a queer fluttering in my breast. What a strange girl she was, so pale and slim, with her red hair escaping its braids in little curls. I wanted to sweep them back behind her ears, or perhaps to let her braids down all together, and giggle as I brushed a hundred strokes before bedtime.
I had been reading a book when she came in with Miss Cuthbert. I don't remember what the book was, but I remember that I dropped it on the floor. Then Mama shooed us into the garden and we were alone in the mellow sunset light, gazing bashfully at each other over a gorgeous clump of tiger lilies. I never see tiger lilies but I think of her, all slim and orange and brighter than what you'd expect to find in Avonlea. I planted some beside my door.
The very first thing she ever said to me, hands clasped beneath her chin, was, "Oh, Diana, oh do you think you can like me a little — enough to be my bosom friend?"
What could I do but laugh?
We joined hands over the garden path and swore our eternal vows of friendship, my heart battering against my ribs like something waking to find itself in a cage.
I solemnly swear that I will be faithful to my bosom friend, Anne Shirley, as long as the sun and moon shall endure.
Her eyes were wide and starry, green and gray, and her fingers were bony under mine.
"You're a queer girl, Anne," I said. "I heard before that you were queer. But I believe I'm going to like you real well."
Avonlea seemed to come alive after she arrived. Mother was glad that to see me put my books aside, but she would not have been so pleased if she had traced the wanderings of my imagination. By Anne's side, everything seemed to burst into full color. All the woods and fields, so familiar that I no longer saw them, became bright and gay, festooned with the blossoms of her fancy. She renamed them all, the ponds and paths of my childhood, christening them with names beyond anything I could have dreamed myself. My own leaden efforts only disappointed her, though she was too kind to say so directly. She gave me Idlewild and Willowmere; all I could offer in return was Birch Path.
There was trouble in school — Gilbert and slates and punishments. But what I really remember was the day Mama told me I could never see her again. Never! Eternity stretched before me in all its emptiness and I flew down to the Dryad's Bubble with my heart in my throat.
"I couldn't love anybody as I love you," I sobbed, and meant it.
We were children, and there was a frisson of pleasure to our grief. We pledged our undying love and I gave her a lock of my hair, crying with both sorrow and delight in the gift. I spent the days afterward finding ways to send her my love, even though Mama had forbidden my speaking to her, even at school. I folded red tissue paper into triangles and trapezoids, overlapping in beautiful symmetry, and gave it to her as a bookmark. When she kissed it, I knew what she meant by a thrill.
I thought we had killed her.
She had protested that it was ridiculous for her to play the lily maid on account of her hair, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting tiger lily.
"I think it is real pretty," I said, admiring the little curls that clung to her head under a wide velvet bow.
She lay in the flat, covered by an old piano scarf and holding a blue iris, and I could not imagine a lovelier lily maid. I kissed her quiet brow and shivered.
When the flat turned up empty, my heated blood ran cold. We had killed her and there was nothing romantic about it. I tore madly for home, faster than Ruby and Jane could hope to fly, but found no one home. There was no one at Green Gables either, with Marilla gone to Carmody and Matthew nowhere to be found.
We had killed her and Ruby was in hysterics and I was sobbing and gasping when suddenly she appeared as an apparition on the ferny little path under the maples.
"Oh, Anne," I gasped, throwing my arms about her neck and clinging for all I was worth. "Oh, Anne — we thought — you were — drowned — and we felt like murderers . . ."
I took her home to Green Gables and helped her peel away her soaking clothes, hoping my recent exertion would excuse the hectic flush in my cheeks. I had seen her undressed, of course, when we changed for bed or played at princesses, trying on my best dresses and parading through my bedroom. But this was different, and I left as soon as I could get away, pleading headache to my mother and hiding myself under my own quilt.
She went away to Queen's and I began to dream about her. By day, I would embroider cushions and knead dough and try to learn the things my mother wished me to know. But at night, my mind and hands were free to wander. I began to love night.
I should have been glad the weekends she was home, but jealousy nipped at my heart.
