Marilla went to town the next day and returned in the evening. Anne had gone over to Orchard Slope with Diana and came back to find Marilla in the kitchen, sitting by the table with her head leaning on her hand. Something in her dejected attitude struck a chill to Anne’s heart. She had never seen Marilla sit limply inert like that.
“Are you very tired, Marilla?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know,” said Marilla wearily, looking up. “I suppose I am tired but I haven’t thought about it. It’s not that.”
“Did you see the oculist? What did he say?” asked Anne anxiously.
“Yes, I saw him. He examined my eyes. He says that if I give up all reading and sewing entirely and any kind of work that strains the eyes, and if I’m careful not to cry, and if I wear the glasses he’s given me he thinks my eyes may not get any worse and my headaches will be cured. But if I don’t he says I’ll certainly be stone-blind in six months. Blind! Anne, just think of it!”
For a minute Anne, after her first quick exclamation of dismay, was silent. It seemed to her that she could NOT speak. Then she said bravely, but with a catch in her voice:
“Marilla, DON’T think of it. You know he has given you hope. If you are careful you won’t lose your sight altogether; and if his glasses cure your headaches it will be a great thing.”
“I don’t call it much hope,” said Marilla bitterly. “What am I to live for if I can’t read or sew or do anything like that? I might as well be blind—or dead. And as for crying, I can’t help that when I get lonesome. But there, it’s no good talking about it. If you’ll get me a cup of tea I’ll be thankful. I’m about done out. Don’t say anything about this to any one for a spell yet, anyway. I can’t bear that folks should come here to question and sympathize and talk about it.”
When Marilla had eaten her lunch Anne persuaded her to go to bed. Then Anne went herself to the east gable and sat down by her window in the darkness alone with her tears and her heaviness of heart. How sadly things had changed since she had sat there the night after coming home! Then she had been full of hope and joy and the future had looked rosy with promise. Anne felt as if she had lived years since then, but before she went to bed there was a smile on her lips and peace in her heart. She had looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend—as duty ever is when we meet it frankly.
One afternoon a few days later Marilla came slowly in from the front yard where she had been talking to a caller—a man whom Anne knew by sight as Sadler from Carmody. Anne wondered what he could have been saying to bring that look to Marilla’s face.
“What did Mr. Sadler want, Marilla?”
Marilla sat down by the window and looked at Anne. There were tears in her eyes in defiance of the oculist’s prohibition and her voice broke as she said:
“He heard that I was going to sell Green Gables and he wants to buy it.”
“Buy it! Buy Green Gables?” Anne wondered if she had heard aright. “Oh, Marilla, you don’t mean to sell Green Gables!”
“Anne, I don’t know what else is to be done. I’ve thought it all over. If my eyes were strong I could stay here and make out to look after things and manage, with a good hired man. But as it is I can’t. I may lose my sight altogether; and anyway I’ll not be fit to run things. Oh, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d have to sell my home. But things would only go behind worse and worse all the time, till nobody would want to buy it. Every cent of our money went in that bank; and there’s some notes Matthew gave last fall to pay. Mrs. Lynde advises me to sell the farm and board somewhere—with her I suppose. It won’t bring much—it’s small and the buildings are old. But it’ll be enough for me to live on I reckon. I’m thankful you’re provided for with that scholarship, Anne. I’m sorry you won’t have a home to come to in your vacations, that’s all, but I suppose you’ll manage somehow.”
Marilla broke down and wept bitterly.
“You mustn’t sell Green Gables,” said Anne resolutely.
“Oh, Anne, I wish I didn’t have to. But you can see for yourself. I can’t stay here alone. I’d go crazy with trouble and loneliness. And my sight would go—I know it would.”
“You won’t have to stay here alone, Marilla. I’ll be with you. I’m not going to Redmond.”
“Not going to Redmond!” Marilla lifted her worn face from her hands and looked at Anne. “Why, what do you mean?”
