Poll results can be found at my LiveJournal, Blytheauthoress.

September's poll: Which two desserts from the Anne books would you most like to know the recipe for?

-M.R.

Chapter Two: Apples and Aspirations

"You like me, right?...Better than any of the other guys you know?"

"Yes," I sighed.

"But that's all," he said, and it wasn't a question..."That's okay, you know. As long as you like me the best. And you think I'm good-looking—sort of. I'm prepared to be annoyingly persistent."

-Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

It was late afternoon, the day before Gilbert, Charlie, and Anne were to leave for Kingsport; and a sense of uneasy excitement hung over the Cuthbert, Blythe and Sloane households like a swiftly-gathering black raincloud.

But rainclouds were far from Gilbert's mind today. He calmly traversed the bridge…where the disaster had taken place only two days previously…and went through the Haunted Wood with neither the panic which had accompanied him as an impressionable schoolboy, nor the frenzy which had caused him to tear about the place when Dora was missing. Anne met him at the door to Green Gables.

"You look tired, Anne!" he exclaimed, noting the somewhat pained look of her eyes and the pinched-up feeling around Anne's face that was not usually her wont. Anne allowed herself a wan smile.

"I am tired," she admitted, stifling a yawn. "And worse than that, I'm disgruntled. I'm tired because I've been packing my trunk, and sewing, all day and all night; but I'm disgruntled because six women of Avonlea have been here to say good-bye to me…and every one of the six managed to say something that seemed to take the color right out of life and leave it as gray and dismal and cheerless as a November morning!"

"Spiteful old cats!" said Gilbert emphatically, having been visited by those same six or seven busybody housewives in the last week…the same housewives which Charlie Sloane had been telling Gilbert, scarcely an hour ago, of being terrorized by.

"Oh, no, they aren't, and that is just the trouble!" protested Anne. "If they had been 'spiteful cats' I wouldn't have minded them…But they are all nice, kind, motherly souls, who like me and whom I like, and that is why what they said, or hinted, had such undue weight with me." Anne sighed. "You see, they let me see they thought I was crazy—going to Redmond and trying to take a B.A., and ever since then I've been wondering if I am.

"Mrs. Peter Sloane, for example, sighed and said she hoped my strength would hold out till I got through…and at once I saw myself a hopeless victim of nervous prostration at the end of my third year; Mrs. Eben Wright said it must cost an awful lot to put in four years at Redmond; and I felt all over me that it was unpardonable of me to squander Marilla's money and my own on such a folly! Mrs. Jasper Bell said she hoped I wouldn't let college spoil me, as it did some people; and I felt in my bones that the end of my four Redmond years would see me a most insufferable creature, thinking I knew it all, and looking down on everything and everybody in Avonlea; Mrs. Elisha Wright said she understood that Redmond girls, especially those who belonged to Kingsport, were 'dreadful dressy and stuck-up', and she guessed I wouldn't feel much at home among them; and I saw myself, a snubbed, dowdy, humiliated country girl, shuffling through Redmond's classic halls in copper-toed boots."

"But surely you don't really care for what they said!"

"We-ell…" Anne hesitated.

"You know how narrow their outlook on life is," continued Gilbert, seeing that Anne was weakening. "To anything they have never done is anathema maranatha! It is only that you are the first Avonlea girl who has ever gone to college, so they have their doubts."

"I know…but feeling that they are right is so different from knowing they are wrong," lamented Anne. "My common sense tells me all you say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul. Really, after Mrs. Elisha went away I hardly had the heart to finish packing!"

"You're just tired, Anne," Gilbert maintained, putting a (more or less) platonic arm around her shoulders. He was exceedingly gratified to see that she did not shake him off. "Come on, just forget it all for an hour or so; and take a walk with me, a ramble back through the woods beyond the marsh…there should be something there I want to show you."

"Should be?!" laughed Anne. "Don't you know if it is there?"

"No…I only know it should be, from something I did there in spring. Come on—we'll pretend we are two schoolchildren again; and we'll go 'the way of the wind'."

