"Averil's Atonement"
"What are you dreaming of, Anne?"
The two girls were loitering one evening in a fairy hollow of the brook. Ferns nodded in it, and little grasses were green, and wild pears hung finely-scented, white curtains around it.
Anne roused herself from her reverie with a happy sigh.
"I was thinking out my story, Diana."
"Oh, have you really begun it?" cried Diana, all alight with eager interest in a moment.
"Yes, I have only a few pages written, but I have it all pretty well thought out. I've had such a time to get a suitable plot.
None of the plots that suggested themselves suited a girl named AVERIL.""Couldn't you have changed her name?"
"No, the thing was impossible. I tried to, but I couldn't do it, any more than I could change yours. AVERIL was so real to me that no matter what other name I tried to give her I just thought of her as AVERIL behind it all. But finally I got a plot that matched her. Then came the excitement of choosing names for all my characters. You have no idea how fascinating that is.
I've lain awake for hours thinking over those names. The hero's name is PERCEVAL DALRYMPLE.""Have you named ALL the characters?" asked Diana wistfully. "If you hadn't I was going to ask you to let me name one -- just some unimportant person. I'd feel as if I had a share in the story then.""You may name the little hired boy who lived with the LESTERS,"conceded Anne. "He is not very important, but he is the only one left unnamed.""Call him RAYMOND FITZOSBORNE," suggested Diana, who had a store of such names laid away in her memory, relics of the old "Story Club," which she and Anne and Jane Andrews and Ruby Gillis had had in their schooldays.
Anne shook her head doubtfully.
"I'm afraid that is too aristocratic a name for a chore boy, Diana. I couldn't imagine a Fitzosborne feeding pigs and picking up chips, could you?"Diana didn't see why, if you had an imagination at all, you couldn't stretch it to that extent; but probably Anne knew best, and the chore boy was finally christened ROBERT RAY, to be called BOBBY should occasion require.
"How much do you suppose you'll get for it?" asked Diana.
But Anne had not thought about this at all. She was in pursuit of fame, not filthy lucre, and her literary dreams were as yet untainted by mercenary considerations.
"You'll let me read it, won't you?" pleaded Diana.
"When it is finished I'll read it to you and Mr. Harrison, and Ishall want you to criticize it SEVERELY. No one else shall see it until it is published.""How are you going to end it -- happily or unhappily?""I'm not sure. I'd like it to end unhappily, because that would be so much more romantic. But I understand editors have a prejudice against sad endings. I heard Professor Hamilton say once that nobody but a genius should try to write an unhappy ending.
And," concluded Anne modestly, "I'm anything but a genius.""Oh I like happy endings best. You'd better let him marry her,"said Diana, who, especially since her engagement to Fred, thought this was how every story should end.
"But you like to cry over stories?"
"Oh, yes, in the middle of them. But I like everything to come right at last.""I must have one pathetic scene in it," said Anne thoughtfully.
"I might let ROBERT RAY be injured in an accident and have a death scene.""No, you mustn't kill BOBBY off," declared Diana, laughing.
"He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish. Kill somebody else if you have to."For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to mood, in her literary pursuits. Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary character would NOT behave properly. Diana could not understand this.
"MAKE them do as you want them to," she said.
"I can't," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine.
She WILL do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again."Finally, however, the story was finished, and Anne read it to Diana in the seclusion of the porch gable. She had achieved her "pathetic scene" without sacrificing ROBERT RAY, and she kept a watchful eye on Diana as she read it. Diana rose to the occasion and cried properly; but, when the end came, she looked a little disappointed.
"Why did you kill MAURICE LENNOX?" she asked reproachfully.
"He was the villain," protested Anne. "He had to be punished.""I like him best of them all," said unreasonable Diana.
"Well, he's dead, and he'll have to stay dead," said Anne, rather resentfully. "If I had let him live he'd have gone on persecuting AVERIL and PERCEVAL.""Yes -- unless you had reformed him."
"That wouldn't have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too long.""Well, anyway, it's a perfectly elegant story, Anne, and will make you famous, of that I'm sure. Have you got a title for it?""Oh, I decided on the title long ago. I call it AVERIL'SATONEMENT. Doesn't that sound nice and alliterative? Now, Diana, tell me candidly, do you see any faults in my story?""Well," hesitated Diana, "that part where AVERIL makes the cake doesn't seem to me quite romantic enough to match the rest. It's just what anybody might do. Heroines shouldn't do cooking, _I_ think.""Why, that is where the humor comes in, and it's one of the best parts of the whole story," said Anne. And it may be stated that in this she was quite right.
Diana prudently refrained from any further criticism, but Mr. Harrison was much harder to please. First he told her there was entirely too much description in the story.
"Cut out all those flowery passages," he said unfeelingly.
Anne had an uncomfortable conviction that Mr. Harrison was right, and she forced herself to expunge most of her beloved descriptions, though it took three re-writings before the story could be pruned down to please the fastidious Mr. Harrison.
"I've left out ALL the descriptions but the sunset," she said at last.