“Just what I say. I’m not going to take the scholarship. I decided so the night after you came home from town. You surely don’t think I could leave you alone in your trouble, Marilla, after all you’ve done for me. I’ve been thinking and planning. Let me tell you my plans. Mr. Barry wants to rent the farm for next year. So you won’t have any bother over that. And I’m going to teach. I’ve applied for the school here—but I don’t expect to get it for I understand the trustees have promised it to Gilbert Blythe. But I can have the Carmody school—Mr. Blair told me so last night at the store. Of course that won’t be quite as nice or convenient as if I had the Avonlea school. But I can board home and drive myself over to Carmody and back, in the warm weather at least. And even in winter I can come home Fridays. We’ll keep a horse for that. Oh, I have it all planned out, Marilla. And I’ll read to you and keep you cheered up. You sha’n’t be dull or lonesome. And we’ll be real cozy and happy here together, you and I.”
Marilla had listened like a woman in a dream.
“Oh, Anne, I could get on real well if you were here, I know. But I can’t let you sacrifice yourself so for me. It would be terrible.”
“Nonsense!” Anne laughed merrily. “There is no sacrifice. Nothing could be worse than giving up Green Gables—nothing could hurt me more. We must keep the dear old place. My mind is quite made up, Marilla. I’m NOT going to Redmond; and I AM going to stay here and teach. Don’t you worry about me a bit.”
“But your ambitions—and—”
“I’m just as ambitious as ever. Only, I’ve changed the object of my ambitions. I’m going to be a good teacher—and I’m going to save your eyesight. Besides, I mean to study at home here and take a little college course all by myself. Oh, I’ve dozens of plans, Marilla. I’ve been thinking them out for a week. I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes—what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows—what new landscapes—what new beauties—what curves and hills and valleys further on.”
“I don’t feel as if I ought to let you give it up,” said Marilla, referring to the scholarship.
“But you can’t prevent me. I’m sixteen and a half, ‘obstinate as a mule,’ as Mrs. Lynde once told me,” laughed Anne. “Oh, Marilla, don’t you go pitying me. I don’t like to be pitied, and there is no need for it. I’m heart glad over the very thought of staying at dear Green Gables. Nobody could love it as you and I do—so we must keep it.”
“You blessed girl!” said Marilla, yielding. “I feel as if you’d given me new life. I guess I ought to stick out and make you go to college—but I know I can’t, so I ain’t going to try. I’ll make it up to you though, Anne.”
When it became noised abroad in Avonlea that Anne Shirley had given up the idea of going to college and intended to stay home and teach there was a good deal of discussion over it. Most of the good folks, not knowing about Marilla’s eyes, thought she was foolish. Mrs. Allan did not. She told Anne so in approving words that brought tears of pleasure to the girl’s eyes. Neither did good Mrs. Lynde. She came up one evening and found Anne and Marilla sitting at the front door in the warm, scented summer dusk. They liked to sit there when the twilight came down and the white moths flew about in the garden and the odor of mint filled the dewy air.
Mrs. Rachel deposited her substantial person upon the stone bench by the door, behind which grew a row of tall pink and yellow hollyhocks, with a long breath of mingled weariness and relief.
“I declare I’m getting glad to sit down. I’ve been on my feet all day, and two hundred pounds is a good bit for two feet to carry round. It’s a great blessing not to be fat, Marilla. I hope you appreciate it. Well, Anne, I hear you’ve given up your notion of going to college. I was real glad to hear it. You’ve got as much education now as a woman can be comfortable with. I don’t believe in girls going to college with the men and cramming their heads full of Latin and Greek and all that nonsense.”
“But I’m going to study Latin and Greek just the same, Mrs. Lynde,” said Anne laughing. “I’m going to take my Arts course right here at Green Gables, and study everything that I would at college.”
Mrs. Lynde lifted her hands in holy horror.
“Anne Shirley, you’ll kill yourself.”
“Not a bit of it. I shall thrive on it. Oh, I’m not going to overdo things. As ‘Josiah Allen’s wife,’ says, I shall be ‘mejum’. But I’ll have lots of spare time in the long winter evenings, and I’ve no vocation for fancy work. I’m going to teach over at Carmody, you know.”
“I don’t know it. I guess you’re going to teach right here in Avonlea. The trustees have decided to give you the school.”
“Mrs. Lynde!” cried Anne, springing to her feet in her surprise. “Why, I thought they had promised it to Gilbert Blythe!”
