Emily Climbs (25 page)

“But we can’t hang ‘em, Pussy – that’s just the trouble. They’re more likely to hang us. I put it to you, Pussy – suppose – there’s no harm in supposing it – that you were grown up and married and had a daughter of your age, and you went downstairs one night and found her as Aunt Ruth found you and Perry.
Would
you like it?
Would
you be well pleased? Honest, now?”

Emily stared hard at the fire for a moment.

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said at last. “But then – that’s different. I wouldn’t
know
.”

Cousin Jimmy chuckled.

“That’s the point, Pussy. Other people can’t
know
. So we’ve got to watch our step. Oh, I’m only simple Jimmy Murray, but I can see we have to watch our step. Pussy, we’re going to have roast spare-ribs for supper.”

A savoury whiff crept in from the kitchen at that very moment – a homely, comfortable odour that had nothing in common with compromising situations and family skeletons. Emily gave Cousin Jimmy another hug.

“Better a dinner of herbs where Cousin Jimmy is than roast spare-ribs and Aunt Ruth therewith,” she said.

“April 3, 19–

“T
here
are
times when I am tempted to believe in the influence of evil stars or the reality of unlucky days. Otherwise how can such diabolical things happen as do happen to well-meaning people? Aunt Ruth has only just begun to grow weary of recalling the night she found Perry kissing me in the dining-room, and now I’m in another ridiculous scrape.

“I will be honest. It was not dropping my umbrella which was responsible for it, neither was it the fact that I let the kitchen mirror at New Moon fall last Saturday and crack. It was just my own carelessness.

“St. John’s Presbyterian church here in Shrewsbury became vacant at New Year’s and has been hearing candidates. Mr. Towers of the
Times
asked me to report the sermons for his paper on such Sundays as I was not in Blair Water. The first sermon was good and I reported it with pleasure. The second one was harmless, very harmless, and I reported it without pain. But the third, which I heard last Sunday, was ridiculous. I said so to Aunt Ruth on the way home from church and
Aunt Ruth said, ‘Do you think
you
are competent to criticise a sermon?’

“Well, yes I do!

“That sermon was a most inconsistent thing. Mr. Wickham contradicted himself half a dozen times. He mixed his metaphors – he attributed something to St. Paul that belonged to Shakespeare – he committed almost every conceivable literary sin, including the unpardonable one of being deadly dull. However, it was my business to report the sermon, so report it I did. Then I had to do something to get it out of my system, so I wrote, for my own satisfaction, an analysis of it. It was a crazy but delightful deed. I showed up all the inconsistencies, the misquotations, the weaknesses and the wobblings. I enjoyed writing it – I made it as pointed and satirical and satanical as I could – oh, I admit it was a very vitriolic document.

“Then I handed
it
to the
Times
by mistake!

“Mr. Towers passed it over to the typesetter without reading it. He had a touching confidence in my work, which he will never have again. It came out the next day.

“I awoke to find myself infamous.

“I expected Mr. Towers would be furious; but he is only mildly annoyed – and a little amused at the back of it. It isn’t as if Mr. Wickham had been a settled minister here, of course. Nobody cared for him or his sermon and Mr. Towers is a Presbyterian, so the St. John’s people can’t accuse him of wanting to insult
them
. It is poor Emily B. on whom is laid the whole burden of condemnation. It appears most of them think I did it ‘to show off Aunt Ruth is furious, Aunt Elizabeth outraged, Aunt Laura grieved, Cousin Jimmy alarmed. It is such a shocking thing to criticise a minister’s sermon. It is a Murray tradition that ministers’ sermons – Presbyterian
ministers’ especially – are sacrosanct. My presumption and vanity will yet be the ruin of me, so Aunt Elizabeth coldly informs me. The only person who seems pleased is Mr. Carpenter. (Dean is away in New York. I know
he
would like it, too.) Mr. Carpenter is telling every one that my ‘report’ is the best thing of its kind he ever read. But Mr. Carpenter is suspected of heresy, so his commendation will not go far to rehabilitate me.

“I feel wretched over the affair. My mistakes worry me more than my sins sometimes. And yet, an unholy something, 7way back in me, is grinning over it all. Every word in that ‘report’ was true. And more than true – appropriate.
I
didn’t mix my metaphors.

“Now, to live this down

“April 20, 19–

“Awake thou north wind and come thou south. Blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out.’

“So chanted I as I went through the Land of Uprightness this evening – only I put ‘woods’ in place of garden. For spring is just around the corner and I have forgotten everything but gladness.

