"I hate to be Em'ly'd and Miss'd and sniffed at! It seems to me that Aunt Ruth has all the Murray faults, and none of their virtues.
"Uncle Oliver's son Andrew came with him and is going to stay for a week. He is four years older than I am.
"May 19, 19-
"This is my birthday. I am fourteen years old today. I wrote a letter 'From myself at fourteen to myself at twenty-four,' sealed it up and put it away in my cupboard, to be opened on my twenty-fourth birthday. I made some predictions in it. I wonder if they will have come to pass when I open it.
"Aunt Elizabeth gave me back all Father's books today. I was so glad. It seems to me that a part of Father is in those books. His name is in each one in his own handwriting, and the notes he made on the margins. They seem like little bits of letters from him. I have been looking over them all the evening, and Father seems so near to me again, and I feel both happy and sad.
"One thing spoiled the day for me. In school, when I went up to the blackboard to work a problem, everybody suddenly began to titter. I could not imagine why. Then I discovered that some one had pinned a sheet of foolscap to my back, on which was printed in big, black letters: 'Emily Byrd Starr, Authoress of The Four-Legged Duck' They laughed more than ever when I snatched it off and threw it in the coalscuttle. It infuriates me when any one ridicules my ambitions like that. I came home angry and sore. But when I had sat on the steps of the summer-house and looked at one of Cousin Jimmy's big purple pansies for five minutes all my anger went away. Nobody can keep on being angry if she looks into the heart of a pansy for a little while.
"Besides, the time will come when they will not laugh at me!
"Andrew went home yesterday. Aunt Elizabeth asked me how I like him. She never asked me how I liked any one before - my likings were not important enough. I suppose she is beginning to realise that I am no longer a child.
"I said I thought he was good and kind and stupid and uninteresting.
"Aunt Elizabeth was so annoyed she would not speak to me the whole evening. Why? I had to tell the truth. And Andrew is.
"May 21, 19-
"Old Kelly was here today for the first time this spring, with a load of shining new tins. He brought me a bag of candies as usual - and teased me about getting married, also as usual. But he seemed to have something on his mind, and when I went to the dairy to get him the drink of milk he had asked for, he followed me.
"'Gurrl dear,' he said mysteriously. 'I met Jarback Praste in the lane. Does he be coming here much?'
"I cocked my head at the Murray angle.
"'If you mean Mr. Dean Priest,' I said, 'he comes often. He is a particular friend of mine.'
"Old Kelly shook his head.
"'Gurrl dear - I warned ye - niver be after saying I didn't warn ye. I towld ye the day I took ye to Praste Pond niver to marry a Praste. Didn't I now?'
"'Mr. Kelly, you're too ridiculous,' I said - angry and yet feeling it was absurd to be angry with Old Jock Kelly. 'I'm not going to marry anybody. Mr. Priest is old enough to be my father, and I am just a little girl he helps in her studies.'
"Old Kelly gave his head another shake.
"'I know the Prastes, gurrl dear - and when they do be after setting their minds on a thing ye might as well try to turn the wind. This Jarback now - they tell me he's had his eye on ye iver since he fished ye up from the Malvern rocks - he's just biding his time till ye get old enough for coorting. They tell me he's an infidel, and it's well known that whin he was being christened he rached up and clawed the spectacles off av the minister. So what wud ye ixpect? I nadn't be telling ye he's lame and crooked - ye can see that for yerself. Take foolish Ould Kelly's advice and cut loose while there's time. Now, don't be looking at me like the Murrays, gurrl dear. Shure, and it's for your own good I do be spaking.'
"I walked off and left him. One couldn't argue with him over such a thing. I wish people wouldn't put such ideas into my mind. They stick there like burrs. I won't feel as comfortable with Dean for weeks now, though I know perfectly well every word Old Kelly said was nonsense.
"After Old Kelly went away I came up to my room and wrote a full description of him in a Jimmy-book.
"Ilse has got a new hat trimmed with clouds of blue tulle, and red cherries, with big blue tulle bows under the chin. I did not like it and told her so. She was furious and said I was jealous and hasn't spoken to me for two days. I thought it all over. I knew I was not jealous, but I concluded I had made a mistake. I will never again tell any one a thing like that. It was true but it was not tactful.
