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At fifteen, Gilbert Blythe had an extremely limited view of what marriage was like; he never witnessed it between his parents, and as much as his father was his closest confidant, the subject of his mother was rarely approached— the older man's eyes would become dim and absent with an emotion that seemed leagues beyond what the young boy understood whenever she was mentioned— so for the sake of both of them, he held his tongue and his curiosity.
Gilbert knew his father never laid any blame on him for his mother’s death, but there was always a shallow tension on his birthday until father would blink and look up with a large smile and laugh “Gil, you look about a year older from when I saw you last,” and Gilbert would pretend he hadn’t noticed the used handkerchief crumpled up in his hand. But still, the old picture of her sat on the bedside table, and sometimes his eyes would drift to her sepia-toned face as he read Whitman to his ailing father and he wondered what she would do differently if she were here to take care of him. Was there something Gilbert could have done better? Was there something missing in his desperate attempts to nurse his loving, and carefree dad back to health?
When he was twelve, Ruby Gillis batted her eyelashes and smiled at him for the first time in the coatroom at school. It wasn’t that wide and toothless smile that came with a snort she used to give him— none of the girls did that anymore— and it wasn’t the kind of smile he saw plastered on Josie’s face when she made fun of Moody in the many times he tripped over his own feet. No, this smile was different, with her lips closed but curved up delicately and her eyelashes fluttering onto her blushing cheek, and then she turned around slowly, walking airily to sit at her place next to Diana where the two burst out into giggles excitedly.
As he stared blankly at the odd display, Charlie approached from behind and whispered that he thought Ruby would be a fine wife one day, but someone would first have to cure her of those giggles because they were “awfully obnoxious.”
Gilbert didn’t give it much thought then— as the conversation Moody and Paul were having about seeing Mr. Lynde fall off his horse and into a massive mud puddle seemed so much more interesting— and he didn’t give it a second thought now, as Ruby stood in his kitchen with Anne and Diana and explained that they had made him a shepherds pie in that sweet voice, full of a pity that he had learned to hate in the past few days after his father’s death.
Anne wrung her hat tightly between her hands and her eyes darted back and forth as Diana paid compliment to her cooking and Gilbert barely had time to register before the redhead blurted out that she would make a terrible wife and exited the house swiftly.
Anne Shirley was confusing; she would rarely even look at him, but when she did there were no flirtatious smiles, there were no fluttering eyelashes— there were sharp words and hair tosses with a raised chin. Despite this, he still wanted to be her friend; no one in Avonlea spoke poetry like it was an extension of their own soul like she did; no one in Avonlea fought Gilbert bitterly for the top of the class as she did, and certainly, no one in Avonlea would run into a burning house as she did. He wanted to be her friend, but she would thwart his every effort to talk to her. After their brief meeting, his father had chuckled so heartily that it almost sounded like his laughs from simpler times as Gilbert divulged their complicated relationship thus far, and the older man lamented that his mother made him earn it before she would allow them to become friends. Gilbert couldn’t understand why Anne wouldn’t make a fine wife, sure, she could be loud and argumentative, but didn’t that make her interesting? He thought, surely, a wife was just a good friend that you lived with and sometimes you’d kiss her. The other boys had blanched at school when kissing was mentioned only briefly in a poem they were reading, and afterward Moody groaned out that he would “never kiss a girl,” with Charlie nodding aggressively behind him.
Later that night, as he lay restless in that overbearingly lonely house, he wondered if kissing Anne would be so terrible.
Gilbert concluded after a good couple hours of pondering the question, that no, it would not be so terrible at all. He just had to get her to have a decent conversation with him first.
At sixteen, Gilbert had seen the world— or at least, a small sliver more than he would have cooped up in Avonlea. Avonlea was constricting, it was closing in on him and he had to leave before it swallowed him whole. The S.S Primrose sat on the wide, open sea, and there were people who spoke all kinds of languages from all kinds of places aboard, and it couldn’t have been more opposite to his old home. His father used to tell him of the wild adventures he’d had during his days in the military, and in a way, Gilbert felt like he was doing this for him, to continue his legacy and make him proud.
