Emily's Quest (15 page)

“Well, your story has helped,” she admitted. “But I'm thankful to be where I can keep my eye on things once more. What are you going to do with your book? What are you going to call it?”

“
The Moral of the Rose
.”

“I don't think that is a good title at all. I don't know what it means – nobody will know.”

“No matter. That is the book's name.”

Aunt Elizabeth sighed.

“I don't know where you get your stubbornness from,
Emily I'm sure I don't. You never would take advice. And I know the Courcys will never speak to us again, after the book is published.”

“The book hasn't any chance of being published,” said Emily gloomily. “They'll send it back, ‘damned with faint praise.'”

Aunt Elizabeth had never heard this expression before and she thought Emily had originated it and was being profane.

“Emily,” she said sternly,” don't let me ever hear such a word from your lips again. I've more than suspected Ilse of such language – that poor girl never got over her early bringing up – she's not to be judged by
our
standards. But Murrays of New Moon do
not
swear.”

“It was only a quotation, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily wearily.

She was tired – a little tired of everything. It was Christmas now and a long, dreary winter stretched before her – an empty, aimless winter. Nothing seemed worth while – not even finding a publisher for
The Moral of the Rose
.

However, she typewrote it faithfully and sent it out. It came back. She sent it out again, three times. It came back. She retyped it – the MS. was getting dog-eared – and sent it out again. At intervals all that winter and summer she sent it out, working doggedly through a list of possible publishers. I forget how many times she retyped it. It became a sort of a joke – a bitter joke.

The worst of it was that the New Moon folk knew of all these rejections and their sympathy and indignation were hard to bear. Cousin Jimmy was so angry over every rejection of this
masterpiece that he could not eat for a day afterwards and she gave up telling him of the journeys. Once she thought of sending it to Miss Royal and asking her if she had any influence to use. But the Murray pride would not brook the idea. Finally in the autumn when it returned from the last publisher on her list Emily did not even open the parcel. She cast it contemptuously into a compartment of her desk.

“That's the end of it – and of all my dreams. I'll use it up for scribbling paper. And now I'll settle down to a tepid existence of pot-boiling.”

At least magazine editors were more appreciative than book publishers – as Cousin Jimmy indignantly said, they appeared to have more sense. While her book was seeking vainly for its chance her magazine clientele grew daily. She spent long hours at her desk and enjoyed her work after a fashion. But there was a little consciousness of failure under it all. She could never get much higher on the Alpine path. The glorious city of fulfilment on its summit was not for her. Pot-boiling! That was all. Making a living in what Aunt Elizabeth thought was a shamefully easy way.

Miss Royal wrote her frankly that she was falling off.

“You're getting into a rut, Emily,” she warned. “A self-satisfied rut. The admiration of Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy is a bad thing for you. You should be
here
– we would keep you up to the scratch.”

Suppose she had gone to New York with Miss Royal when she had the chance six years ago. Would she not have been able to get her book published? Was it not the fatal Prince Edward
Island postmark that condemned it – the little out-of-the-world province from which no good thing could ever come?

Perhaps! Perhaps Miss Royal had been right. But what did it matter?

No one came to Blair Water that summer. That is – Teddy Kent did not come. Ilse was in Europe again. Dean Priest seemed to have taken up his residence permanently at the Pacific Coast. Life at New Moon went on unchanged. Except that Aunt Elizabeth limped a little and Cousin Jimmy's hair turned white quite suddenly, overnight as it seemed. Now and then Emily had a quick, terrible vision that Cousin Jimmy was growing old. They were all growing old. Aunt Elizabeth was nearly seventy. And when she died New Moon went to Andrew. Already there were times when Andrew seemed to be putting on proprietary airs in his visits to New Moon. Not that he would ever live there himself, of course. But it ought to be kept in good shape against the day when it would be necessary to sell it.

“It's time those old Lombardies were cut down,” said Andrew to Uncle Oliver one day. “They're getting frightfully ragged at the tops. Lombardies are so out of date now. And that field with the young spruces should be drained and ploughed.”

“That old orchard should be cleared out,” said Uncle Oliver. “It's more like a jungle than an orchard. The trees are too old for any good anyhow. They should all be chopped down. Jimmy and Elizabeth are too old-fashioned. They don't make half the money out of this farm they should.”

Emily, overhearing this, clenched her fists. To see New Moon desecrated – her old, intimate, beloved trees cut down – the spruce field where wild strawberries grew improved out of existence – the dreamy beauty of the old orchard destroyed – the little dells and slopes that kept all the ghostly joys of her past changed – altered. It was unbearable.

“If you had married Andrew New Moon would have been yours,” said Aunt Elizabeth bitterly, when she found Emily crying over what they had said.

