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The road from the Avonlea school wound red and dusty between the maple woods, and along it, that golden afternoon in early October, walked Anne Shirley.
She did not have the pleasure of Diana Barry’s company. A bitter fate, in the form of currant wine and Mrs Barry, had separated them, and Anne felt the weight of it afresh at the close of this school day, when the two of them parted at the gate with no more than a look of what Anne herself described as heartbroken devotion. But a girl cannot walk home in silence, and Ruby Gillis, who was placid and good-natured and went the same road, made a tolerable substitute for conversational purposes, if not for the deeper needs of the soul.
During the Testament lesson that morning, Ruby had slipped a handful of plums into Anne’s lap, and Anne, who never let a kindness go unmentioned, thought the walk home a suitable occasion for gratitude.
‘You can’t imagine how much I enjoyed your plums!’ she was saying. ‘Or perhaps you can, because your family grew them and you must have tasted hundreds. But I don’t believe that having a great deal of a thing lets you love it any better, do you? When I ate the very last one, I imagined I was a fairy plunging into the heart of a flower to drink its nectar. They were perfectly marvellous, as though they had come straight from fairyland.’
‘They were just off the tree by the well,’ said Ruby.
‘Perhaps fairies live by your well,’ said Anne.
Some little distance behind them, near enough to hear and far enough not to be accused of listening, walked Gilbert Blythe. A frown settled across that boy’s handsome face, which was unusual, for he was not by nature given to brooding. But just now, there was a problem on his mind, and it would not let him be.
He had not managed to make Anne Shirley look at him even once since the famous afternoon when he had called her ‘Carrots’ and she had brought her slate down upon his head with a force that cracked it clean in two. For several weeks afterwards, she had not come to school, so the question of making her look at him had remained theoretical. But now she was back at last, sitting in the same schoolroom and walking the same road home, and the matter could no longer be put off.
The word ‘plums’ reached him across the dust, spoken in that way that made the ordinary fruit sound like something out of a fairytale.
Anne Shirley was fond of plums. Immediately, it had become a fact of enormous consequence to Gilbert. His own folks did not grow plums, but there was, he knew, a plum tree in their neighbour’s yard. Not the small wild sort that sprang up along the island fences, either, but a fine grafted tree, with branches hanging heavy with great yellow fruit that no other orchard in Avonlea had. If only he might give a few of those plums to Anne!
Presently, the time came for Gilbert to turn off the main road onto the one that wound up between the spruces and over the hill to the little white house where the Blythes lived. But before he could come to it, he had to pass the lane to their neighbour’s place, Callum Macleod’s, and so, of necessity, past Macleod’s plum tree. It stood close by the lane, low boughs heavy with golden fruit, and the yard about it looked as drowsy as if the whole place had fallen asleep in the late sun. Not a soul stirred anywhere.
Gilbert did not think long. One moment he was walking home from school, and the next he was over the gate and up the lane with his heart beating high. A few, just a few plums, he told himself, and nobody would be the worse for it!
Four he had got safely into his pocket, and he was reaching for a fifth, picturing already the careless and gallant way he would present them, when the kitchen door banged, and Callum Macleod stormed out into the yard. A great barrel of a man, he came shaking his broom and roaring in a voice fit to reach Carmody.
‘Hey! You there! Boy! What are you doing?’
When a boy is hailed in such a voice, there is but one thing for him to do, and Gilbert did it. In an instant, he was down the lane and over the gate and into the spruce woods, with Macleod’s roar at his heels: ‘Stop! You rascal! Come back here this instant! I’ll tan your hide!’
But no boy ever stopped to oblige such an invitation, and Gilbert had no notion of being the first. He ran until the shouting was well behind him, and then a little farther still, for caution’s sake.
It was not until he had reached his own yard and flung himself down, winded, under the big oak by the gate, that the comforting thought came to him. Boy, Mr Macleod had said. Only boy. He had not yelled Gilbert, nor Blythe, nor John Blythe’s son, which he most assuredly would have said had he known on whose father he might call to see justice done.
And this was a reassuring thing to reflect upon, for Gilbert had a clear notion of what his father would say to him on such an occasion, or rather of what he would do, should it ever come to his ears that his son got caught in someone else’s tree.
As it happened, Gilbert was to hear his father’s opinion of boys who raided their neighbours’ yards, whether he wished to or not. Later that day, as they were all seated at the small oak table in their kitchen, John Blythe set down his cup and observed that he had fallen in with old Macleod on the road that afternoon.