The men aboard the ship were loud and rambunctious, and they hardly took Gilbert seriously. They laughed when he burned himself on the hot coals and they sneered when he refused their offers for drinks, and every once and a while a couple of them would get into fights for no particular reason other than simply wanting to fight. They would drink heavily in every port they stopped at and make crude comments about the women around them, the kind of comments that made Bash cover Gilbert’s ears, and yell, “not in front of the little lamb!” But even the roughest men aboard would still climb into their hammocks at night and quietly read letters from their wives or their sweethearts back home.
He had heard the burly man next to him comment once that he liked his wife well enough, but she sent pages and pages of stuff he had no mind to pay attention to— that he only wanted to hear how their land was faring without him, but she would go on for paragraphs about some book she and her friends were reading, or what flowers she was planning on planting in spring.
So, Gilbert would stand at the edge of the ship with his arms pressed on the rail, and peer out at the sunset-tinted sea and wish someone would talk to him like that; that if the other men around him wanted peace and quiet, all he wanted was someone to fill the silence that weighed on his heart with passionate and long drawn out speeches laced with infectious laughter. Pretending he didn’t know the girl he had in mind was futile; he knew it wasn’t Ruby, with her pretty pink dresses and golden hair that laid against her shoulders, and her innocent kindness that only flourished under Anne’s friendship; he knew it wasn’t Diana, with dark raven hair and her affinity for French and the piano, who comported herself with an elegant air, yet would still counter the boys teasing with her own clever jokes; it definitely wasn’t Josie, Jane, or Tillie, who had begun indulging in the Avonlea gossip mill he so detested. He would not pretend that when he closed his eyes long enough and drowned out the boorish conversations from the upper echelons of society behind him, it wasn’t Anne’s vibrant voice that he could make out in the waves that pushed against the bottom of the ship.
He would feel the embarrassment from these budding feelings only for a second, before shoving it down and accepting the ever so persistent longing that would plead for a way to get her to talk to him forever. He had time to deny his feelings to Bash later, but at present, he just wanted to take comfort in the warmth that had radiated off of her when she told him to “come home someday.”
Every time he told himself he would never go back, that maybe he’d settle down in one of the grand cities he had become acquainted with like New York or Boston, it was her voice that convinced him to keep Avonlea as an option if just to see her smiling face once again. She wasn’t from the Island, but she was the Island. Her red hair was the red soil that littered the ground, her bright, blue eyes were the tumultuous sea that poured over the sand which resembled the tan freckles that were splattered on her face. And when she would write to him, curt and business-like (she would never write for no reason, of course), he wondered if he could accept the Island back into his heart one day—in the same place he held her. But Gilbert would brush off Bash’s teasing, and when the man would snatch the letter out of his hands and read through her embellished words with an amused smirk, he’d comment that “she needs a lot of words to say one thing,”
Gilbert smiled conspicuously with sure confidence that Bash hadn’t figured him out yet, (he had figured him out pretty quickly, but he let the boy think he had deceived him), and said:
“I like to read.”
At eighteen, Gilbert thought that a marriage could survive on fondness and camaraderie alone.
Winifred was a lovely friend, a beautiful and graceful woman, but there was always this overwhelming feeling that something was missing. Something that wouldn’t have kindled the flame of marriage that he had seen shine so brightly in Bash and Mary’s time together. Mary had urged him to marry only for love, yet the feeling of love became so blurry to him after Anne’s vitriol and cold words that he truly believed one day his fondness for Winnie would morph into love— but with every impassioned argument, lingering touch, and shared laugh with Anne he realized that marriage needed to be built on love and not just its expectations.
Every time he tried his hardest to imagine a life with Winnie, he could only picture her as a friend that would come and go, but the fiery red-head beside him was too frustratingly stubborn to leave his mind and would insist upon being there, building a home with him from nothing, and he could never keep Winnie there no matter how hard he tried to conjure her image up. In his restless nights, he would strategically place Winnie in the center of his dreams; he imagined kissing her gently and telling her how much he cared for her, but when he’d pull back, Anne was in front of him, faltering in front of his loving gaze; he imagined what their daily domesticities would look like, perhaps sharing a meal with her in their dining room, until Anne would appear, take a quick glance at their plates and laugh, “Gilbert doesn’t even like ham!” Every time he practiced his proposal and held out that green ring he never saw Winnie’s soft, and manicured hand accepting it but instead Anne’s, which was farm-work calloused and victim to her incessant nervous picking.
And so he stopped trying to avoid it.
