Her face was like a star all pale and fair —
Were you looking in the glass when you composed that line?”
“No—” indignantly.
“‘When the morning light is shaken like a banner on the hill’ — a good line — a good line —
Oh, on such a golden morning
To be living is delight —
Too much like a faint echo of Wordsworth. The Sea in September—’blue and austerely bright’—’austerely bright’ — child, how can you marry the right adjectives like that? Morning—’all the secret fears that haunt the night’ — what do you know of the fears that haunt the night?”
“I know something,” said Emily decidedly, remembering her first night at Wyther Grange.
“To a Dead Day —
With the chilly calm on her brow
That only the dead may wear —
Have you even seen the chilly calm on the brow of the dead, Emily?”
“Yes,” said Emily softly, recalling that grey dawn in the old house in the hollow.
“I thought so — otherwise you couldn’t have written that — and even as it is — how old are you, jade?”
“Thirteen, last May.”
“Humph! Lines to Mrs George Irving’s Infant Son — you should study the art of titles, Emily — there’s a fashion in them as in everything else. Your titles are as out of date as the candles of New Moon —
Soundly he sleeps with his red lips pressed
Like a beautiful blossom close to her breast —
The rest isn’t worth reading. September — is there a month you’ve missed?—’Windy meadows harvest-deep’ — good line. Blair Water by Moonlight — gossamer, Emily, nothing but gossamer. The Garden of New Moon —
Beguiling laughter and old song
Of merry maids and men —
Good line — I suppose New Moon is full of ghosts. ‘Death’s fell minion well fulfilled its part’ — that might have passed in Addison’s day but not now — not now, Emily —
Your azure dimples are the graves
Where million buried sunbeams play —
Atrocious, girl — atrocious. Graves aren’t playgrounds. How much would you play if you were buried?”
Emily writhed and blushed again. Why couldn’t she have seen that herself? Any goose could have seen it.
“Sail onward, ships — white wings, sail on,
Till past the horizon’s purple bar
You drift from sight. — In flush of dawn
Sail on, and ‘neath the evening star —
Trash — trash — and yet there’s a picture in it —
Lap softly, purple waves. I dream,
And dreams are sweet — I’ll wake no more —
Ah, but you’ll have to wake if you want to accomplish anything. Girl, you’ve used purple twice in the same poem.
Buttercups in a golden frenzy —
‘a golden frenzy’ — girl, I see the wind shaking the buttercups,
From the purple gates of the west I come —
You’re too fond of purple, Emily.”
“It’s such a lovely word,” said Emily.
“Dreams that seem too bright to die —
Seem but never are, Emily —
The luring voice of the echo, fame —
So you’ve heard it, too? It is a lure and for most of us only an echo. And that’s the last of the lot.”
Mr Carpenter swept the little sheets aside, folded his arms on the desk, and looked over his glasses at Emily.
Emily looked back at him mutely, nervelessly. All the life seemed to have been drained out of her body and concentrated in her eyes.
“Ten good lines out of four hundred, Emily — comparatively good, that is — and all the rest balderdash — balderdash, Emily.”
“I — suppose so,” said Emily faintly.
Her eyes brimmed with tears — her lips quivered. She could not help it. Pride was hopelessly submerged in the bitterness of her disappointment. She felt exactly like a candle that somebody had blown out.
“What are you crying for?” demanded Mr Carpenter.
Emily blinked away the tears and tried to laugh.
“I — I’m sorry — you think it’s no good—” she said.
Mr Carpenter gave the desk a mighty thump.
“No good! Didn’t I tell you there were ten good lines? Jade, for ten righteous men Sodom had been spared.”
“Do you mean — that — after all—” The candle was being relighted again.
“Of course, I mean. If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten — if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though — and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you — but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice — by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go — even when she shuts her ears for ever to their plea. What have you there?”
Emily, her heart thrilling, handed him her Jimmy-book. She was so happy that it shone through her whole being with a positive radiance. She saw her future, wonderful, brilliant — oh, her goddess would listen to her—”Emily B. Starr, the distinguished poet”—”E. Byrd Starr, the rising young novelist.”
She was recalled from her enchanting reverie by a chuckle from Mr Carpenter. Emily wondered a little uneasily what he was laughing at. She didn’t think there was anything funny in that book. It contained only three or four of her latest stories — The Butterfly Queen, a little fairy tale; The Disappointed House, wherein she had woven a pretty dream of hopes come true after long years; The Secret of the Glen, which, in spite of its title, was a fanciful little dialogue between the Spirit of the Snow, the Spirit of the Grey Rain, the Spirit of Mist, and the Spirit of Moonshine.
“So you think I am not beautiful when I say my prayers?” said Mr Carpenter.
Emily gasped — realized what had happened — made a frantic grab at her Jimmy-book — missed it. Mr Carpenter held it up beyond her reach and mocked at her.