“We had a grey, rainy dawn but sunshine came in the afternoon and a bit of April frost tonight – just enough to make the earth firm. It seemed to me a night when the ancient gods might be met with in the lonely places. But I saw nothing except some sly things back among the fir corpses that
may
have been companies of goblins, if they weren’t merely shadows.

“(I wonder why
goblin
is such an enchanting word and
gobbling
such an ugly one. And why is
shadowy
suggestive of all beauty while umbrageous is so ugly?)

“But I heard all kinds of fairy sounds and each gave me an exquisite vanishing joy as I went up the hill. There is always something satisfying in climbing to the top of a hill. And that is a hill-top I love. When I reached it I stood still and let the loveliness of the evening flow through me like music. How the Wind Woman was singing in the bits of birchland around me – how she whistled in the serrated tops of the trees against the sky! One of the thirteen new silver moons of the year was hanging over the harbour. I stood there and thought of many, many beautiful things – of wild, free brooks running through starlit April fields – of rippled grey-satin seas – of the grace of an elm against the moonlight – of roots stirring and thrilling in the earth – owls laughing in darkness – a curl of foam on a long sandy shore – a young moon setting over a dark hill – the grey of gulf storms.

“I had only seventy-five cents in the world but Paradise isn’t bought with money.

“Then I sat down on an old boulder and tired to put those moments of delicate happiness into a poem. I caught the shape of them fairly well, I think – but not their soul. It escaped me.

“It was quite dark when I came back and the whole character of my Land of Uprightness seemed changed. It was eerie – almost sinister. I would have run if I could have dared. The trees, my old well-known friends, were strange and aloof. The sounds I heard were not the cheery, companionable sounds of daytime – nor the friendly, fairy sounds of the sunset – they were creeping and weird, as if the life of the woods had suddenly developed something almost hostile to me – something at least that was furtive and alien and unacquainted. I could fancy that I heard stealthy footsteps all around me – that strange eyes were watching me through the
boughs. When I reached the open space and hopped over the fence into Aunt Ruth’s back yard I felt as if I were escaping from some fascinating but not altogether hallowed locality – a place given over to Paganism and the revels of satyrs. I don’t believe the woods are ever wholly Christian in the darkness. There is always a lurking life in them that dares not show itself to the sun but regains its own with the night.

“‘You should not be out in the damp with that cough of yours,’ said Aunt Ruth.

“But it wasn’t the damp that hurt me – for I
was
hurt. It was that little fascinating whisper of something unholy. I was afraid of it – and yet I loved it. The beauty I had loved on the hill-top seemed suddenly quite tasteless beside it. I sat down in my room and wrote another poem. When I had written it I felt that I had exorcised something out of my soul and Emily-in-the-Glass seemed no longer a stranger to me.

“Aunt Ruth had just brought in a dose of hot milk and cayenne pepper for my cough. It is on the table before me – I have to drink it – and it has made both Paradise and Pagan-land seem very foolish and unreal!

“May 25, 19–

“Dean came home from New York last Friday and that evening we walked and talked in New Moon garden in a weird, uncanny twilight following a rainy day. I had a light dress on and as Dean came down the path he said,

“‘When I saw you first I thought you were a wild, white cherry-tree – like
that
’ – and he pointed to one that was leaning and beckoning, ghost-fair in the dusk, from Lofty John’s bush.

“It was such a beautiful thing that just to be distantly compared to it made me feel very well pleased with myself,
and it was lovely to have dear old Dean back again. So we had a delightful evening, and picked a big bunch of Cousin Jimmy’s pansies and watched the grey rain-clouds draw together in great purple masses in the east, leaving the western sky all clear and star-powdered.

“‘There is something in your company’ said Dean, ‘that makes stars seem starrier and pansies purpler.’

“Wasn’t that nice of him! How is it that his opinion of me and Aunt Ruth’s opinion of me are so very different?

“He had a little flat parcel under his arm and when he went away he handed it to me.

“‘I brought you that to counteract Lord Byron,’ he said.

“It was a framed copy of the ‘Portrait of Giovanna Degli Albizzi, wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ghirlanjo’ – a Lady of the Quatro Cento. I brought it to Shrewsbury and have it hanging in my room. I love to look at the Lady Giovanna – that slim, beautiful young thing with her sleek coils of pale gold and her prim little curls and her fine, high-bred profile (
did
the painter flatter her?) and her white neck and open, unshadowed brow, with the indefinable air over it all of saintliness and remoteness and fate – for the Lady Giovanna died young.

