L. M. Montgomery

“ Emily’s anger, which had been sublimated during the evening into energy and ambition, suddenly flared up again, sweeping everything before it. It was unbearable to be treated thus. She had endured enough at Aunt Ruth’s hands—this was the proverbial last straw. One could not put up with everything, even to get an education. One owed something to one’s dignity and self-respect.
There were three things she could do. She could thump the old-fashioned brass knocker on the door until Aunt Ruth came down and let her in, as she had done once before—and then endure weeks of slurs because of it. ”

“ But the shadow was there and spoiled, to a certain extent, the Christmas holidays at New Moon. Outwardly, the girls were the friends they had always been, but Emily was acutely conscious of a sudden rift between them. Strive as she would she could not bridge it. The seeming unconsciousness of any such severance on Ilse’s part served to deepen it. Hadn’t Ilse cared enough for her and her friendship to feel the chill that had come over it? Could she be so shallow and indifferent as not to perceive it? Emily brooded and grew morbid over it. ”

“ I climbed the steep little wooded hill in the Land of Uprightness tonight and had an exultation on its crest. There’s always something satisfying in climbing to the top of a hill. There was a fine tang of frost in the air, the view over Shrewsbury Harbour was very wonderful, and the woods all about me were expecting something to happen soon—at least that is the only way I can describe the effect they had on me. I forgot everything—Aunt Ruth’s stings and Evelyn Blake’s patronage and Queen Alexandra’s dog collar—everything in life that isn’t just right. ”

“ The winter’s snow had gone but the bare road was hard-frozen and rough—no dainty footing for the thin kid slippers of Cousin Jimmy’s Christmas box. Emily reflected with what she considered a grim, sarcastic laugh that it was well, after all, that Aunt Ruth had insisted on cashmere stockings and flannel petticoat.
There was a moon that night, but the sky was covered with curdled grey clouds, and the harsh, bleak landscape lay dourly in the pallid grey light. The wind came across it in sudden, moaning gusts. ”

“ She wanted the New Moon candle-lights shining out on the birch trees—the scent of hop-vines in the dew—her purring pussy cats—her own dear room, full of dreams—the silences and shadows of the old garden—the grand anthems of wind and billow in the gulf—that sonorous old music she missed so much in this inland silence. She missed even the little graveyard where slept the New Moon dead.
“I’m not going to cry.” Emily clenched her hands. “Aunt Ruth will laugh at me. There’s nothing in this room I can ever love. ”

“ Ilse resented the tone.
“For heaven’s sake, Emily, don’t be such a crank!” she exclaimed.
For a second the wonderful world in which Emily was at the moment living, trembled and wavered like a disturbed reflection in water. Then——
“Don’t let’s quarrel here,” she implored. “One of us might push the other off the haystack.”
Ilse burst out laughing. Nobody can really laugh and keep angry. So their night under the stars was not spoiled by a fight. They talked for a while in whispers, of school girl secrets and dreams and fears. They even talked of getting married some time in the future. ”

“ Oh, Dean, you'll write me often, won’t you? Nobody understands like you. And you've got to be such a habit with me I can’t do without you.”
Emily said—and meant—it lightly enough; but Dean’s thin face flushed darkly. They did not say good-bye—that was an old compact of theirs. Dean waved his hand at her.
“May every day be kind to you,” he said.
Emily gave him only her slow, mysterious smile—he was gone. The garden seemed very lonely in the faint blue twilight, with the ghostly blossoms of the white phlox here and there. She was glad when she heard Teddy’s whistle in Lofty John’s Bush. ”

“ It’s my soul that’s on fire,”’ said Emily with an inscrutable smile. She shut the door behind her and at once forgot Aunt Ruth and every other disagreeable thing and person. How beautiful the world was—how beautiful life was—how wonderful the Land of Uprightness was! The young firs along the narrow path were lightly powdered with snow, as if, thought Emily, a veil of aërial lace had been tricksily flung over austere young Druid priestesses foresworn to all such frivolities of vain adornment. Emily decided she would write that sentence down in her Jimmy-book when she went back. ”

“ Emily knew that it was only a question of time before he would reach the pew where she crouched—feeling about with those hands! All that kept her senses in her frozen body was the thought that if she lost consciousness those hands would touch her—hold her—caress her. The next lightning flash showed him entering the adjoining pew. Emily sprang up and out and rushed to the other side of the church. She hid again: he would search her out, but she could again elude him: this might go on all night: a madman’s strength would outlast hers: at last she might fall exhausted and he would pounce on her. ”

“ Emily detested Mother Hubbards as heartily as Aunt Elizabeth herself did. They were worse she considered, even than the hated “baby aprons” of her first summer at New Moon. She knew she looked ridiculous in Aunt Laura’s Mother Hubbard, which came to her feet, and hung in loose, unbeautiful lines from her thin young shoulders; and Emily had a horror of being “ridiculous.” She had once shocked Aunt Elizabeth by coolly telling her that she would “rather be bad than ridiculous.” ”