‘In a fine state he was, too,’ said Mr Blythe, helping himself to a second go of the potato stew, which was a dish his wife had a particular gift for. ‘It seems some young rascal got into his plum tree, right under his nose, and made off with a whole armful of fruit before Macleod could stir a step to stop him.’
It had been four plums. But Gilbert had sense enough not to correct his father, and only shifted a little in his chair, marvelling in some discomfort at how a story could grow and spread in one afternoon.
‘Dear, dear,’ said Mrs Blythe placidly. ‘And Callum Macleod so proud of his plums, too. He’ll talk of nothing else for a fortnight.’
‘The worst of it isn’t the plums,’ said Mr Blythe. ‘It’s the underhandedness of the thing I can’t put up with. A neighbour wants to feel he can trust a neighbour, and a neighbour’s boys into the bargain. That’s worth more than all the plum trees in Avonlea, and some young scamp has gone and spoilt it for a handful of fruit. I tell you, I’d not know where to put my face if I had a son like that.’
‘But could Macleod not tell who it was at all?’
‘Never got a fair look at him. Over the fence and gone, he said, like a hare.’
‘Well, John,’ sighed Mrs Blythe, ‘boys will be boys.’
‘Boys will be boys till they’re taught better,’ returned Mr Blythe grimly. ‘I only hope they find out who the young rascal is, and that his father takes him in hand properly. There’s a cure for that sort of thing, and it hangs on a nail in most barns.’
It was then that Mrs Blythe’s eye fell upon her son. ‘Gilbert, dear,’ she said, ‘you’ve scarcely touched a thing. Are you sickening for something?’
Gilbert shook his head and turned to his stew with a great show of appetite he was far from feeling. All the while, he kept turning over the dreadful predicament he had got himself into, and all out of one bright notion of carrying a gift to Anne Shirley. It was plain enough now that the best thing he could do was to be rid of those wretched plums as fast as ever. Since his father began to talk, they seemed to have swelled to twice their honest size, bulging out of his pocket in the most conspicuous manner.
‘Please may I be excused?’ he said, and pushed back his chair.
But he had not taken into consideration his mother’s eyes, which had a way of resting on her boy and taking in rather more than he wanted.
‘Why, Gilbert,’ said she, ‘you’ve got a wet spot on your jacket. Turn round and let me have a look.’
Gilbert’s hand flew to his pocket, and, sure enough, there was a dark, damp, telltale stain creeping along his side.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’ll see to it outside, right now.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said his mother. ‘You’ll turn out that pocket this very minute, before you spoil a good jacket entirely, and then I’ll have it off you and remove the stain.’
‘No!’ cried Gilbert. ‘Just leave it be, Mother, please!’
‘Gilbert.’ His father barely raised his voice, but Gilbert’s heart dropped into his very boots. ‘You heard your mother. Out with it, and no more of that tone.’
It must be owned that, at that moment, Gilbert’s eye went hopefully to the kitchen door, and the thought crossed his mind that he might still reach the yard, fling the plums into the dark, and get away with a mere scolding for his outburst. But the door was behind his father’s chair, and his father had come home from Alberta as sound and spry as any man in Avonlea. He would have Gilbert by the collar before the boy could make three steps.
There was nothing left to do.
Very slowly, with his ears as red as embers, Gilbert put his hand into his pocket and laid upon the clean white tablecloth a handful of yellow plums. One of them, cracked and crushed in all its adventures, let fall a single drop of bright juice that ran down its side like a tear.
‘It wasn’t an armful,’ Gilbert murmured. ‘Just these four.’
At first, his father only looked at the plums as though he could not rightly make out what they were doing there; and that blank, puzzled look was a great deal worse to bear than if he had set to work that minute taking Gilbert’s character to pieces, or even shouted.
It was his mother who spoke at last. ‘Gilbert! Were you hungry, child?’ When he said nothing, she turned to her husband. ‘He’ll have been hungry, John, walking all that way from school.’
‘And if he’d walked another quarter-mile, he’d have had your whole pantry to make free with, and welcome to it as well.’ Mr Blythe looked at his son, and his face was grave. ‘This is not the boy I raised under my roof. What in the world possessed you to go over Macleod’s gate?’