"I hope Ilse will have forgiven me by tomorrow. I miss her horribly when she is offended with me. She's such a dear thing and so jolly, and splendid, when she isn't vexed.
"Teddy is a little squiffy with me, too, just now. I think it is because Geoff North walked home with me from prayer-meeting last Wednesday night. I hope that is the reason. I like to feel that I have that much power over Teddy.
"I wonder if I ought to have written that down. But it's true.
"If Teddy only knew it, I have been very unhappy and ashamed over that affair. At first, when Geoff singled me out from all the girls, I was quite proud of it. It was the very first time I had had an escort home and Geoff is a town boy, very handsome and polished and all the older girls in Blair Water are quite foolish about him. So I sailed away from the church door with him, feeling as if I had grown up all at once. But we hadn't gone far before I was hating him. He was so condescending. He seemed to think I was a simple little country girl who must be quite overwhelmed with the honour of his company.
"And that was true at first! That was what stung me. To think I had been such a little fool!
"He kept saying, 'Really, you surprise me,' in an affected, drawling kind of way, whenever I made a remark. And he bored me. He couldn't talk sensibly about anything. Or else he wouldn't try to with me. I was quite savage by the time we got to New Moon. And then that insufferable creature asked me to kiss him!
"I drew myself up - oh, I was Murray clear through at that moment, all right. I felt I was looking exactly like Aunt Elizabeth.
"'I do not kiss young men,' I said disdainfully.
"Geoff laughed and caught my hand.
"'Why, you little goose, what do you suppose I came home with you for!' he said.
"I pulled my hand away from him, and walked into the house. But before I did that, I did something else.
"I slapped his face!
"Then I came up to my room and cried with shame over being insulted, and having been so undignified in resenting it. Dignity is a tradition of New Moon, and I felt that I had been false to it.
"But I think I 'surprised' Geoff North in right good earnest!
"May 24, 19-
"Jennie Strang told me today that Geoff North told her brother that I was 'a regular spitfire' and he had had enough of me.
"Aunt Elizabeth has found out that Geoff came home with me, and told me today that I would not be 'trusted' to go alone to prayer-meeting again.
"May 25, 19-
"I am sitting here in my room at twilight. The window is open and the frogs are singing of something that happened very long ago. All along the middle garden walk the Gay Folk are holding up great fluted cups of ruby and gold and pearl. It is not raining now, but it rained all day - a rain scented with lilacs. I like all kinds of weather and I like rainy days - soft, misty, rainy days when the Wind Woman just shakes the tops of the spruces gently; and wild, tempestuous, streaming rainy days. I like being shut in by the rain - I like to hear it thudding on the roof, and beating on the panes and pouring off the eaves, while the Wind Woman skirls like a mad old witch in the woods, and through the garden.
"Still, if it rains when I want to go anywhere I growl just as much as anybody!
"An evening like this always makes me think of that spring Father died, three years ago, and that dear, little, old house down at Maywood. I've never been back since. I wonder if any one is living in it now. And if Ad am-and-Eve and the Roo
ster Pine and the Praying Tree are just the same. And who is sleeping in my old room there, and if any one is loving the little birches and playing with the Wind Woman in the spruce barrens. Just as I wrote the words 'spruce barrens' an old memory came back to me. One spring evening, when I was eight years old, I was running about the barrens playing hide-and-seek with the Wind Woman, and I found a little hollow between two spruces that was just carpeted with tiny, bright-green leaves, when everything else was still brown and faded. They were so beautiful that the flash came as I looked at them - it was the very first time it ever came to me. I suppose that is why I remember those little green leaves so distinctly. No one else remembers them - perhaps no one else ever saw them. I have forgotten other leaves, but I remember them every spring and with each remembrance I feel again the wonder-moment they gave me."
IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT
Some of us can recall the exact time in which we reached certain milestones on life's road - the wonderful hour when we passed from childhood to girlhood - the enchanted, beautiful - or perhaps the shattering and horrible - hour when girlhood was suddenly womanhood - the chilling hour when we faced the fact that youth was definitely behind us - the peaceful, sorrowful hour of the realisation of age. Emily Starr never forgot the night when she passed the first milestone, and left childhood behind her for ever.