“ An ancient enchantment was suddenly upon them, and the white magic of the sky and the dark magic of the woods wove the final spell of a potent incantation.
“Such loveliness as this doesn’t seem real,” murmured Emily. “It’s so wonderful it hurts me. I’m afraid to speak out loud for fear it will vanish. Were we vexed with that horrid old man and his beastly politics today, Ilse? Why, he doesn’t exist—not in this world, anyway. I hear the Wind Woman running with soft, soft footsteps over the hill. I shall always think of the wind as a personality. ”

“ She carried the letter and magazine off to her room to gloat over it, blissfully unconscious that Aunt Ruth was doing an extra deal of sniffing. Aunt Ruth felt very suspicious of suddenly crimsoned cheek and glowing eye and general air of rapture and detachment from earth.
In her room Emily sat down and read her poem as if she had never seen it before. There was, to be sure, a printer’s error in it that made the flesh creep on her bones—it was awful to have hunter’s moon come out as hunter’s moan—but it was her poem—hers—accepted by and printed in a real magazine. ”

“ But in my diary, which nobody sees but myself, or ever will see until after I’m dead, I like just to let myself go.”
Emily looked at her candle—it, too, was almost burned out. She knew she could not have another that night—Aunt Elizabeth’s rules were as those of Mede and Persian: she put away her diary in the little right-hand cupboard above the mantel, covered her dying fire, undressed and blew out her candle. The room slowly filled with the faint, ghostly snow-light of a night when a full moon is behind the driving storm-clouds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If I lived in you, beloved, I’d always stand at that western window at evening to wave to some one coming home. That is just exactly what that window was built for—a frame for love and welcome.”
“When you get through with talking to your house we'd better hurry on,” warned Ilse. “There’s a storm coming up. See those clouds—and those sea-gulls. Gulls never come up this far except before a storm. It’s going to rain any minute. We'll not sleep on a haystack tonight, Friend Emily.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It swept away all morbid, poisonous, rankling things. All at once Emily knew that Ilse had never done that. She laughed joyously—amusedly.
“What a little fool I’ve been! Oh, such a little fool! Of course, Ilse never did it. There’s nothing between us now—it’s gone—gone—gone. I'll go right to her and tell her so.”
Emily hurried back adown her little path. The Land of Uprightness lay all about her, mysterious in the moonlight, wrapped in the exquisite reticence of winter woods. She seemed one with its beauty and charm and mystery. ”

“ On the next afternoon Evelyn Blake found Ilse and Emily in a beautiful row. At least Ilse was rowing while Emily sat with her legs crossed and a bored, haughty expression in her insolently half-shut eyes. It should have been a welcome sight to a girl who disliked the intimacies of other girls. But Evelyn Blake was not rejoiced. Ilse was quarrelling with Emily again—ergo, Ilse and Emily were on good terms once more. ”

“ Harvest fields drenched in sunshine lay all around them: the austere charm of northern firs made wonderful the ways over which they walked: goldenrod beribboned the fences and the sacrificial fires of willow-herb were kindled on all the burnt lands along the sequestered roads back among the hills. But they soon discovered that canvassing for subscriptions was not all fun—though, to be sure, as Ilse said, they found plenty of human nature for their essays.
There was the old man who said “Humph” at the end of every remark Emily made. ”

“ The hill of clover meadows flashed instantly into incredibly vivid green. The triangle of sea shimmered into violet. The old house gleamed like white marble against the emerald of its hilly background, and the inky black sky over and around it.
“Oh,” gasped Emily, “I never saw anything so wonderful!”
She groped wildly in her bag and clutched her Jimmy-book. The post of a field-gate served as a desk—Emily licked a stubborn pencil and wrote feverishly. Ilse squatted on a stone in a fence corner and waited with ostentatious patience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among them were her latest stories, written before Aunt Elizabeth’s ultimatum. Criticism was something Mr. Carpenter could give with a right good will and he never minced matters; but he was just, and Emily had confidence in his verdicts, even when he said things that raised temporary blisters on her soul.
“This love story is no good,” he said bluntly.
“I know that it isn’t what I wanted to make it,” sighed Emily.
“No story ever is,” said Mr. Carpenter. “You'll never write anything that really satisfies you though it may satisfy other people. ”

“ He was only simple Jimmy Murray, but he understood what sensible Elizabeth Murray could not understand.
“What is wrong?” he asked, looking from one to the other.
“Nothing is wrong,” said Aunt Elizabeth haughtily. “I have offered Emily an education and she has refused it. She is free to do so, of course.”
“No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors,” said Cousin Jimmy in the eerie tone in which he generally said such things. It always made Elizabeth shiver—she could never forget that his eeriness was her fault. “Emily can’t promise what you want. Can you, Emily?” ”

“ 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. ”