He stood at the ends of the Earth— or the cliff that separated Avonlea from the ocean, whichever suits your fancy more— and decided that he was done trying to replace Anne. How unfair it would be to the kindhearted Winifred if every time he touched her, kissed her, spoke to her, he was picturing Anne instead, his Anne who wasn’t even his. He wished desperately that he could look at her without igniting a flame in his chest, to look at her without the rose-colored tint.
The fireside rejection still burned in his mind like the embers that cracked and landed on his fingertips. He wanted to believe he had been clear, that she had understood him plain, but he knew he hadn’t. Would that have made a difference? If there was no vague intention of his love and he had shouted his declaration so that there could be no more misunderstandings between them would they have fared any better?
She would still be Anne and he would still be Gilbert, and he wanted to come hand in hand all the way through life* with her, while she wanted a tragical romance. But Gilbert; logical, sensical, practical Gilbert Blythe wasn’t built like her; the dreamy, poetic, and romantic Anne. She wanted someone who would read poetry to her with a melancholic tone and all the elevated capacity of a prince-like man, and that wasn’t him, and this wasn’t due to a lack of trying— Gilbert tried. Love had made him irrational, he realized when he was three lines into a sickeningly sweet poem about her flaming tresses and the infinite constellations on her face, but it all felt so disingenuous. Anne’s beauty wasn’t ostentatious phrases but was raw, alive, and could not be tamed with earthly words on flimsy parchment, and he needed her to know that, he needed her to know that he loved her because of who she was in the most simple and untouched way.
Honesty was the only virtue he could offer her.
He couldn’t see a life with Winnie even when it was being graciously offered to him on a silver platter by her parents, or when her delicate hand was tucked under his arm as they walked together, but he could see a life with Anne through one simple dance in their old, unromantic schoolhouse; he could see a life with Anne whenever she spoke of family and home. This was love— the kind of love his father told tales about late at night when Gilbert couldn’t sleep; the kind of love that Mary exuded in every breath she took, and the kind that Bash held so tightly with him in the form of Delphine.
Gilbert loved Anne Shirley-Cuthbert and it was his most uncomplicated truth. He could come to this conclusion with no proofs or formulas, but just by reaching into his heart and feeling her impact. In time, he would try again. He would bare his soul to her again without the chatter of their classmates in their ears and no alcohol raging in their systems, this after telling Winifred that he has made a complete fool of himself and apologize profusely, of course. It was decided then— in a secret pact with his eighteen-year-old self— that if she rejected him, he would keep it with him for the rest of his days and never marry another. Gilbert would go to medical school and bury himself in his work, set up a practice far away, maybe start a hobby (Bash seemed to have fun knitting?), and be contented with that decision. But he could not, and would not marry another when his heart would be devotedly Anne’s; Gilbert never did anything without giving it his all.
If this revelation was dramatic, he’d blame it on Anne’s extensive influence on him.
At twenty, Gilbert could be convinced to go anywhere by Anne.
It was really all a blur. They had been spending a lazy summer morning strewn about the orchard, she read the book of English poetry he had gifted her, and he pretended to read yesterday’s copy of the Telegraph, choosing instead to stare at the way her brows were furrowed in concentration and her tongue stuck out enticingly. Days where they had no obligations were his favorite; no Mrs. Lynde preaching about propriety, no teasing from Bash, none of Marilla’s watchful glances, or worse, a thousand miles between them. He was taken from his thoughts when Anne shut her book and leaned back against the tree, finding his shoulder to rest her head. She began to speak of all the ways they could be spending this day, exclaiming that “Gilbert, haven’t you ever just seen a day that needed to be lived?” And when she suggested that the beach was the most ideal location for such a day, Gilbert only blinked before she rushed down the path towards Green Gables and shouted for him to meet her in an hour.
And so that was how Gilbert found himself with his slacks rolled up just below his knees, letting his toes dig into the sand while he watched Anne— who had forgone her stockings and was wearing the dark green dress from her school days— dance along with the tides’ push and pull. She was like that, he thought, always back and forth, pulled by her strong emotions; he supposed then that he was the moon, using all his might to bring her towards him. If the moon were in love with the ocean, then he found himself sympathizing with that solitary rock in the sky, as he too, found the distance between him and his love to be exceedingly great. This was a thought for a more bitter and grim time, as for now, he could shake those insecurities out of his mind and train his eyes on the beautiful woman in front of him— her hair was long and free of constraints so it whipped across her face from the speed at which she spun wildly, her laughter a rich song that he wanted to play on repeat.