Gilbert went scarlet to the very roots of his hair. Foolish and reckless as his plan had been, it seemed ten times worse out here in the lamplit kitchen under his father and mother’s disappointed stares. Not for the worst thrashing ever would he have owned the truth of it: that, reaching up into Callum Macleod’s tree, he had fancied himself a gallant knight of old, bearing off a tribute for the lady of his heart. And if ever a whisper of what a fool he had made of himself were to come to Anne Shirley’s ears, he would die of mortification on the spot.
‘I just wanted them,’ he muttered and fixed his eyes hard upon the table.
That answer did not suit his father in the least. John Blythe brought his hand down upon the table and rose to his full height. ‘And what if next time you want Thomas Lynde’s mare? Or the church organ? Or the bank at Carmody, while you’re about it? It’s a wide world, Gilbert, and full of things a body might fancy. Are you to help yourself to the whole of it, too?’
That his father should think such a thing of him was not something Gilbert could bear, either. ‘Of course not!’ he cried. ‘That’s different! I know it’s different.’
‘Do you, now?’ Mr Blythe frowned. ‘Then suppose you tell it to me. What is the difference?’
‘Those plums weren’t even for me!’
Too late, half a second too late, Gilbert shut his mouth.
‘Weren’t even for you?’ his father repeated in a wondering way.
Gilbert braced himself for more and harder questions, but to his great surprise, none came at all. His father only looked at his son another moment, and whatever he made of that burning, stubborn, miserable face bent over the plums, he kept to himself. And when he spoke again, it was in a calmer voice, though no less stern for that.
‘Whatever your reasons, they don’t change the right and wrong of it,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same in the end. A boy who takes what isn’t his has earned a good hiding, and I won’t cheat you out of it. Get your cap and come out to the barn. After that account is settled, you and I will be paying a call on Callum Macleod so he can see I raised a boy who answers for his mischief.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better if I made it right with Mr Macleod first, and the rest after?’ said Gilbert, for he would much rather nurse his sorrows in private after a trip to the barn.
‘You didn’t seem so eager to face Mr Macleod this afternoon, when he was right there in front of you,’ said his father. ‘Tonight we do things in my order. That man will want to hear I tanned your hide good and proper for getting into his tree, and that’s his right.’
It was not an evening’s programme to gladden any boy’s heart, but it was no more than Gilbert had expected, once the truth was out. There remained, perhaps, one last hope in all the world. He threw a quick, pleading look at his mother, and, sure enough, Mrs Blythe reached for her husband’s arm.
‘John…’
‘Now, now,’ Mr Blythe grumbled. ‘I know you’d shield the boy from a draught if you could, but even you’ll not tell me he hasn’t earned it this time.’
‘I’ll not tell you any such thing,’ said Mrs Blythe, with dignity. ‘Gilbert has done wrong. Only that you’ve a walk up to Macleod’s after, the pair of you, and the dew falling. See you both wrap up warm, for I’ll not have you catching colds on top of everything else.’
And so there was nothing for it but to go out into the October evening, where the first real chill of the autumn had come down with the dark. The golden afterglow was dying off behind the spruces, while the fields lay grey and quiet under a sky pricking out in stars. Somewhere down by the brook, a single late cricket was making the most of what was left to him. It was the sort of evening a boy might have found beautiful, had he been coming out to anything other than the barn.
What passed inside that barn was what generally passes in such places between a father and a son who has overstepped, and neither of them would have cared to talk much about it.
However, if one was curious and happened to glance at the lit square of the barn window that evening, one might have seen Gilbert walk in ahead of his father, take off his jacket, and fold it over the gate to the nearest stall. Afterwards, the boy bent over a hay bale without waiting to be told that, for he had been through this business enough times in his young life and knew what was expected of him.
And one might have seen his father reach up and lift the strap down from its peg on the wall, where it had always been. The piece of leather was sound and supple, well-oiled and kept in good repair, for John Blythe maintained that if a thing must be done at all, it ought to be done properly. He was not a cruel man, nor even an overly harsh one, but he believed that certain lessons wanted fixing in a boy’s memory, and that there were some truths best learned through the seat of one’s trousers.
The first portion of that lesson fell with a crack that echoed off the rafters, and Gilbert drew in his breath, but made no other sound. This was a point of honour with him, and he meant to keep it. A boy might occasionally holler if he got a fishhook through his thumb or tumbled into a raspberry thicket, but a boy bore his punishment in silence.
