“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 to-day 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 to-day 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 anyone is living in it now. And if Adam-and-Eve and the Rooster Pine and the Praying Tree are just the same. And who is sleeping in my old room there, and if anyone 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 realization 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 north-west, 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 e
ven 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 realized 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 anyone 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 to-morrow. 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 Greene’s 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.”
Whereupon Mr. Sampson, who had several times noted Emily’s intent, probing gaze, and thought he was impressing her tremendously with a sense of her unsaved condition, finished with a final urgent whoop of entreaty, and sat down. The audience in the close, oppressive atmosphere of the crowded, lamplit church gave an audible sigh of relief, and scarcely waited for the hymn and benediction before crowding out to purer air. Emily, caught in the current, and parted from Aunt Laura, was swept out by way of the choir door to the left of the pulpit. It was some time before she could disentangle herself from the throng and hurry around to the front where she expected to meet Ilse. Here was another dense, though rapidly thinning crowd, in which she found no trace of Ilse. Suddenly Emily noticed that she did not have her hymn-book. Hastily she dashed back to the choir door. She must have left her hymn-book in the pew — and it would never do to leave it there. In it she had placed for safe-keeping a slip of paper on which she had furtively jotted down some fragmentary notes during the last hymn — a rather biting description of scrawny Miss Potter in the choir — a couple of satiric sentences regarding Mr. Sampson himself — and a few random fancies which she desired most of all to hide because there was in them something of dream and vision which would have made the reading of them by alien eyes a sacrilege.
Old Jacob Banks, the sexton, a little blind and more than a little deaf, was turning out the lamps as she went in. He had reached the two on the wall behind the pulpit. Emily caught her hymn-book from the rack — her slip of paper was not in it. By the faint gleam of light, as Jacob Banks turned out the last lamp, she saw it on the floor, under the seat of the pew in front. She kneeled down and reached after it. As she did so Jacob went out and locked the choir door. Emily did not notice his going — the church was still faintly illuminated by the moon that as yet outrode the rapidly climbing thunder-heads. That was not the right slip of paper after all — where could it be? — oh, here, at last. She caught it up and ran to the door which would not open.
For the first time Emily realized that Jacob Banks had gone — that she was alone in the church. She wasted time trying to open the door — then in calling Mr. Banks. Finally she ran down the aisle into the front porch. As she did so she heard the last buggy turn gridingly at the gate and drive away: at the same time the moon was suddenly swallowed up by the black clouds and the church was engulfed in darkness — close, hot, smothering, almost tangible darkness. Emily screamed in sudden panic — beat on the door — frantically twisted the handle — screamed again. Oh, everybody could not have gone — surely somebody would hear her! “Aunt Laura”—”Cousin Jimmy”—”Ilse” — then finally in a wail of despair—”Oh,
Teddy — Teddy!”
A blue-white stream of lightning swept the porch, followed by a crash of thunder. One of the worst storms in Blair Water annals had begun — and Emily Starr was locked alone in the dark church in the maple woods — she, who had always been afraid of thunderstorms with a reasonless, instinctive fear which she could never banish and only partially control.
She sank, quivering, on a step of the gallery stairs, and huddled there in a heap. Surely some one would come back when it was discovered she was missing. But would it be discovered? Who would miss her? Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy would suppose she was with Ilse, as had been arranged. Ilse, who had evidently gone, believing that Emily was not coming with her, would suppose she had gone home to New Moon. Nobody knew where she was — nobody would come back for her. She must stay here in this horrible, lonely, black, echoing place — for now the church she knew so well and loved for its old associations of Sunday-school and song and homely faces of dear friends had become a ghostly, alien place full of haunting terrors. There was no escape. The windows could not be opened. The church was ventilated by transom-like panes near the top of them, which were opened and shut by pulling a wire. She could not get up to them, and she could not have got through them if she had.
She cowered down on the step, shuddering from head to foot. By now the thunder and lightning were almost incessant: rain blew against the windows, not in drops but sheets, and intermittent volleys of hail bombarded them. The wind had risen suddenly with the storm and shrieked around the church. It was not her old dear friend of childhood, the bat-winged, misty “Wind Woman,” but a legion of yelling witches. “The Prince of the Power of the Air rules the wind,” she had heard Mad Mr. Morrison say once. Why should she think of Mad Mr. Morrison now? How the windows rattled as if demon riders of the storm were shaking them! She had heard a wild tale of some one hearing the organ play in the empty church one night several years ago. Suppose it began playing now! No fancy seemed too grotesque or horrible to come true. Didn’t the stairs creak? The blackness between the lightnings was so intense that it looked thick. Emily was frightened of it touching her and buried her face in her lap.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 254