Anne stopped her twirling and looked at him curiously, before plopping down next to him and easing him to lay down on the blanket. “You look completely engrossed Mr. Blythe,” she said with a fond look, “a penny for your thoughts?”
“Ah,” Gilbert conceded, “luckily there’s a deal on my thoughts today, Anne-girl, they’re completely free.” She giggled happily before setting her head on his outstretched arm and waited for him to speak. “Why did you want to come to the beach, Anne?”
She pondered the question for a moment, “My deeply philosophical answer is that despite its terrifyingly great expanse, the ocean is proof that the world is wide, and there are an infinite amount of possibilities out there— if I could swim, I would dive in and travel across its entirety; my simple, and honest answer is that I’ve never been here with you, and I find that whenever there’s something we haven’t done together, I immediately set out to change that.”
He laughed, one hand on his stomach and the other carding through her hair, “I favor your simple answer, because I’d much rather you stay here with me than swim across the entire ocean, though, Anne— can you not swim?”
“I’m afraid that ship has sailed,” she sighed, “Matthew tried to teach me long ago, but it, unfortunately, did not stick; I think that’s the sort of thing you have to learn when you’re a child— did your father teach you how to swim?” She asked earnestly.
“Yes, he did, and I was a menace about it too, kicking and screaming, but once he let me go and I actually got the hang of it, he couldn’t get me out.” The memory was still fresh in his mind even though it was nearly sixteen years ago, he could still hear his father’s encouragements and feel the curly hair that he gripped onto when he wasn’t ready to let go. Anne looked at him mesmerized, and he could tell she was imagining it just as clearly as he was. “Dad always said it was one of a father’s great joys— teaching his children how to swim.”
Anne’s cheeks went slightly flush and she fixed her eyes back to the waves, “do… do you see yourself doing that one day?”
The question echoed in his ears, and he knew, because he knew her, that she was beating herself up over it and feeling foolish, so he turned her cheek to face him with soft and sure fingers. What Anne didn’t know was that he saw everything with her; if she saw an infinite amount of possibilities in the ocean, then he saw an infinite amount of possibilities in her vivid blue eyes. He gave her a crooked smile before shutting his eyes over-dramatically.
“I see… a house by the ocean and you’re sitting on the beach— I hope me of the future showered you with compliments because you look breathtaking, Anne,” he added, shifting to avoid her exasperated smack on his chest, “you’re smiling and clapping as I hold our children’s hands in the water— and they wouldn’t cry like I did because they’re brave like their mother, but they would try and try again because they’re patient like me, and is it selfish if I hope they all have red hair?” She groaned loudly in response and he pulled her closer so that she was looking down at him, hair streaming onto his face like a canopy, his voice now low and breathy, “you would come in the water, ignoring your own inability to swim because did I mention you’re brave, and we would hold them and help them and love them, together”
“How’s that?” He asked, and when he opened his eyes back up to see her, there were tears pooling along her lower eyelashes, and she was caressing his cheek gently. “Was my imagination up to snuff?”
She choked out a wet laugh before collapsing on top of him and wrapping her arms tightly around his neck.
“Oh, Gilbert.”
At twenty-four, Gilbert had gotten used to waking up to the orange and pink hues of sunrise that filtered in through their large window and delicately drew him out of his slumber. What he hadn’t gotten used to yet in their two months of marriage, was the feeling of her in his arms; the slow and steady breathing that indicated she was still sleeping; the flowery smell of her hair against his nose; the soft and delicate lace of her nightgown between his fingers, and the way her feet lightly nudged his under the quilt. She always ended up here like this, and sometimes it was intentional; he would tug her into him after she finished reading for the night, or she would settle herself in his arms for warmth, but sometimes it was done in the middle of the night where one of them would unconsciously seek the other out for comfort.
He had spent almost a decade imagining what it would be like to be married to her, and just like in everything she did, she exceeded every expectation.
It was like living with his best friend but so much more; when she forgot about their first dinner and it came out burnt beyond recognition, they had just laughed until every room, every hall in their house of dreams echoed their happiness. When he was awoken for the first time by the telephone— a patient calling for their doctor— she woke with him, and as he stood in front of the mirror observing himself with his coat and doctor’s bag, she kissed his cheek and with a voice full of exhaustion and admiration whispered, “go get ‘em, Dr. Blythe.”