“
And
her embroidered velvet sleeves, slashed and puffed, very beautifully made and fitting the arm perfectly. The Lady Giovanna must have had a good dressmaker and, in spite of her saintliness, one thinks she was quite aware of the fact. I am always wishing that she would turn her head and let me see her full face.

“Aunt Ruth thinks she is queer-looking and evidently doubts the propriety of having her in the same room with the jewelled chromo of Queen Alexandra.

“I doubt it myself.

“June 10, 19–

“I do all my studying now by the pool in the Land of Uprightness, among those wonderful, tall, slender trees. I’m a Druidess in the woods – I regard trees with something more than love – worship.

“And then, too, trees, unlike so many humans, always improve on acquaintance. No matter how much you like them at the start you are sure to like them much better further on, and best of all when you have known them for years and enjoyed intercourse with them in all seasons. I know a hundred dear things about these trees in the Land of Uprightness that I didn’t know when I came here two years ago.

“Trees have as much individuality as human beings. Not even two spruces are alike. There is always some kink or curve or bend of bough to single each one out from its fellows. Some trees love to grow sociably together, their branches twining, like Ilse and me with our arms about each other, whispering interminably of their secrets. Then there are more exclusive groups of four or five – clan-Murray trees; and there are hermits of trees who choose to stand apart in solitary state and who hold commune only with the winds of heaven. Yet these trees are often the best worth knowing. One feels it is more of a triumph to win their confidence than that of easier trees. Tonight I suddenly saw a great, pulsating star resting on the very crest of the big fir that stands alone in the eastern corner and I had a sense of two majesties meeting that will abide with me for days and enchant everything – even classroom routine and dishwashing and Aunt Ruth’s Saturday cleaning.

“June 25, 19–

“We had our history examination today – the Tudor period. I’ve found it very fascinating – but more because of
what isn’t in the histories than of what
is
. They don’t – they
can’t
tell you what you would really like to know. What did Jane Seymour think of when she was awake in the dark? Of murdered Anne, or of pale, forsaken Katharine? Or just about the fashion of her new ruff? Did she ever think she had paid too high for her crown or was she satisfied with her bargain? And was she happy in those few hours after her little son was born – or did she see a ghostly procession beckoning her onward with them? Was Lady Jane Grey ‘Jane’ to her friends and did she
ever
have a fit of temper? What did Shakespeare’s wife actually think of him? And was any man ever
really
in love with Queen Elizabeth? I am always asking questions like this when I study that pageant of kings and queens and geniuses and puppets put down in the school curriculum as ‘The Tudor Period.’

“July 7, 19–

“Two years of High School are over. The result of my exams was such as to please even Aunt Ruth, who condescended to say that she always knew I could study if I put my mind to it. In brief, I led my class. And I’m pleased. But I begin to understand what Dean meant when he said real education was what you dug out of life for yourself. After all, the things that have taught me the most these past two years have been my wanderings in the Land of Uprightness, and my night on the haystack, and the Lady Giovanna, and the old woman who spanked the King, and trying to write nothing but
facts
, and things like that. Even rejection slips and hating Evelyn Blake have taught me something. Speaking of Evelyn – she failed in her exams and will have to take her senior year over again. I am truly sorry.

“That sounds as if I were a most amiable, forgiving creature. Let me be perfectly frank. I am sorry she didn’t pass, because if she had she wouldn’t be in school next year.

“July 20, 19–

“Ilse and I go bathing every day now. Aunt Laura is always very particular about seeing that we have our bathing suits with us. I wonder if she ever heard any faint, far-off echoes of our moonlit petticoatedness.

“But so far our dips have been in the afternoon. And afterwards we have a glorious wallow on sunwarm, golden sands, with the gauzy dunes behind us stretching to the harbour, and the lazy blue sea before us, dotted over with sails that are silver in the magic of the sunlight. Oh, life is good – good – good. In spite of three rejection slips that came today. Those very editors will be
asking
for my work some day! Meanwhile Aunt Laura is teaching me how to make a certain rich and complicated kind of chocolate cake after a recipe which a friend of hers in Virginia sent her thirty years ago. Nobody in Blair Water has ever been able to get it and Aunt Laura made me solemnly promise I would never reveal it.

“The real name of the cake is Devil’s Food but Aunt Elizabeth will not have it called that.

“Aug. 2, 19–