Emily Climbs

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look at that row of candles on the chimney-piece—all that trouble and poor light because of the little extra coal-oil would cost. Well, she can’t take her money with her—she’ll have to leave it all behind at the golden gate even if she is a Murray.”
Emily experienced a shock. She realised that not only was she being half suffocated in the boot closet, but that she was an eavesdropper—something she had never been since the evening at Maywood when she had hidden under the table to hear her aunts and uncles discussing her fate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emily, trembling from head to foot with anger, shame and the most intense humiliation she had ever suffered, washed the moustache off her face. Her first impulse was to go home—she could not face that roomful of Preps again. Then she set her teeth and went back, holding her black head very high as she walked down the aisle to her desk. Her face was burning and her spirit was aflame. In the corner she saw Ilse’s yellow head bent over her paper. The others were smiling and tittering. Mr. Scoville was insultingly grave. Emily took up her pen but her hand shook over her paper. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But then I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.
She lighted her candle, put on her stockings and a heavy coat, got out another half-filled Jimmy-book, and began to write by the single, uncertain candle which made a pale oasis of light in the shadows of the room. In that oasis Emily wrote, her black head bent over her book, as the hours of night crept away and the other occupants of New Moon slumbered soundly ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emily straightened her shoulders and cautiously let down her feet to a lower step. She thought she had better try to get back into the church. If another cloud came up, the steeple might be struck—steeples were always getting struck, she remembered: it might come crashing down on the porch right over her. She would go in and sit down in the Murray pew: she would be cool and sensible and collected: she was ashamed of her panic—but it had been terrible. ”

“ She was glad Ilse was asleep. Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful—as if the finite were for a second infinity—as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity—as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty. Oh—beauty—Emily shivered with the pure ecstasy of it. ”

“ Emily was looking at the sunset sky—her eyes rapt, her face pale and seeking. She felt no longer blue or depressed—somehow she never could feel that way long in Teddy’s company. In all the world there was no music like his voice. All good things seemed suddenly possible with him. She could not go to Shrewsbury—but she could work and study at New Moon—oh, how she would work and study. Another year with Mr. Carpenter would do a great deal for her—as much as Shrewsbury, perhaps. ”

“ I’m surprised at Elizabeth. It simply isn’t decent for two young girls like you and Ilse to be wandering alone over the country for three days.”
“What do you suppose could happen to us?” asked Emily.
“A good many things might happen,” said Aunt Ruth severely.
She was right. A good many things might—and did—happen in that excursion; but Emily and Ilse set off in high spirits Thursday afternoon, two graceless school girls with an eye for the funny side of everything and a determination to have a good time. Emily especially was feeling uplifted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ann Cyrilla, “I think a great many of Emily’s faults come from her intimacy with Ilse Burnley. She shouldn’t be allowed to run about with Ilse as she does. Why, they say Ilse is as much an infidel as her father. I have always understood she doesn’t believe in God at all—or the Devil either.”
(Emily: “Which is a far worse thing in your eyes.’’)
“Oh, the doctor’s training her a little better now since he found out his precious wife didn’t elope with Leo Mitchell,” sniffed Miss Potter. “He makes her go to Sunday School. But she’s no fit associate for Emily. She swears like a trooper, I’m told. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After all, there’s something delightful in a storm. There’s always something—deep down in me—that seems to rise and leap out to meet a storm—wrestle with it.”
“I feel that way sometimes—but not tonight,” said Ilse. “I’m tired—and that poor baby——”
“Oh!” Emily’s triumph and exultation went from her in a cry of pain. “Oh—Ilse—I’d forgotten for a moment—how could I? Where can he be?”
“Dead,” said Ilse harshly. “It’s better to think so—than to think of him alive still—out tonight. Come, we've got to get in somewhere. The storm is on for good now—no more showers.” ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Be honest now, Emily, ‘look then into thy heart’ and try to see yourself, not as Miss Potter sees you or as you see yourself, but as you really are.
(“I think I’m going to find this interesting!)
“In the first place, Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said I was pig-headed.
“Am I pig-headed?
“I know I am determined, and Aunt Elizabeth says I am stubborn. But pig-headedness is worse than either of those. Determination is a good quality and even stubbornness has a saving grace in it if you have a little gumption as well. ”

“ She had been afraid of Elizabeth and Laura—Murray family rows were bitter things—and truly a little afraid of the results to Emily herself if she had really gone to New Moon in those thin shoes and that insufficient coat. For Ruth Dutton was not a fiend—only a rather stupid, stubborn little barnyard fowl trying to train up a skylark. She was honestly afraid that Emily might catch a cold and go into consumption. And if Emily took it into her head not to come back to Shrewsbury—well, that would “make talk” and Ruth Dutton hated “talk” when she or her doings was the subject. ”