I always found Una to be one of the most interesting characters in LMM's books. She is really a surprisingly complex character. I love Una partly because we are both shy and withdrawn and partly because I identify with her love story. There are plenty of parallels in our lives ( though not of course war). I hope I captured her. She is so hard to write.
Una sat in the Manse parlor and carefully unpicked the seams of last year's spring dress. Mary Vance's wedding would shortly be upon her and Una was expected to be her bridesmaid. The dress was slightly too large. She found it difficult to eat sometimes and though she realized she could not lose much more weight it hardly troubled her.
Just this very morning she had sat before the mirror arranging her hair and noticed how old she looked. Faith was floating on air because Jem was home but Una knew that her sister's beauty was glowing and almost electric. Her own pale face, strange thin lips and odd features made her sigh. She was plain and knew it. Nor indeed did she have any other characteristics that would make her attractive or noteworthy. She was not brilliant, clever or unusually artistic. She was just Una.
Certainly she had never had anything to attract him. Even as a child she had viewed him with the awe born of him being someone so different than the usual boy. She had never liked most of them; they were rude and coarse and loved to make her cry. But Walter had been so kind to her. He had never teased her or made fun of shyness and fear.
She had never once thought of that adoration as anything but natural until that dreadful day in the summer a few years before the War started. She had been in Rainbow Valley and as usual listening to the rest a little apart. Faith had said something funny and thrown out her arms dramatically to prove her point with the bright color flooding her face. Una had glanced at Jem and seen the look of admiration and tenderness on his normally contented countenance. Then she had chanced a look at Walter and caught for an instant an expression, which caused a queer twisting in her stomach and a tight breathlessness in her lungs. The expression was not just longing, that would have made her rather disconcerted, but a sad wistfulness over Faith's very elusive, fairy like spirit.
Walter was in love with Faith? Even at the time it had struck her heart with painful intensity. But Jem and Faith loved each other. Una never doubted that for an instant. Walter would not have a chance. She had seen the strange light in her sister's eyes as they brushed their hair in the still hour before bed. Jem and Faith were so ideally suited to each other though they never revealed their feelings through poetry but through glances, innocent hidden touches that meant more than words and the quiet support of strong friendship. But Walter, he loved in such an odd intense way that must reveal itself in words. She had read the sonnets clearly written for Faith and sighed with the hopelessness of love so rarely bringing anything but empty echoes.
Sometimes she was terribly envious of Faith. Faith didn't need Walter's love and didn't even recognize it. There were times Una longed to be her sister. To be beautiful and fascinating with that wild charm and loveliness that took the air out of people's lungs was something she secretly wanted. Other times she wished to have the power to ease the pain of the impossible from his life; to comfort the warm passionate nature into calmness. She never expected to inspire poetry but only act as some sort of salve toward a wounded heart.
Una stood up and smoothed the fabric, as her stepmother looked toward her, "Are you all right, Una You have lost weight. Won't you see Dr. Blythe and see if he can give you medicine?"
Una thoughtlessly replied, "Yes, I will."
She wondered if she could bear to see him. He would know of course that her loss of appetite was caused by grief but of course he would never know the cause. No one knew the cause except perhaps for Rilla. Rilla had after all given her Walter's last letter.
She stepped outside and saw moon cast pale shadows over the silent yard. She moved like a wraith toward the graveyard and sat down on a tombstone. Sometimes she longed to sob wildly but she had not sobbed since she had received the news that dreadful night. She had never understood before what it was to bleed inwardly to wish to scream out in some empty space to relieve the ache.
He had come upon her once in this very spot not long after the war had started. The misery of being forgotten had been all but abolished in joy of being singled out even if just for a few moments. He had talked to her as if she was somehow more noble and self-sacrificing than him. He seemed to know she understood as the rest could hardly understand. When he leaned down and said in a desperate tone, "It torments me; to be involved in such a war and yet it is almost worse to do nothing. I wish I was dead."
It had taken all her strength not to fling her arms about his neck and comfort him with her own sympathy. She wanted to hurt those foolish women who sent him white feathers. He didn't deserve such treatment; that fine noble spirit deserved more than insults and sneers. He wasn't a coward at all. She was the coward. She was the coward for not taking her sorrow bravely.
There had been that time when he danced with her at the Four Winds dance. Una wasn't supposed to dance but at that moment she would hardly have refused him anything. She supposed he felt sorry for her sitting alone on the rocks. It had been strange to her to be held as if she was beautiful like Faith and dance softly to the haunting tones of the fiddle. Una had wondered if that was what standing on the edge of cliff felt like. If the gaze from his warm grey eyes had caught hers for an instant she saw it slid away toward the sea without connecting. She had been so close to him for just one instant but it had meant nothing. It was as if they were two forms passing in the dark that almost touched but never truly met.
Una was numb when she realized that he had enlisted. She had somehow known from the first that he would in fact do so. It did not strike her as inconsistent that he had changed his mind. To her it seemed an evolution of the fine impulses that had kept him from doing so before. Even then she had known somehow that the Piper that had figured so largely in her childish fancy would come and take him from her.
That moment at the station when she had fought so hard not to cry that she dug her fingernails into her palms until she bled came back to her as the wind swept down upon her sharp from the sea. She had looked down at her hand and found an odd satisfaction in the blood and pain that distracted her from the separation.
Then he had kissed her. Even now she sometimes wondered if after all she had imagined it. That sanity had left her completely. And yet she knew she couldn't have imagined it. It was just the merest whisper of a kiss, delivered on a train platform in front of a crowd of onlookers. It wasn't passionate like the moving picture nor did it deceive her into thinking that it was anything but a friendly kiss. She had never been kissed before and for a moment the mask slipped. All the emotions she had hidden far back in her heart slipped into the forefront and shone radiantly on her face. But as he turned and waved goodbye to the crowd of his loved ones she knew somehow that tender salutation would be her last. It was only then she understood truly the way her sister had looked when she came in from Rainbow Valley after meeting Jem for the last time before he went away. The glowing flush and the way she had said, "Una, it just fills you up until you can't figure out if you are laughing and crying. Then you just want to be so close you want to faint but of course you don't actually faint. Its so glorious and horrible." Una had been rather shocked at the time but now she understood what her sister had been talking about.
Una tore her thoughts away from the past with great effort. She found to her surprise that tears were running down her cheeks. For a moment she fought them but then she surrendered to pain and allowed herself to feel the rawness of the pain as if the grief was new. It was freeing to feel again and to allow herself to float aimlessly through the memories.
She did not see the figure on the path to the Manse for her head was bowed and her back was to it. Shirley did not speak and turned respectfully away to knock on Rosemary Meredith's door and give her loves of tea bread Susan had sent him over with. He shook his head at her grief and wished he might help her. But what could he say?
After all he was unable to overcome himself. He saw the comrades who had never come home and now lay in some abandoned field. He saw those who had been captured and half starved in a prisoner of war camp as the depleted German stores ran dangerously low. But most of all he saw little Annette who had seemed the human replication of the mayflowers standing as he last saw her with her eyes aglow with the wonder of being seventeen and in love. In six weeks she was dead from a dreadful combination of starvation and influenza. Somehow he did not wonder that Una was sobbing in the darkness of an old graveyard. He rather felt like joining her.