"Is he worse -?" asked Emily, slipping out of her high, black bed with its carved posts.
"Dying," said Aunt Elizabeth briefly. "Dr. Burnley says he can't last till morning."
Something in Emily's face touched Aunt Elizabeth.
"Isn't it better for him, Emily?" she said with an unusual gentleness. "He is old and tired. His wife has gone - they will not give him the school another year. His old age would be very lonely. Death is his best friend."
"I am thinking of myself," choked Emily.
She went down to Mr. Carpenter's house, through the dark, beautiful spring night. Aunt Louisa was crying but Emily did not cry. Mr. Carpenter opened his eyes and smiled at her - the same old, sly smile.
"No tears," he murmured. "I forbid tears at my deathbed. Let Louisa Drummond do the crying out in the kitchen. She might as well earn her money that way as another. There's nothing more she can do for me."
"Is there anything I can do?" asked Emily.
"Just sit here where I can see you till I'm gone, that's all. One doesn't like to go out - alone. Never liked the thought of dying alone. How many old she-weasels are out in the kitchen waiting for me to die?"
"There are only Aunt Louisa and Aunt Elizabeth," said Emily, unable to repress a smile.
"Don't mind my not - talking much. I've been talking - all my life. Through now. No breath - left. But if I think of anything - like you to be here."
Mr. Carpenter closed his eyes and relapsed into silence. Emily sat quietly, her head a soft blur of darkness against the window that was beginning to whiten with dawn. The ghostly hands of a fitful wind played with her hair. The perfume of June lilies stole in from the bed under the open window - a haunting odour, sweeter than music, like all the lost perfumes of old, unutterably dear years. Far off, two beautiful, slender, black firs, of exactly the same height, came out against the silver dawn-lit sky like the twin spires of some Gothic cathedral rising out of a bank of silver mist. Just between them hung a dim old moon, as beautiful as the evening crescent. Their beauty was a comfort and stimulant to Emily under the stress of this strange vigil. Whatever passed - whatever came - beauty like this was eternal.
Now and then Aunt Louisa came in and looked at the old man. Mr. Carpenter seemed unconscious of these visitations but always when she went out he opened his eyes and winked at Emily. Emily found herself winking back, somewhat to her own horror - for she had sufficient Murray in her to be slightly scandalised over deathbed winks. Fancy what Aunt Elizabeth would say.
"Good little sport," muttered Mr. Carpenter after the second exchange of winks. "Glad - you're there."
At three o'clock he grew rather restless. Aunt Louisa came in again.
"He can't die till the tide goes out, you know," she explained to Emily in a solemn whisper.
"Get out of this with your superstitious blather," said Mr. Carpenter loudly and clearly. "I'll die when I'm d - n well ready, tide or no tide."
Horrified, Aunt Louisa excused him to Emily on the ground that he was wandering on his mind and slipped out.
"Excuse my common way, won't you?" said Mr. Carpenter. "I had to shock her out. Couldn't have that elderly female person - round watching me die. Given her - a good yarn to tell - the rest of her - life. Awful - warning. And yet - she's a good soul. So good - she bores me. No evil in her. Somehow - one needs - a spice - of evil - in every personality. It's the - pinch of-salt - that brings out - the flavour."
Another silence. Then he added gravely
"Trouble is - the Cook - makes the pinch - too large - in most cases. Inexperienced Cook - wiser after - a few eternities."
Emily thought he really was "wandering" now but he smiled at her.
"Glad you're here - little pal. Don't mind being - here - do you?"
"No," said Emily.
"When a Murray says - no - she means it."
After another silence Mr. Carpenter began again, this time more to himself, as it seemed, than any one else.
"Going out - beyond the dawn. Past the morning star. Used to think I'd be frightened. Not frightened. Funny. Think how much I'm going to know - in just a few more minutes, Emily. Wiser than anybody else living. Always wanted to know - to know. Never liked guesses. Done with curiosity - about life. Just curious now - about death. I'll know the truth, Emily - just a few more minutes and I'll know the - truth. No more guessing. And if-it's as I think - I'll be - young again. You can't know what - it means. You - who are young - can't have - the least idea - what it means - to be young - again."