Gilbert didn’t have to wish that she would talk to him; she negated the silence in his heart without even trying, and then some. The first time it rained, she huddled herself by the window that faced their garden in deep thought, and when he asked her what was wrong, she turned to look at him with solid determination and said, “I’m going to plant peonies in spring.” They talked into the deep hours of the night, speaking of things left unsaid and unknown, misunderstandings that they’d held for so long, or she would tell him an amusing story about her old students, which he would counter with a tale about the first time he and his anatomy class worked on cadavers. Even in the same silence that used to pull him from the ground and leave his head in the clouds, she weighed him back down to Earth by her formidable spirit and anchoring hands.
She shifted beneath him, indicating she had woken up, yawning softly before turning around to face him. Her hair was sticking out of the long, effortless braid she had quickly fashioned the night before, and her eyes were squinted as they adjusted to the morning light. He reached past her cheek to roll a loose curl between his fingers and she sighed into his touch.
“Are you staring at my hair because it’s finally maturing into a dark auburn? Be honest with me.”
His laugh was still hoarse with sleep, “no, I don’t think it is,” she stared blankly at him with a small pout.
“You seem awfully pleased about that,” she retorted and he quirked his brows and released the offending curl.
“You just wouldn’t be my Anne without your red hair,” he said, watching her pout morph into a bitten back smile, “you truly do look the spitting image of that drawing of your mother,” he stated, knowing it would satisfy her, and it did because she tucked herself back against his chest and her arms went behind his shoulders in a tight embrace.
“You always do that,” she mumbled, and he had to duck his head closer to her to hear the rest, “you always are so blunt and honest, but before I can get mad at you for it, you go and turn it into something completely poetical and romantic—”
“Me?” He cut her off, “poetical and romantic?”
She lifted her head once again to look him in the eyes, “yes, you! Gilbert! How can you think otherwise when I have boxes and boxes of your letters that made even the most romantic of the poets—Byron, or even Keats— read like shopping lists to me. Perhaps, I have gotten used to your prose, Gil, because your honesty and your rationale make loving me— ridiculous, silly, nonsensical, Anne— seem like the most logical thing you’ve ever done. So no, I don’t want frilly metaphors and rhythmic lines, I just want you.”
This was certainly something he’d never be fully used to— the way she unabashedly loved so strongly that it permeated through every inch of him. The fear that she would never love him the way he loved her had been borne from the thought that he couldn’t give her what she wanted, that he couldn’t feed her soul in the way she desired, but here she was— completely unrestrained and vulnerable— saying that all she wanted was him, and it was nearly devastating.
“So…” he started, “you don’t want me to get that volume of Shakespeare you wanted for Christmas?”
She gasped, “don’t be so rash— of course, I still want it!”
The bed shook with their laughter, and the warmth of her still pressed against him in their downy quilt almost dismantled his resolve to get out of bed and dress for his daily rounds, but he knew he should get on his way before the wave of telephone calls. As he gently rose, Anne groaned and clung onto his arms.
“You forgot something” she drawled out, and before he could question just what he had forgotten, her finger was on her lips decisively, “a husband ought to kiss his wife good morning.”
“Ah, how could I forget,” he teased, leaning down to place a soft and slow kiss on her lips, the same passion of their newfound intimacy was there, but it burned through him differently, a steady rhythm in his heart that flowed, and flowed like his lifeblood. He pulled away before she could deepen their kiss any further, much to her chagrin, and tapped her nose with his finger lightly.
“I’ll be home soon,” he whispered as if there was someone to be disturbed and shook her hand in his hesitantly.
“I know,” she assured, squeezing his fingers.
And later, when he’d come home after checking up on his patients, two births, and a particularly nasty case of pneumonia, it will be well past dinner— with his plate still set neatly at the head of the table, and light filtering down from their room. He’d walk up the stairs, three steps at a time just as he did, and open the door to find her curled up and barely awake. The candles would be blown out and he’d slip into bed as carefully as he could as to not disturb her and revel in the feeling of her naturally rolling over to him, uttering her quiet goodnights. He would love her goodnights because they held promises of good mornings; he would love her comforting touch because it would tether him to her; he would love the way she sang and danced when she did chores around the house; he would love her because she was his family and he was hers, and he would love her because he had done so for nearly half his life and it was his most uncomplicated truth.