Every experience enriches life and the deeper such an experience, the greater the richness it brings. That night of horror and mystery and strange delight ripened her mind and heart like the passage of years.
It was a night early in July. The day had been one of intense heat. Aunt Elizabeth had suffered so much from it that she decided she would not go to prayer-meeting. Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy and Emily went. Before leaving Emily asked and obtained Aunt Elizabeth's permission to go home with Ilse Burnley after meeting, and spend the night. This was a rare treat. Aunt Elizabeth did not approve of all-night absences as a general thing.
But Dr. Burnley had to be away, and his housekeeper was temporarily laid up with a broken ankle. Ilse had asked Emily to come over for the night, and Emily was to be permitted to go. Ilse did not know this - hardly hoped for it, in fact - but was to be informed at prayer-meeting. If Ilse had not been late Emily would have told her before meeting "went in," and the mischances of the night would probably have been averted; but Ilse, as usual, was late, and everything else followed in course.
Emily sat in the Murray pew, near the top of the church by the window that looked out into the grove of fir and maple that surrounded the little white church. This prayer-meeting was not the ordinary weekly sprinkling of a faithful few. It was a "special meeting," held in view of the approaching communion Sunday, and the speaker was not young, earnest Mr. Johnson, to whom Emily always liked to listen, in spite of her blunder at the Ladies' Aid Supper, but an itinerant evangelist lent by Shrewsbury for one night. His fame brought out a churchful of people, but most of the audience declared afterwards that they would much rather have heard their own Mr. Johnson. Emily looked at him with her level, critical gaze, and decided that he was oily and unspiritual. She heard him through a prayer, and thought,
"Giving God good advice, and abusing the devil isn't praying."
She listened to his discourse for a few minutes and made up her mind that he was blatant and illogical and sensational, and then proceeded, coolly, to shut mind and ears to him and disappear into dreamland - something which she could generally do at will when anxious to escape from discordant realities.
Outside, moonlight was still sifting in a rain of silver through the firs and maples, though an ominous bank of cloud was making up in the northwest, and repeated rumblings of thunder came on the silent air of the hot summer night - a windless night for the most part, though occasionally a sudden breath that seemed more like a sigh than a breeze brushed through the trees, and set their shadows dancing in weird companies. There was something strange about the night in its mingling of placid, accustomed beauty with the omens of rising storm, that intrigued Emily, and she spent half the time of the evangelist's address in composing a mental description of it for her Jimmy-book. The rest of the time she studied such of the audience as were within her range of vision.
This was something that Emily never wearied of, in public assemblages, and the older she grew the more she liked it. It was fascinating to study those varied faces, and speculate on the histories written in mysterious hieroglyphics over them. They had all their inner, secret lives, those men and women, known to no one but themselves and God. Others could only guess at them, and Emily loved this game of guessing. At times it seemed veritably to her that it was more than guessing - that in some intense moments she could pass into their souls and read therein hidden motives and passions that were, perhaps, a mystery even to their possessors. It was never easy for Emily to resist the temptation to do this when the power came, although she never yielded to it without an uneasy feeling that she was committing trespass. It was quite a different thing from soaring on the wings of fancy into an ideal world of creation - quite different from the exquisite, unearthly beauty of "the flash;" neither of these gave her any moments of pause or doubt. But to slip on tiptoe through some momentarily unlatched door, as it were, and catch a glimpse of masked, unuttered, unutterable things in the hearts and souls of others, was something that always brought, along with its sense of power, a sense of the forbidden - a sense even of sacrilege. Yet Emily did not know if she would ever be able to resist the allure of it - she had always peered through the door and seen the things before she realised that she was doing it. They were nearly always terrible things. Secrets are generally terrible. Beauty is not often hidden - only ugliness and deformity.