Gilbert held this view with great sincerity and conviction, right up until somewhere around the sixth stroke. After that, his convictions on the matter began to shift. He pressed his forehead into the hay and groaned each time the old piece of leather found its mark. Six more followed, and his earlier point of honour quietly excused itself from the proceedings, while Gilbert dug his fingers into the hay and howled.
John Blythe, for his part, took no pleasure in the task. Each time he raised his arm, he thought of the little boy Gilbert had been, tumbling about the yard after the barn cats, and of the man his son would grow into one day, sooner than seemed possible. He hoped, as all fathers do, that the hard lesson of this night might make the road smoother for that man in the years to come, however rough it was for him just now.
In the end, it did not last long, for John Blythe knew his business and had no desire to prolong the matter beyond what justice demanded. When he was done, he stood a moment looking at his son’s shoulders, still thin and narrow, heaving over the hay bale with the stormy aftermath of endurance. Whatever words he might have composed on the disgrace of a good name seemed quite unnecessary now. Some lessons, once delivered, require no sermon to drive them home. He hung the strap back on its peg, then put a hand on his son’s back and kept it there.
‘All done now,’ said Mr Blythe gruffly. ‘All square.’
‘You’re not ashamed of me any more, then?’ choked Gilbert, without looking back.
‘I was never ashamed of you, son.’ His father let out a long breath. ‘I told you tonight that wasn’t the boy I raised, and so it wasn’t. But the boy I raised is the one that owned up in the end, and took his medicine, and will now go up to Callum Macleod’s door and apologise like a man. That’s the boy I know. The other was just a bad hour, and we’ve all of us had those.’
When they came outside again, the dark had thickened; and yet, to Gilbert’s eyes, the world looked brighter. Perhaps it was only that a few tears, manfully fought down but not quite conquered, washed the sight clearer. Or perhaps it was that one unpleasant part of his evening programme was behind him now, and there is no relief in all the world quite like the relief of a dreaded thing got over. There remained the walk to Macleod’s, but even that did not loom so black as it had some minutes ago.
Gilbert’s feet began to lag, however, the moment the lighted windows of the neighbour’s house came glimmering up out of the dark. He would have dearly liked to stop altogether and put the apology off a little longer, perhaps until next week or even next month, but his father allowed him no such opportunity. John Blythe walked his son straight up to the door and knocked.
It opened almost instantly, and there in the lamplight stood Callum Macleod, filling the whole doorway.
The truth was that Gilbert had always been a little afraid of Callum Macleod. As a small boy, he had believed the neighbour to be the largest and the loudest man in the world; and although three years out West had stretched Gilbert tall enough to look the man nearly level now, the old dread had a way of coming back the moment that great red face was in front of him. And even though Gilbert had rehearsed a number of dignified openings on the walk over, every one of them deserted him now.
‘I- I came to give you back your plums,’ he stammered, and held them out, all four of them, somewhat the worse for their adventures. ‘And to say that I’m sorry I took them. Sir.’
‘Aha!’ The roar of the man nearly took Gilbert’s cap off. ‘So it’s you, is it, you young pirate! Sorry, says he! Sorry now your father’s caught you and walloped you, I’m sure, which is a different story altogether from being sorry you did it. Eh? Eh?’
‘It may be partly true, sir,’ Gilbert admitted, too miserable just then to be anything but honest. ‘But I’m sorry now for the whole of it, and that's the truth.’
‘Ah, but it must have been a good walloping, then!’ Callum Macleod brightened, as though they had arrived at the genuinely interesting part of the conversation. ‘If it’s set a boy telling the truth at last. There’s nothing like a good walloping for clearing a boy’s head, I always said. I had many of them myself at your age and look at me now.’ He spread his arms to indicate the full and impressive sum of what the wallopings had produced, which was Callum Macleod. ‘Couldn’t have turned out better.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Gilbert mumbled, since it seemed the safest thing to say.
‘Glad you’ve got your lesson, lad.’ Mr Macleod scratched his beard vigorously. ‘For it was never about the plums, mind. Do you think I’d grudge a growing lad a handful of plums? Me?’ He leaned suddenly in, his red face crinkling up in the kindliest way imaginable. ‘Why, if you’d only come to the door, this very door, and knocked, and said, “Mr Macleod, might I have some of your plums?” - do you know what I’d have said? Eh?’
‘No, sir,’ said Gilbert, because it seemed to be expected of him.