Though they clasped each other's hands as they ran off…like two children would, of course…Gilbert made sure that he stayed in the role of teasing schoolboy…not lovesick swain, as, he remembered ruefully, he had so effectively acted mere days before.

"The wood really is haunted now—by old memories," exclaimed Anne, as they dashed through the spruce grove. "It seems to me that the little girls Diana and I used to be play here still, and sit by the Dryad's Bubble in the twilights, trysting with the ghosts. Do you know," she continued thoughtfully, "I can never go up this path in the dusk without feeling a bit of the old fright and shiver…There was one especially horrifying phantom which Mrs. Hammond once claimed to have met—the ghost of a murdered child that crept up behind you and laid cold fingers on yours. I confess that, to this day, I cannot help fancying its little, furtive footsteps behind me when I come here after nightfall. I'm not afraid of the White Lady or the headless man or the skeletons, but I wish I had never imagined that baby's ghost into reality—as it were. How angry Marilla and Mrs. Barry were over that affair!"

Now after "Uncle Abe's storm", Gilbert, during a solitary ramble in the woods, had found an apple tree—old, venerable, but badly damaged by the wind and hail. Gilbert and his father had saved the tree, and Gilbert was almost sure that "his" tree, strong and weathered as it was, would be the only tree in Avonlea this fall to bear apples. Anne would no doubt be thrilled by the story of the tree.

He was not disappointed. "An apple tree—and away back here!" Anne cried delightedly, upon seeing it.

"Yes; a veritable apple-bearing tree, too, even after the storm…" Gilbert's eyes twinkled at the recollection of the "magicking up" of that storm…"here in the midst of pines and birches, and a mile from any orchard!" He explained how he had found and helped heal the tree, and Anne's eyes glowed with admiration.

Gilbert preened…but only when Anne was not looking. "See, it's loaded," he exclaimed then. "They look good, too: tawny as russets but with a dusky red cheek. Most wild seedlings are green and uninviting." And sour, too!

Anne did sigh with the tree's romance. "I suppose it sprang…years ago…from some chance-sown seed—and oh, how it has flourished and held its own here, all alone, among aliens!—the brave, determined thing!"

"Here's a fallen tree with a cushion of moss; sit down Anne, it will serve for a woodland throne." Gilbert scrutinized the tree. "I'll have to climb for some apples, they all grow high. The tree has had to reach up to the sunlight."

In a few minutes, Gilbert, scratched, bruised and triumphant, offered Anne the bigger apple and bit into his only after she had begun to nibble. They were not disappointed in their taste test; for the apples were possessed of a mysterious, almost cinnamon-y tang, with just the slightest hint of something like the taste of cool, clear spring water and…something like the way a birch tree looked…interwoven into a melody of flavor.

"The fatal apple of Eden couldn't have had a rarer flavor," was Anne's verdict.

The two "schoolchildren" suddenly looked about and found that it was well past sunset.

"Well, and do you feel as disgruntled as you did when we started out, Anne?" asked Gilbert triumphantly, as they strolled through Lovers' Lane, Gilbert with his hat full of the apples for his mother to make into an interesting pie, and some extra to bring on the train tomorrow; Anne, with her hands full of white irises that she and Diana had transplanted, as young girls, into the Land and which now grew miraculously wild along the road.

"Not I! Those apples have been as manna to a hungry soul!" Anne grinned. "I feel that we shall love Redmond, and have a splendid four years there…"

"And after those four years—what?" Romance? added his mind mischievously…as though the second question was not, despite his honest attempt to stop it, already thick in his voice.

Anne seemed to have heard the tone; she replied, a little too quickly…a little too airily… "Oh, there's only another bend in the road. I've no idea what may be around it. I don't want to have. It's nicer not to know."

Gilbert looked at Anne sadly; it was dim now and she could not have seen the expression on his face. Her white gown and queenly, graceful straight bearing reminded him of the flowers she carried in her arms.

I wonder if I can EVER make her care for me…!

Do you know how HORRIBLE it is to write about apples for a great while, and then rush downstairs under the influence of an irresistible temptation for one, only to find that, currently, one has at hand nothing but oranges?!

-M.R.