“So they did. But as soon as Gilbert heard that you had applied for it he went to them—they had a business meeting at the school last night, you know—and told them that he withdrew his application, and suggested that they accept yours. He said he was going to teach at White Sands. Of course he knew how much you wanted to stay with Marilla, and I must say I think it was real kind and thoughtful in him, that’s what. Real self-sacrificing, too, for he’ll have his board to pay at White Sands, and everybody knows he’s got to earn his own way through college. So the trustees decided to take you. I was tickled to death when Thomas came home and told me.”
“I don’t feel that I ought to take it,” murmured Anne. “I mean—I don’t think I ought to let Gilbert make such a sacrifice for—for me.”
“I guess you can’t prevent him now. He’s signed papers with the White Sands trustees. So it wouldn’t do him any good now if you were to refuse. Of course you’ll take the school. You’ll get along all right, now that there are no Pyes going. Josie was the last of them, and a good thing she was, that’s what. There’s been some Pye or other going to Avonlea school for the last twenty years, and I guess their mission in life was to keep school teachers reminded that earth isn’t their home. Bless my heart! What does all that winking and blinking at the Barry gable mean?”
“Diana is signaling for me to go over,” laughed Anne. “You know we keep up the old custom. Excuse me while I run over and see what she wants.”
Anne ran down the clover slope like a deer, and disappeared in the firry shadows of the Haunted Wood. Mrs. Lynde looked after her indulgently.
“There’s a good deal of the child about her yet in some ways.”
“There’s a good deal more of the woman about her in others,” retorted Marilla, with a momentary return of her old crispness.
But crispness was no longer Marilla’s distinguishing characteristic. As Mrs. Lynde told her Thomas that night.
“Marilla Cuthbert has got MELLOW. That’s what.”
Anne went to the little Avonlea graveyard the next evening to put fresh flowers on Matthew’s grave and water the Scotch rosebush. She lingered there until dusk, liking the peace and calm of the little place, with its poplars whose rustle was like low, friendly speech, and its whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. When she finally left it and walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight—”a haunt of ancient peace.” There was a freshness in the air as of a wind that had blown over honey-sweet fields of clover. Home lights twinkled out here and there among the homestead trees. Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of soft mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings. The beauty of it all thrilled Anne’s heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it.
“Dear old world,” she murmured, “you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.”
Halfway down the hill a tall lad came whistling out of a gate before the Blythe homestead. It was Gilbert, and the whistle died on his lips as he recognized Anne. He lifted his cap courteously, but he would have passed on in silence, if Anne had not stopped and held out her hand.
“Gilbert,” she said, with scarlet cheeks, “I want to thank you for giving up the school for me. It was very good of you—and I want you to know that I appreciate it.”
Gilbert took the offered hand eagerly.
“It wasn’t particularly good of me at all, Anne. I was pleased to be able to do you some small service. Are we going to be friends after this? Have you really forgiven me my old fault?”
Anne laughed and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw her hand.
“I forgave you that day by the pond landing, although I didn’t know it. What a stubborn little goose I was. I’ve been—I may as well make a complete confession—I’ve been sorry ever since.”
“We are going to be the best of friends,” said Gilbert, jubilantly. “We were born to be good friends, Anne. You’ve thwarted destiny enough. I know we can help each other in many ways. You are going to keep up your studies, aren’t you? So am I. Come, I’m going to walk home with you.”
Marilla looked curiously at Anne when the latter entered the kitchen.
“Who was that came up the lane with you, Anne?”
“Gilbert Blythe,” answered Anne, vexed to find herself blushing. “I met him on Barry’s hill.”
“I didn’t think you and Gilbert Blythe were such good friends that you’d stand for half an hour at the gate talking to him,” said Marilla with a dry smile.
“We haven’t been—we’ve been good enemies. But we have decided that it will be much more sensible to be good friends in the future. Were we really there half an hour? It seemed just a few minutes. But, you see, we have five years’ lost conversations to catch up with, Marilla.”
Anne sat long at her window that night companioned by a glad content. The wind purred softly in the cherry boughs, and the mint breaths came up to her. The stars twinkled over the pointed firs in the hollow and Diana’s light gleamed through the old gap.
Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joy of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!
”’God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,’” whispered Anne softly. softly.
背景和作者介绍
这段文字选自《绿山墙的安妮》，这是一部深受喜爱的经典小说，由加拿大作家露西·莫德·蒙哥马利创作，于1908年首次出版。故事讲述了安妮·雪莉，一个富有想象力和活力的孤儿女孩，她被误送到玛丽拉和马修·卡斯伯特那里，他们是一对兄妹，原本打算收养一个男孩来帮助他们在农场绿山墙工作。故事发生在爱德华王子岛虚构的艾凡里村庄，小说探讨了安妮的成长、她的人际关系，以及她勇敢乐观地面对的挑战。
露西·莫德·蒙哥马利从她自己的童年和爱德华王子岛的风景中汲取灵感，创造了一个生动而温馨的环境。她的写作风格融合了幽默、温暖和情感深度，使这个故事历久弥新，并吸引了所有年龄段的读者。
详细解读和意义
这段摘录揭示了安妮和玛丽拉生活中一个关键的时刻。玛丽拉一直是一个坚强、务实的女人，她面临着失明的毁灭性前景，这威胁到她的独立性和绿山墙的未来。安妮决定放弃奖学金，留在附近教书，这是一种深沉的爱和牺牲，展现了她的成熟和责任感。
这段文字探讨了韧性、牺牲、家庭忠诚和逆境中的希望等主题。玛丽拉最初的绝望与安妮坚定不移的乐观和决心形成对比，她决心寻找新的前进道路，这象征着安妮对“路上的转弯”的思考——一个充满可能性的未知未来。
这个故事也突出了社区和友谊的重要性，正如吉尔伯特·布莱斯为了让安妮有机会留在玛丽拉身边而主动放弃了学校申请。这一刻标志着他们关系的一个转折点，从竞争走向友谊。
给学生的启示和见解
-
**面对挑战时的韧性：**玛丽拉与视力衰退的斗争以及安妮的反应告诉我们，生活可能会带来意想不到的困难，但只要有勇气和支持，我们就能适应并找到新的方式来茁壮成长。
-
**牺牲和家庭忠诚：**安妮为了玛丽拉放弃梦想的选择表明了把亲人放在首位的价值，以及在紧密的家庭纽带中找到的力量。
-
**乐观和希望：**安妮对“路上的转弯”的信念鼓励读者以希望和好奇心面对不确定性，而不是恐惧。
-
**友谊和宽恕：**安妮和吉尔伯特之间的和解表明了宽恕的力量以及培养积极关系的重要性。
在日常生活中应用
-
**在学习中：**安妮决心在家继续接受教育，尽管没有上大学，这提醒学生们学习是一个终生的旅程，并且可以通过多种形式进行。它鼓励在追求知识方面的自我激励和创造力。
-
**在社会关系中：**这个故事鼓励对朋友和家人友善、理解和支持，尤其是在困难时期。它还表明，冲突可以通过同情和公开沟通来解决。
-
**在个人成长中：**安妮的旅程激励年轻读者拥抱变化和不确定性，将其视为成长的机会，而不是障碍。
从故事中培养积极的品质
-
**勇气：**像安妮和玛丽拉一样，学生们可以学会勇敢地面对困难，寻找解决方案而不是放弃。
-
**责任感：**安妮愿意承担教学职责，表现出成熟和强烈的责任感，这些品质在学校和以后的生活中都很有价值。
-
**同情心：**这些角色对彼此的关怀塑造了同情心和善良，鼓励学生支持周围的人。
-
**乐观：**保持乐观的态度，即使在情况看起来很糟糕的时候，也有助于建立韧性和精神力量。
结论
《绿山墙的安妮》不仅仅是一个迷人的故事；它还是年轻读者的人生课程和灵感的丰富来源。通过安妮的想象力和玛丽拉的坚定，学生们可以学习毅力、爱和希望的力量。这些价值观不仅在文学中至关重要，在日常生活中也很重要，帮助年轻人充满信心和优雅地驾驭自己的“路上的转弯”。