‘Yes!’ roared Mr Macleod. ‘That’s what. Yes, and welcome, and here’s a bag to put them in! You mind that, lad.’ He beamed round upon Gilbert, hugely satisfied, and then, as though the happy thought had only that moment struck him, ‘Well, now - and would you like to pick some more of them plums to take along with you?’
But Gilbert had had as much to do with Callum Macleod’s plums that day as he ever wished to have in this life, and he declined as politely as a boy with a stinging behind can decline anything. The adults exchanged a few more words, about the weather, and the harvest, and the likelihood of an early frost, and at last the door swung upon Callum Macleod, who was, perhaps, not so very terrible after all.
And then there was only the dark road, and the cold, sweet night, and the boy with his father walking home along it. And because, on a dark road, two people are spared the trouble of looking one another in the eye, the talk turned down a way that neither of them would have dared to take by lamplight.
‘When you said those plums weren’t for you,’ said John Blythe, in the mild, idle voice of a man remarking on the weather, ‘you’d not have meant they were for a certain red-headed young lady, I suppose? The one whose teasing landed you in hot water a while back?’
Gilbert flushed. How did his father know? But then, there were few secrets in Avonlea. ‘It’s not - it isn’t what you think!’
‘I’m not thinking anything at all, son.’
But there was something at work beneath John Blythe’s moustache that was suspiciously near to a smile, and Gilbert heard it there as surely as if he could have seen it.
‘She’s just come to Avonlea,’ he said, very fast. ‘I only wanted to make her feel welcome. That’s all it was.’
‘The most natural thing in the world,’ his father agreed gravely. ‘As long as you can manage without robbing a neighbour’s orchard for it.’
‘I know, Dad, I do,’ Gilbert groaned. ‘I got carried away!’
‘Well, well. A boy gets carried away now and then. It’s no new thing in the world.’ There was no edge in his father’s voice now at all. ‘Only, when it happens, it’s my business to fetch you back. That’s what a father’s good for.’
And John Blythe laid his hand, briefly, on the back of Gilbert’s neck. If the boy had not already known he was forgiven, he would have known it then.
‘What will you do now?’ his father asked. ‘Now that you’ve no plums to give after all?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gilbert muttered. ‘It was a stupid notion to begin with.’
‘Was it.’ Mr Blythe walked a few steps before he continued, as though he were turning something over in his mind. ‘I had a notion or two of that kind myself, at your age. There was a girl then, I’d have swum round the world for, if I’d thought it would impress her. But it seldom impresses anyone, swimming round the world. It’s the staying that does. Only I learned it later, from your mother.’
Gilbert said nothing, but he was listening now in a different way.
‘It’s the easiest thing,’ his father went on, ‘to believe that the rare thing, the thing just out of your reach, like a plum in somebody else’s yard, is the thing worth giving. But a man gives what’s his to give. The rest is only show, and show wears thin.’
They walked on a little more.
‘We’ve still a good few apples in the old orchard across the lake,’ said Mr Blythe presently, in quite another voice, as though remarking on nothing in particular. ‘Finest crop the trees have borne in a long while.’
And Gilbert, who was not a fool, whatever notions he was sometimes seized by, understood very well what his father was telling him.
He was up before the rest of the house the next morning, and out across the dew-glistening fields to the old orchard on the far side of the lake, where the strawberry apples grew. They were the only strawberry apples in all of Avonlea, though Gilbert had not given it a second thought then.
A dozen good apples he passed over before he found the one he wanted: a plump, sun-reddened beauty, the finest on the tree. All the way to school, he polished it on his sleeve, and when no one was looking, he laid it on Anne Shirley’s desk. But when she came in after the dinner hour, she held it only a moment in her hands before setting it down as though it had burned her. She knew as well as anyone where strawberry apples grew. Not only that, but she wiped her fingers on her handkerchief with an air of such disdain that Gilbert felt it clear across the room.
It would have been easy, after a thing like that, to give the whole matter up as a bad business. But Gilbert, walking home, found himself thinking instead of a dark road, and his father’s voice, and how it was the staying that mattered after all.
Very well, then. He would give her that.
Gilbert would offer her his friendship again, and again after that, and not go away, no matter how she snubbed him. Sooner or later, she would have to take some notice. He had no rare fine things to dazzle her with; only a stubborn humour, a friendly hand, and a way of turning up when needed. But those, at least, were his to give, and he could keep on giving for a long time.