His voice sank into restless muttering for a time, then rose clearly.
"Emily, promise me - that you'll never write - to please anybody - but yourself."
Emily hesitated a moment. Just what did such a promise mean?
"Promise," whispered Mr. Carpenter insistently.
Emily promised.
"That's right," said Mr. Carpenter with a sigh of relief "Keep that - and you'll be - all right. No use trying to please everybody. No use trying to please - critics. Live under your own hat. Don't be - led away - by those howls about realism. Remember - pine woods are just as real as - pigsties - and a darn sight pleasanter to be in. You'll get there - sometime - you have the root - of the matter - in you. And don't - tell the world - everything. That's what's the - matter - with our - literature. Lost the charm of mystery - and reserve. There's something else I wanted to say - some caution - I can't - seem to remember -"
"Don't try," said Emily gently. "Don't tire yourself."
"Not - tired. Feel quite through - with being tired. I'm dying - I'm a failure - poor as a rat. But after all, Emily - I've had a - darned interesting time."
Mr. Carpenter shut his eyes and looked so death-like that Emily made an involuntary movement of alarm. He lifted a bleached hand.
"No - don't call her. Don't call that weeping lady back. Just yourself, little Emily of New Moon. Clever little girl, Emily. What was it - I wanted to say to her?"
A moment or two later he opened his eyes and said in a loud, clear voice, "Open the door - open the door. Death must not be kept waiting."
Emily ran to the little door and set it wide. A strong wind of the grey sea rushed in. Aunt Louisa ran in from the kitchen.
"The tide has turned - he's going out with it - he's gone."
Not quite. As Emily bent over him the keen, shaggy-browed eyes opened for the last time. Mr. Carpenter essayed a wink but could not compass it.
"I've - thought of it," he whispered. "Beware - of-italics."
Was there a little impish chuckle at the end of the words? Aunt Louisa always declared there was. Graceless old Mr. Carpenter had died laughing - saying something about Italians. Of course he was delirious. But Aunt Louisa always felt it had been a very unedifying deathbed. She was thankful that few such had come in her experience.
III
Emily went blindly home and wept for her old friend in the room of her dreams. What a gallant old soul he was - going out into the shadow - or into the sunlight? - with a laugh and a jest. Whatever his faults there had never been anything of the coward about old Mr. Carpenter. Her world, she knew, would be a colder place now that he was gone. It seemed many years since she had left New Moon in the darkness. She felt some inward monition that told her she had come to a certain parting of the ways of life. Mr. Carpenter's death would not make any eternal difference for her. Nevertheless, it was as a milestone to which in after years she could look back and say,
"After I passed that point everything was different."
All her life she had grown, as it seemed, by these fits and starts. Going on quietly and changelessly for months and years; then all at once suddenly realising that she had left some "low-vaulted past" and emerged into some "new temple" of the soul more spacious than all that had gone before. Though always, at first, with a chill of change and a sense of loss.
FOUR
I
The year after Mr. Carpenter's death passed quietly for Emily - quietly, pleasantly - perhaps, though
she tried to stifle the thought, a little monotonously. No Ilse - no Teddy - no Mr. Carpenter. Perry only very occasionally. But of course in the summer there was Dean. No girl with Dean Priest for a friend could be altogether lonely. They had always been such good friends, ever since the day, long ago, when she had fallen over the rocky bank of Malvern Bay and been rescued by Dean.* It did not matter in the least that he limped slightly and had a crooked shoulder, or that the dreamy brilliance of his green eyes sometimes gave his face an uncanny look. On the whole, there was no one in all the world she liked quite so well as Dean. When she thought this she always italicised the liked. There were some things Mr. Carpenter had not known.
Aunt Elizabeth never quite approved of Dean. But then Aunt Elizabeth had no great love for any Priest. There seemed to be a temperamental incompatibility between the Murrays and the Priests that was never bridged over, even by the occasional marriage between the clans.
"Priests, indeed," Aunt Elizabeth was wont to say contemptuously, relegating the whole clan, root and branch, to limbo with one wave of her thin, unbeautiful Murray hand. "Priests, indeed!"