She had given him the wrong Jimmy-book! And this one, oh, horrors, what was in it? Or rather, what wasn’t in it? Sketches of every one in Blair Water — and a full — a very full — description of Mr Carpenter himself. Intent on describing him exactly, she had been as mercilessly lucid as she always was, especially in regard to the odd faces he made on mornings when he opened the school day with a prayer. Thanks to her dramatic knack of word painting, Mr Carpenter lived in that sketch. Emily did not know it, but he did — he saw himself as in a glass and the artistry of it pleased him so that he cared for nothing else. Besides, she had drawn his good points quite as clearly as his bad ones. And there were some sentences in it—”He looks as if he knew a great deal that can never be any use to him”—”I think he wears the black coat Mondays because it makes him feel that he hasn’t been drunk at all.” Who or what had taught the little jade these things? Oh, her goddess would not pass Emily by!
“I’m — sorry,” said Emily, crimson with shame all over her dainty paleness.
“Why, I wouldn’t have missed this for all the poetry you’ve written or ever will write! By gad, its literature — literature — and you’re only thirteen. But you don’t know what’s ahead of you — the stony hills — the steep ascents — the buffets — the discouragements. Stay in the valley if you’re wise. Emily, why do you want to write? Give me your reason.”
“I want to be famous and rich,” said Emily coolly.
“Everybody does. Is that all?”
“No. I just love to write.”
“A better reason — but not enough — not enough. Tell me this — if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life — if you knew you’d never have a line published — would you still go on writing — would you?”
“Of course I would,” said Emily disdainfully. “Why, I have to write — I can’t help it at
times — I’ve just got to.”
“Oh — then I’d waste my breath giving advice at all. If it’s in you to climb you must — there are those who must lift their eyes to the hills — they can’t breathe properly in the valleys. God help them if there’s some weakness in them that prevents their climbing. You don’t understand a word I’m saying — yet. But go on — climb! There, take your book and go home. Thirty years from now I will have a claim to distinction in the fact that Emily Byrd Starr was once a pupil of mine. Go — go — before I remember what a disrespectful baggage you are to write such stuff about me and be properly enraged.”
Emily went, still a bit scared but oddly exultant behind her fright. She was so happy that her happiness seemed to irradiate the world with its own splendour. All the sweet sounds of nature around her seemed like the broken words of her own delight. Mr Carpenter watched her out of sight from the old worn threshold.
“Wind — and flame — and sea!” he muttered. “Nature is always taking us by surprise. This child has — what I have never had and would have made any sacrifice to have. But ‘the gods don’t allow us to be in their debt’ — she will pay for it — she will pay.”
At sunset Emily sat in the lookout room. It was flooded with soft splendour. Outside, in sky and trees, were delicate tintings and aerial sounds. Down in the garden Daffy was chasing dead leaves along the red walks. The sight of his sleek, striped sides, the grace of his movements, gave her pleasure — as did the beautiful, even, glossy furrows of the ploughed fields beyond the lane, and the first faint white star in the crystal-green sky.
The wind of the autumn night was blowing trumpets of fairyland on the hills; and over in Lofty John’s bush was laughter — like the laughter of fauns. Ilse and Perry and Teddy were waiting there for her — they had made a tryst for a twilight romp. She would go to them — presently — not yet. She was so full of rapture that she must write it out before she went back from her world of dreams to the world of reality. Once she would have poured it into a letter to her father. She could no longer do that. But on the table before her lay a brand-new Jimmy-book. She pulled it towards her, took up her pen, and on its first virgin page she wrote,
New moon,
Blair water,
P. E. island.
October 8th.
I am going to write a diary, that it may be published when I die.
THE END
EMILY CLIMBS
McClelland & Stewart published Emily Climbs, the second in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, in 1925. Emily Byrd Starr dreams of attending Queen’s Academy in order to earn a teaching license. She strikes an unhappy bargain with her Aunt Elizabeth, who doesn’t want her to attend secondary school at all, but allows her to attend Shrewsbury High School under a couple of onerous conditions. The autobiographical novel relates her adventures at Shrewsbury, a budding, but complicated romance, the development of an important friendship, and above all, her continued apprenticeship as a writer. Ultimately Emily faces the most difficult choice of her young life. Montgomery’s use of Emily’s journal entries feels very immediate and allows the reader to walk in Emily’s shoes and to feel keenly her passions and small triumphs. Beginning in 1998 and filming on Prince Edward Island, CBC Television and Salter Street Films adapted the Emily novels into a TV series and in 2007, NHK and Tokyo Movie Shinsha adapted the novels into a 26 episode Japanese animated series entitled Kaze no Shouje Emily (Emily, the Wind Girl).