"Elder Forsyth would have been a persecutor in old times," she thought. "He has the face of one. This very minute he is loving the preacher because he is describing hell, and Elder Forsyth thinks all his enemies will go there. Yes, that is why he is looking pleased. I think Mrs. Bowes flies off on a broomstick o' nights. She looks it. Four hundred years ago she would have been a witch, and Elder Forsyth would have burned her at the stake. She hates everybody - it must be terrible to hate everybody - to have your soul full of hatred. I must try to describe such a person in my Jimmy-book. I wonder if hate has driven all love out of her soul, or if there is a little bit left in it for any one or any thing. If there is it might save her. That would be a good idea for a story. I must jot it down before I go to bed - I'll borrow a bit of paper from Ilse. No - here's a bit in my hymn-book. I'll write it now.
"I wonder what all these people would say if they were suddenly asked what they wanted most, and had to answer truthfully. I wonder how many of these husbands and wives would like a change? Chris Farrar and Mrs. Chris would - everybody knows that. I can't think why I feel so sure that James Beatty and his wife would, too. They seem to be quite contented with each other - but once I saw her look at him when she did not know any one was watching - oh, it seemed to me I saw right into her soul, through her eyes, and she hated him - and feared him. She is sitting there now, beside him, little and thin and dowdy and her face is grey and her hair is faded - but she, herself, is one red flame of rebellion. What she wants most is to be free from him - or just to strike back once. That would satisfy her.
"There's Dean - I wonder what brought him to prayer-meeting? His face is very solemn, but his eyes are mocking Mr. Sampson - what's that Mr. Sampson's saying? - oh, something about the wise virgins. I hate the wise virgins - I think they were horribly selfish. They might have given the poor foolish ones a little oil. I don't believe Jesus meant to praise them any more than He meant to praise the unjust steward - I think He was just trying to warn foolish people that they must not be careless, and foolish, because if they were, prudent, selfish folks would never help them out. I wonder if it's very wicked to feel that I'd rather be outside with the foolish ones trying to help and comfort them, than inside feasting with the wise ones. It would be more interesting, too.
"There's Mrs. Kent
and Teddy. Oh, she wants something terribly - I don't know what it is but it's something she can never get, and the hunger for it goads her night and day. That is why she holds Teddy so closely - I know. But I don't know what it is that makes her so different from other women. I can never get a peep into her soul - she shuts every one out - the door is never unlatched.
"What do I want most? It is to climb the Alpine Path to the very top,
"'And write upon its shining scroll
A woman's humble name.'
"We're all hungry. We all want some bread of life - but Mr. Sampson can't give it to us. I wonder what he wants most? His soul is so muggy I can't see into it. He has a lot of sordid wants - he doesn't want anything enough to dominate him. Mr. Johnson wants to help people and preach truth - he really does. And Aunt Janey wants most of all to see the whole heathen world Christianized. Her soul hasn't any dark wishes in it. I know what Mr. Carpenter wants - his one lost chance again. Katherine Morris wants her youth back - she hates us younger girls because we are young. Old Malcolm Strang just wants to live - just one more year - always just one more year - just to live - just not to die. It must be horrible to have nothing to live for except just to escape dying. Yet he believes in heaven - he thinks he will go there. If he could see my flash just once he wouldn't hate the thought of dying so, poor old man. And Mary Strang wants to die - before something terrible she is afraid of tortures her to death. They say it's cancer. There's Mad Mr. Morrison up in the gallery - we all know what he wants - to find his Annie. Tom Sibley wants the moon, I think - and knows he can never get it - that's why people say he's not all there. Amy Crabbe wants Max Terry to come back to her - nothing else matters to her.
"I must write all these things down in my Jimmy-book tomorrow. They are fascinating - but, after all, I like writing of beautiful things better. Only - these things have a tang beautiful things don't have some way. Those woods out there - how wonderful they are in their silver and shadow. The moonlight is doing strange things to the tombstones - it makes even the ugly ones beautiful. But it's terribly hot - it is smothering here - and those thunder-growls are coming nearer. I hope Ilse and I will get home before the storm breaks. Oh, Mr. Sampson, Mr. Sampson, God isn't an angry God - you don't know anything about Him if you say that - He's sorrowful, I'm sure, when we're foolish and wicked, but He doesn't fly into tantrums. Your God and Ellen Greens God are exactly alike. I'd like to get up and tell you so, but it isn't a Murray tradition to sass back in church. You make God ugly - and He's beautiful. I hate you for making God ugly, you fat little man."
Emily Climbs Page 4