Carl Meredith met our dancing buttercup in the kitchen. Waiting for your playmates in Susan's kitchen was a risky business. The joy laid in how you were sure to receive a doughnut or apple fritter to help past time. For payment, however, you had to divulge all details of your errands to Susan Baker, who for all her hearty kindness had all the incessant warnings the old and wise shall never cease to harass children with, and that the young and foolish are bound to ignore.
"Harbour Head!" Susan Baker exclaimed, eyeing Rilla's attire from her beribboned red-brown curls to her flounced dress and brown buttoned boots. "You'll not spoil those clothes at Harbour Head, playing with those poor and dirty children."
"Captain Crawford is a respectable man. " Carl Meredith pleaded her cause. "Jem used to go there often himself... and never once did he come home dirty. We'll stay on his property all the time."
"As if!" Susan sniffed. "You're hardly indoor creatures, you two ... you're brown as an Indian from the sun. One minute you'll be in Old Abe Crawford's for a ship-in-bottle, the next you'll be chasing ants on the beach. I know you, Carl Meredith."
It was Carl's turn to be momentarily cowed. "Susan, we promise you we won't play at the Harbour Head beach at all..." Rilla pleaded. Susan yielded.
"Mind you come back in time for supper!" was her last word.
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Rilla and Carl trudged along the dusty road Jem had introduced them to, earlier in the summer. Jem was spending most of his last summer before college with Queen's pal Roddy Crawford at the Crawford farm. There, he remembered old Captain Crawford, benefactor of the seafaring treasures Jem had since bequeathed on his youngest sister. He brought Rilla and Carl one day to visit the old Scottish Captain and Rilla and Carl had returned often since, to reap many delightful favours.
"I thought we were going to borrow Captain Crawford's skiff today." Rilla queried.
"We are. We're going to row over to the rock shore by the Four Winds light. I want to study algae as an insect habitat."
Rilla thrilled with delight. She loved excursions for Four Winds and had secretly hankered all summer for a glimpse of ---
"I just didn't want to say anything to Susan about it - she would worry herself sick over us drowning ourselves." Carl explained. "Joe Milgrave told me that Ethel Reese and Ken Ford were nearly caught by the tide at Margaret's Cape last week -- 'as if a Toronto landlubber knows anything about the Atlantic!' Joe scorned."
"He knows more than Joe would ever know in his life!" Rilla flashed. "Why, he's even gone sailing in the Pacific - and that's miles bigger and more tempestuous than the Atlantic, that's for sure." Rilla thought boastfully of the postcard Ken sent her from Japan.
"Whatever you say." Carl shrugged. It was his habitual nonchalant response to the sudden, unreasonable flares of anger girls seemed to liked to display. Faith had shown such sparks all summer.
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Rilla was still thinking darkly of Ethel Reese as they coasted past Margaret's Cape - so named by Mother, for an old romantic tale Uncle Owen had written about in his books.
"What," she began, "do you suppose people do when they like each other?"
"Kiss?" Carl suggested off-handedly, far more fascinated by a red beetle crawing up the edge of the boat.
"That can't be it." Rilla shook her tousled curls. "Jem's only kissed Susette King once."
"Oh ho, so he's kissed her. I can't wait to see Faith's face when I tell her." Carl laughed. Without really understanding the cause of her chagrin, Carl liked to tease his sister mercilessly.
"I hope Walter hasn't kissed Faith." Rilla continued. She would not admit, perhaps not even to herself, her jealousy of the blooming Faith. "I don't think a black haired boy looks right with a golden haired girl." She mused.
"Have you kissed anybody, Miss Roly-Poly?" Carl teased.
Rilla blushed. She had! It was a dim memory - she was only five or six - she was playing with Walter at somebody's farm - there was a boy called Pat who was friends with Walter, and Hannah Crawford, a scrap of a girl three years older than herself who looked like a little squaw from Lennox Island. Hannah had stuck her tongue out at Walter and then at Pat - and to make her jealous, Pat had kissed Rilla! Rilla didn't like him, and had always dreamed of saving her lips for someone else. She had slapped him - Hannah had pulled her hair, and they had not spoken until Hannah moved to the Glen school last year.
"Have you ever kissed anybody?" she returned the question to avoid answering.
"I asked you first."
Rilla nodded.
"Well, who was it?"
Rilla didn't like to repeat the name of Pat Brewster. But she wanted to know who Carl had kissed - and more importantly, what made a boy kiss a girl. Rilla at nine had already developed a talent for accumulating such useful knowledge, against the day when she could wield it to her power.
"Walter's friend." she pronounced mysteriously, liking the ambiguity of her answer. "Your turn, Thomas Carlyle."
"I'll tell you on the way back." Carl drew the skiff quickly to shore and ran off onto the beach.
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The truth was that Carl hadn't kissed any girls and didn't like to admit it to the baby of the gang. He had tried to kiss Alice Clow once - but a toad had hopped out of his pocket at the propitious moment and Alice had ran screaming away. It was too disheartening an experience to try again.
Carl scaled red rock cliffs and algae lagoons with his eyes out more avidly for bugs than for girls. After all, with one tempestuous sister at home and a second sweet, indulgent one, Carl felt no exigent need for a sweetheart. Perhaps he could marry Rilla Blythe when she grew up - but Carl had a vague idea that Rilla had set her affections elsewhere. That was why he tried to kiss Rilla's chum, Alice Clow.
A runaway moth brought Carl sliding down a crumbling cliff to a rocky beach. The bug alighted on a pile of seaweed that a little creature was gathering. Who was it - a slim sea-nymph from one of Walter's fairy tales? Carl was not a whit fanciful, but rubbed his eyes for a moment to make sure she was real. With sea-blue eyes and hair the colour of golden-molasses taffy, she looked as Mother Rosemary must have looked at ten years old. Carl adored his stepmother - tall and fair, she was to him the epitome of womanly beauty. Impulsively, Carl knelt down by her pile of seaweed and kissed her!
She didn't run. Instead, she giggled as she poked a slender finger that the lizard that had crawled from his shirt pocket onto her shoulder, tickling her neck. "What's that?" she asked. "And who are you?"
"Miss Liz," he gathered the said reptile off her milky skin, "and Carl Meredith."
"Persis Ford." she grinned.
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At the end of the afternoon, Carl and Rilla rowed back to the Glen in a golden sea of sunset. Rilla was radiant with secret dreams, and Carl too, glowed red beneath his summer tan.
"What," he asked our hopelessly romantic little Miss Blythe, "do you think of a golden-haired girl with a golden-haired boy?"