A first edition copy by Stokes of Emily Climbs
CONTENTS
Writing Herself Out
Salad Days
In the Watches of the Night
“As Ithers See Us”
Half a Loaf
Shrewsbury Beginnings
Pot-pourri
Not Proven
A Supreme Moment
The Madness of an Hour
Heights and Hollows
At the Sign of the Haystack
Haven
The Woman Who Spanked the King
“The Thing That Couldn’t”
Driftwood
If a Body Kiss a Body
Circumstantial Evidence
“Airy Voices”
In the Old John House
Thicker than Water
“Love Me, Love My Dog”
An Open Door
A Valley of Vision
April Love
An Australian edition of Emily Climbs
Writing Herself Out
Emily Byrd Starr was alone in her room, in the old New Moon farmhouse at Blair Water, one stormy night in a February of the olden years before the world turned upside down. She was at that moment as perfectly happy as any human being is ever permitted to be. Aunt Elizabeth, in consideration of the coldness of the night, had allowed her to have a fire in her little fireplace — a rare favour. It was burning brightly and showering a red-golden light over the small, immaculate room, with its old-time furniture and deep-set, wide-silled windows, to whose frosted, blue-white panes the snowflakes clung in little wreaths. It lent depth and mystery to the mirror on the wall which reflected Emily as she sat coiled on the ottoman before the fire, writing, by the light of two tall, white candles — which were the only approved means of illumination at New Moon — in a brand-new, glossy, black “Jimmy-book” which Cousin Jimmy had given her that day. Emily had been very glad to get it, for she had filled the one he had given her the preceding autumn, and for over a week she had suffered acute pangs of suppression because she could not write in a nonexistent “diary.”
Her diary had become a dominant factor in her young, vivid life. It had taken the place of certain “letters” she had written in her childhood to her dead father, in which she had been wont to “write out” her problems and worries — for even in the magic years when one is almost fourteen one has problems and worries, especially when one is under the strict and well-meant but not over-tender governance of an Aunt Elizabeth Murray. Sometimes Emily felt that if it were not for her diary she would have flown into little bits by reason of consuming her own smoke. The fat, black “Jimmy-book” seemed to her like a personal friend and a safe confidant for certain matters which burned for expression and yet were too combustible to be trusted to the ears of any living being. Now blank books of any sort were not easy to come by at New Moon, and if it had not been for Cousin Jimmy, Emily might never have had one. Certainly Aunt Elizabeth would not give her one — Aunt Elizabeth thought Emily wasted far too much time “over her scribbling nonsense” as it was — and Aunt Laura did not dare to go contrary to Aunt Elizabeth in this — more by token that Laura herself really thought Emily might be better employed. Aunt Laura was a jewel of a woman, but certain things were holden from her eyes.
Now Cousin Jimmy was never in the least frightened of Aunt Elizabeth, and when the notion occurred to him that Emily probably wanted another “blank book,” that blank book materialized straightway, in defiance of Aunt Elizabeth’s scornful glances. He had gone to Shrewsbury that very day, in the teeth of the rising storm, for no other reason than to get it. So Emily was happy, in her subtle and friendly firelight, while the wind howled and shrieked through the great old trees to the north of New Moon, sent huge, spectral wreaths of snow whirling across Cousin Jimmy’s famous garden, drifted the sundial completely over, and whistled eerily through the Three Princesses — as Emily always called the three tall Lombardies in the corner of the garden.
“I love a storm like this at night when I don’t have to go out in it,” wrote Emily. “Cousin Jimmy and I had a splendid evening planning out our garden and choosing our seeds and plants in the catalogue. Just where the biggest drift is making, behind the summer-house, we are going to have a bed of pink asters, and we are going to give the Golden Ones — who are dreaming under four feet of snow — a background of flowering almond. I love to plan out summer days like this, in the midst of a storm. It makes me feel as if I were winning a victory over something ever so much bigger than myself, just because I have a brain and the
storm is nothing but blind, white force — terrible, but blind. I have the same feeling when I sit here cosily by my own dear fire, and hear it raging all around me, and laugh at it. And that is just because over a hundred years ago great-great-grandfather Murray built this house and built it well. I wonder if, a hundred years from now, anybody will win a victory over anything because of something I left or did. It is an inspiring thought.
“I drew that line of italics before I thought. Mr. Carpenter says I use far too many italics. He says it is an Early Victorian obsession, and I must strive to cast it off. I concluded I would when I looked in the dictionary, for it is evidently not a nice thing to be obsessed, though it doesn’t seem quite so bad as to be possessed. There I go again: but I think the italics are all right this time.
“I read the dictionary for a whole hour — till Aunt Elizabeth got suspicious and suggested that it would be much better for me to be knitting my ribbed stockings. She couldn’t see exactly why it was wrong for me to be poring over the dictionary but she felt sure it must be because she never wants to do it. I love reading the dictionary. (Yes, those italics are necessary, Mr. Carpenter. An ordinary ‘love’ wouldn’t express my feeling at all!) Words are such fascinating things. (I caught myself at the first syllable that time!) The very sound of some of them—’haunted’—’mystic’ — for example, gives me the flash. (Oh, dear! But I have to italicize the flash. It isn’t ordinary — it’s the most extraordinary and wonderful thing in my whole life. When it comes I feel as if a door had swung open in a wall before me and given me a glimpse of — yes, of heaven. More italics! Oh, I see why Mr, Carpenter scolds! I must break myself of the habit.)
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 250