"I thought you liked that Stella Maynard better than me," I said, hoping she could not see how much it hurt to admit it. "Josie said you were INFATUATED with her."
She threw her lilies at me and laughed and told me she loved me more than ever. What more could I want?
I knew I was going to go to Hell. What other punishment was there for a girl who was secretly happy — even if only a tiny bit — that Matthew Cuthbert had died?
Of course, my heart broke for Anne. Her grief was terrible, and try though I might, I could not seem to get inside it. But her loss kept her in Avonlea, when she should have gone to Redmond. I was glad, and fearful.
It was sometime after our Golden Picnic when I finally kissed her.
She was writing — she was always writing — and I loved to hear her plots. We would walk in the woods or down the shore and she would tell me all her characters' troubles over and over until she had worked out how to make them behave the way she wanted them to. I never understood that, exactly. People are free to do as they please, but characters should do just as you wish, shouldn't they?
In any event, Lady Cristabella and Sir Algernon were suspended in romantic inertia. I was trying to follow the tangles of their history, but with the sea roaring and Anne flushed and glowing above her white muslin dress, I couldn't be too sure of anything.
"It's terribly difficult to write a kiss when you've never been kissed," she said, frowning. "I keep trying to imagine it, but it skitters away every time I get close."
I licked my lips and took my chance. "You could kiss me," I said, hoping I sounded casual.
She looked at me curiously, and I felt the same queer flutter I had felt the first time she held my hands in hers.
"To help your story," I said, ducking my head.
She laughed, a merry sound as glittering as the flecks of setting sun tipping the waves. "You're a good friend, Diana, listening to me ramble on as I do. I hardly need further encouragement."
"I don't mind," I said, though it was hard to hear myself above the sea.
She turned to me, her eyes large and gray and starry, as they had been at our first vows. She might have said something about Sir Algernon or her romantic ideals, but I heard nothing but the tide roaring louder in my ears.
Her lips were as soft as I knew they would be. Lily petals. I had had no doubt.
If we had stopped there, we might have continued our walk in peace and gone home holding hands and chatting as we always did. It was the second kiss, and the third, when the lily lips parted and the world beyond ceased to exist, that did us in. I don't know how Sir Algernon would have kissed Lady Cristabella, but if he loved her, he would have kissed her like this, with lips red and pulsing at her touch, blood surging toward her even as flesh and bone melted beneath her hand.
She pulled away from me, panting, her sunset hair coming down where I had put my fingers through it, the tingling echo of her fingers still burning on my breast. I never saw her eyes black before, pupils wide enough that I could have fallen into them.
She left by one path and I by another and we did not speak of it again.
Fred Wright began to court me. I liked him well enough, and decided I could be happy with him. After all, he was kind and steady and would make me a good home. There was something faintly ridiculous about the idea of marrying him, but it was not unpleasant. He would be a good father and a good husband and I had all the training I needed to be a good wife.
I kissed him, as well, to be sure I liked it. I must admit that I did. Better still, when he unbuttoned my collar and kissed me freely, if a bit blunderingly. He buried his face in my bosom and sighed, and I did not run away.
I even thought I was happy, until I told Anne of our engagement. She seemed glad for me at first, and why shouldn't she be? But then she made some cutting remarks about doilies and lowered expectations, and I left feeling sour over the whole thing.
Why should it matter what she thought? Wasn't she going away to Redmond? Away from Avonlea, away from the Island, away from me? Why shouldn't I marry Fred Wright?
It was summertime and too hot to sleep with the windows closed and the quilt pulled up over my head, but the alternative was to lie in bed and smell the scent of tiger lilies wafting from the garden, so I made my peace with sweltering.
I tried to make things right, but she drifted away from me at college. It was only natural, I suppose. She made other friends and I put my heart into preparing for my wedding. We were still dear to one another, but nothing I did seemed to be quite right. I thought perhaps I could stitch us back together by helping her get her story published — Averil and Perceval this time — but she wasn't pleased. She thanked me, but it was the Birch Path all over again.