"Murray is Murray and Priest is Priest and never the twain shall meet," Emily shamelessly mischievously misquoted Kipling once when Dean had asked in pretended despair why none of her aunts liked him.
"Your old Great-aunt Nancy over there at Priest Pond detests me," he said, with the little whimsical smile that sometimes gave him the look of an amused gnome. "And the Ladies Laura and Elizabeth treat me with the frosty politeness reserved by the Murrays for their dearest foes. Oh, I think I know why."
Emily flushed. She, too, was beginning to have an unwelcome suspicion why Aunts Elizabeth and Laura were even more frostily polite to Dean than of yore. She did not want to have it; she thrust it fiercely out and locked the door of thought upon it whenever it intruded there. But the thing whined on her doorstep and would not be banished. Dean, like everything and everybody else, seemed to have changed overnight. And what did the change imply - hint? Emily refused to answer this question. The only answer that suggested itself was too absurd. And too unwelcome.
Was Dean Priest changing from friend to lover? Nonsense. Arrant nonsense. Disagreeable nonsense. For she did not want him as a lover and she did want him madly as a friend. She couldn't lose his friendship. It was too dear, delightful, stimulating, wonderful. Why did such devilish things ever happen? When Emily reached this point in her disconnected musings she always stopped and retraced her mental steps fiercely, terrified to realise that she was almost on the point of admitting that "the something devilish" had already happened or was in process of happening.
In one way it was almost a relief to her when Dean said casually one November evening:
"I suppose I must soon be thinking of my annual migration."
"Where are you going this year?" asked Emily.
"Japan. I've never been there. Don't want to go now particularly. But what's the use of staying? Would you want to talk to me in the sitting-room all winter with the aunts in hearing?"
"No," said Emily between a laugh and a shiver. She recalled one fiendish autumn evening of streaming rain and howling wind when they couldn't walk in the garden but had to sit in the room where Aunt Elizabeth was knitting and Aunt Laura crocheting by the table. It had been awful. And again why? Why couldn't they talk as freely and whimsically and intimately then as they did in the garden? The answer to this at least was not to be expressed in any terms of sex. Was it because they talked of so many things Aunt Elizabeth could not understand and so disapproved of? Perhaps. But whatever the cause Dean might as well have been at the other side of the world for all the real conversation that was possible.
"So I might as well go," said Dean, waiting for this exquisite, tall, white girl in an old garden to say she would miss him horribly. She had said it every one of his flitting autumns for many years. But she did not say it this time. She found she dared not.
Again, why?
Dean was looking at her with eyes that could be tender or sorrowful or passionate, as he willed, and which now seemed to be a mixture of all three expressions. He must hear her say she would miss him. His true reason for going away again this winter was to make her realise how much she missed him - make her feel that she could not live without him.
"Will you miss me, Emily?"
"That goes without saying," answered Emily lightly - too lightly: Other years she had been very frank and serious about it. Dean was not altogether regretful for the change. But he could guess nothing of the attitude of mind behind it. She must have changed because she felt something - suspected something, of what he had striven for years to hide and suppress as rank madness. What then? Did this new lightness indicate that she didn't want to make a too important thing of admitting she would miss him? Or was it only the instinctive defence of a woman against something that implied or evoked too much?
"It will be so dreadful here this winter without you and Teddy and Ilse that I will not let myself think of it at all," went on Emily. "Last winter was bad. And this - I know somehow - will be worse. But I'll have my work."
"Oh, yes, your work," agreed Dean with the little, tolerant, half-amused inflection in his voice that always came now when he spoke of her "work," as if it tickled him hugely that she should call her pretty scribbling "work." Well, one must humour the charming child. He could not have said so more plainly in words. His implications cut across Emily's sensitive soul like a whiplash. And all at once her work and her ambitions became - momentarily at least - as childish and unimportant as he considered them. She could not hold her own conviction against him. He must know. He was so clever - so well-educated. He must know. That was the agony of it. She could not ignore his opinion. Emily knew deep down in her heart that she would never be able wholly to believe in herself until Dean Priest admitted that she could do something honestly worth while in its way. And if he never admitted it -
"I shall carry pictures of you wherever I go, Star," Dean was saying. Star was his old nickname for her - not as a pun on her name but because he said she reminded him of a star. "I shall see you sitting in your room by that old lookout window, spinning your pretty cobwebs - pacing up and down in this old garden - wandering in the Yesterday Road - looking out to sea. Whenever I shall recall a bit of Blair Water loveliness I shall see you in it. After all, all other beauty is only a background for a beautiful woman."