Still, she helped me fix my veil for my wedding, and kissed me as a friend.
"Di, darling, kiss me good-bye for the last time. Diana Barry will never kiss me again."
"Diana Wright will, though," I promised.
I prayed that my baby would be a girl so that I could call her Anne. He was Fred instead, and precious in his own way. I loved him, as I loved his father, and waited for the sort of second chance that is possible with babies.
She was radiant at her wedding. It was September, but some unseen bird sang sweetly from some hidden bough when she made her vow to Gilbert Blythe. Fred held my hand and smiled at me and I could not say that I was unhappy. I could live without the fluttering of my heart.
There were many happy years then, full of work and children and merry letters from Glen St. Mary. Nine years on, Anne's house was full and getting fuller every year. Not mine. After Jack was born, I told Fred that I was done with babies and moved my nightgowns to the extra bedroom. Three was quite enough for me.
Then, one year in cherry-blossom time, word came that old John Blythe had passed into eternal rest. Gilbert came from the funeral, but had to hurry back to tend a patient. Anne stayed the week.
I was flustered because Fred's brother Jim was getting married and I positively had to go to the reception, no matter how wild I might be to stay at home. But Anne promised me a Golden Picnic the next day and set my heart racing.
"I always feel adventurous when a west wind blows," she said, balancing a picnic basket against her swelling stomach.
It was a pet day, with rain before and after, but it was ours. We rambled all the old paths, losing ourselves in do-you-remembers. I remembered everything, even the way to Hester Gray's garden, though I had not been there since I was married.
We ate our picnic among the mossy stones and talked of children and families and dreams until the sun went down. Then we lounged in the grass beneath a lilac bush. Her hand found its way into mine and we sat for a long time in a silence too sweet for words. The spring twilight took possession of Hester Gray's garden where nobody ever walked now. A great star came out over the white cherry trees.
"I could sit here forever," I said, unthinking. "I hate the thought of leaving it."
She did not respond right away, but when she did, her voice was low and sweet. "Has it ever occurred to you, Diana, that there is something not quite . . . chaste . . . in the scent of lilac blossoms? Gilbert laughs at such a notion . . . he loves them . . . but to me they always seem to be remembering some secret, too-sweet thing."
Perhaps it was the gathering dark that made her eyes black. But when I looked at her, she did not look away. My heart skipped a beat. Or, if that be a physiological impossibility, I thought it did.
I licked my lips, unsteady on the ground I had trodden only in dreams. "Can a memory be too sweet?" I asked.
She answered me with a kiss.
It was twilight and growing darker, but truth be told I was oblivious to the world beyond myself and her and us together. I remembered her kisses well enough, but the rest of her was new to me. Her belly firm and swollen, perfectly round though not yet any larger than my own soft middle. Breasts full and sensitive, if her sharp intake of breath was any measure. It was too dark to see the copper of her hair, but I pulled it down out of its pins and ran my fingers through it as I did when we were giggling girls. But we were girls no longer, and not playing at love for the sake of a story.
When she lay sighing in my arms, I traced the contour of her ear with a single finger, marveling as I swept back a fugitive curl.
"Wouldn't it be funny, Diana," she said, "if now, as we went home, we were to meet our old selves running along Lover's Lane?"
"What would you tell them?" I asked, still a bit breathless.
She hesitated. "I might tell them . . . not to run away."
I bent to kiss her and she smiled, and my heart gave its queer little flutter.
I packed the picnic basket as she fixed her shirtwaist. "I think this may be the last one," she said, caressing her expanding belly.
"Surely you know by now what causes it?" I said, feeling bold.
She laughed, the same merry, glittering sound I had always loved, and took my hand again. "I do. But I think, perhaps, I am ready to meet another bend in the road."
We went quietly, silently, lovingly home together, with the sunset glory burning on the old hills behind us and our old unforgotten love burning in our hearts.
Author's Note:
Italicized text indicated a quotation from canon (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Ingleside), though some are slightly modified for tense and point of view.