"Her pretty cobwebs -" ah, there it was. That was all Emily heard. She did not even realise that he was telling her he thought her a beautiful woman.
"Do you think what I write is nothing but cobwebs, Dean?" she asked chokingly.
Dean looked surprised, doing it very well.
"Star, what else is it? What do you think it is yourself? I'm glad you can amuse yourself by writing. It's a splendid thing to have a little hobby of the kind. And if you can pick up a few shekels by it - well, that's all very well too in this kind of a world. But I'd hate to have you dream of being a Bronte or an Austen - and wake to find you'd wasted your youth on a dream."
"I don't fancy myself a Bronte or an Austen," said Emily. "But you didn't talk like that long ago, Dean. You used to think then I could do something some day."
"We don't bruise the pretty visions of a child," said Dean. "But it's foolish to carry childish dreams over into maturity Better face facts. You write charming things of their kind, Emily. Be content with that and don't waste your best years yearning for the unattainable or striving to reach some height far beyond your grasp."
II
Dean was not looking at Emily. He was leaning on the old sundial and scowling down at it with the air of a man who was forcing himself to say a disagreeable thing because he felt it was his duty.
"I won't be just a mere scribbler of pretty stories," cried Emily rebelliously He looked into her face. She was as tall as he was - a trifle taller, though he would not admit it.
"You do not need to be anything but what you are," he said in a low vibrant tone. "A woman such
as this old New Moon has never seen before. You can do more with those eyes - that smile - than you can ever do with your pen."
"You sound like Great-aunt Nancy Priest," said Emily cruelly and contemptuously.
But had he not been cruel and contemptuous to her? Three o'clock that night found her wide-eyed and anguished. She had lain through sleepless hours face to face with two hateful convictions. One was that she could never do anything worth doing with her pen. The other was that she was going to lose Dean's friendship. For friendship was all she could give him and it would not satisfy him. She must hurt him. And oh, how could she hurt Dean whom life had used so cruelly? She had said "no" to Andrew Murray and laughed a refusal to Perry Miller without a qualm. But this was an utterly different thing.
Emily sat up in bed in the darkness and moaned in a despair that was none the less real and painful because of the indisputable fact that thirty years later she might be wondering what on earth she had been moaning about.
"I wish there were no such things as lovers and love-making in the world," she said with savage intensity, honestly believing she meant it.
III
Like everybody, in daylight Emily found things much less tragic and more endurable than in the darkness. A nice fat cheque and a kind letter of appreciation with it restored a good deal of her self-respect and ambition. Very likely, too, she had imagined implications into Dean's words and looks that he never meant. She was not going to be a silly goose, fancying that every man, young or old, who liked to talk to her, or even to pay her compliments in shadowy, moonlit gardens, was in love with her. Dean was old enough to be her father.
Dean's unsentimental parting when he went away confirmed her in this comforting assurance and left her free to miss him without any reservations. Miss him she did abominably. The rain in autumn fields that year was a very sorrowful thing and so were the grey ghost-fogs coming slowly in from the gulf. Emily was glad when snow and sparkle came. She was very busy, writing such long hours, often far into the night, that Aunt Laura began to worry over her health and Aunt Elizabeth once or twice remarked protestingly that the price of coal-oil had gone up. As Emily paid for her own coal-oil this hint had no effect on her. She was very keen about making enough money to repay Uncle Wallace and Aunt Ruth what they had spent on her high school years. Aunt Elizabeth thought this was a praiseworthy ambition. The Murrays were an independent folk. It was a clan by-word that the Murrays had a boat of their own at the Flood. No promiscuous Ark for them.
Emily's Quest Page 3