“But the changes would have come just the same,” said Emily. “Andrew wouldn't have listened to me. He believes that the husband is the head of the wife.”

“You will be twenty-four your next birthday,” said Aunt Elizabeth. Apropos of what?

“Oct. 1, 19–     

“T
his afternoon I sat at my window and alternately I wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.”

“Oct. 10, 19–     

“This evening was lovely. I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen in halls of fancy. I held a series of
conversations with imaginary comrades and thought out so many epigrams that I was agreeably surprised at myself”

“Oct. 28, 19–     

“To-night I was out for one of my long walks. In a weird, purple, shadowy world, with great, cold clouds piling up above a yellow sky, hills brooding in the silence of forsaken woods, ocean tumbling on a rocky shore. The whole landscape seemed

“It made me feel – horribly, alone

“What a creature of moods I am!

“‘Fickle,' as Aunt Elizabeth says? ‘Temperamental,' as Andrew says?”

“Nov. 5, 19–     

“What a fit of bad temper the world has indulged in! Day before yesterday she was not unbeautiful – a dignified old dame in fitting garb of brown and ermine. Yesterday she tried to ape juvenility, putting on all the airs and graces of spring, with scarfs of blue hazes. And what a bedraggled and uncomely old hag she was, all tatters and wrinkles. She grew peevish then over her own ugliness and has raged all night and day. I awakened up in the wee sma's and heard the wind shrieking in the trees and tears of rage and spite sleeting against the pane.

“Nov. 23, 19–     

“This is the second day of a heavy, ceaseless autumn rain. Really, it has rained almost every day this November. We had no mail to-day. The outside world is a dismal one, with drenched and dripping trees and sodden fields. And the damp and gloom have crept into my soul and spirit and sapped out all life and energy.

“I could not read, eat, sleep, write or do anything, unless I drove myself to do it and then I felt as if I were trying to do it with somebody else's hands or brain and couldn't work very well with them. I feel lustreless, dowdy and uninviting – I even bore myself.

“I shall grow mossy in this existence!

“There! I feel better for that little outburst of discontent. It has ejected something from my system. I know that into everybody's life must come some days of depression and discouragement when all things in life seem to lose savour. The sunniest day has its clouds; but one must not forget that the sun is there all the time.

“How easy it is to be a philosopher – on paper!

“(Item: – If you are out in a cold, pouring rain, does it keep you dry to remember that the sun is there just the same?)

“Well, thank heaven no two days are ever
exactly
alike!”

“There was a stormy, unrestful sunset to-night, behind the pale, blanched hills, gleaming angrily through the Lombardies and the dark fir-boughs in Lofty John's bush, that were now and again tossed suddenly and distressfully in a fitful gust of wind. I sat at my window and watched it. Below
in the garden it was quite dark and I could only see dimly the dead leaves that were whirling and dancing uncannily over the flowerless paths. The poor dead leaves – yet not quite dead, it seemed. There was still enough unquiet life left in them to make them restless and forlorn. They harkened yet to every call of the wind, which cared for them no longer but only played freakishly with them and broke their rest. I felt sorry for the leaves as I watched them in the dull, weird twilight, and angry – in a petulant fashion that almost made me laugh – with the wind that would not leave them in peace. Why should they – and I – be vexed with these transient, passionate breaths of desire for a life which has passed us by?

“I have not heard even from Ilse for a long time. She has forgotten me, too.”

“Jan. 10, 19–     

“As I came home from the post-office this evening – with three acceptances – I revelled in the winter loveliness around me. It was so very calm and still; the low sun cast such pure, pale tints of pink and heliotrope over the snow; and the great, pale-silver moon peeping over the Delectable Mountain was such a friend of mine.

“How much difference in one's outlook three acceptances make!”

“Jan. 20, 19–     

“The nights are so dreary now and there is such a brief space of grey, sunless day. I work and think all day and, when
night comes down early, gloom settles on my soul. I can't describe the feeling. It is dreadful – worse than any actual pain. In so far as I can express it in words I feel a great and awful weariness – not of body or brain but of
feeling
, coupled with a haunting dread of the future –
any
future – even a happy one – nay, a happy one most of all, for in this strange mood it seems to me that to be happy would require more effort – more buoyancy than I shall possess. The fantastic shape my fear assumes is that it would be
too much trouble
to be happy – require too much energy.

“Let me be honest – in this journal if nowhere else. I know quite well what is the matter with me. This afternoon I was rummaging in my old trunk in the garret and found a packet of the letters Teddy wrote the first year he was in Montreal. I was foolish enough to sit down and read them all.

“It was a mad thing to do. I am paying for it now. Such letters have a terrible resurrective power. I am surrounded by bitter fancies and unbidden ghosts – the little spectral joys of the past.”

“Feb. 5, 19–     

“Life never seems the same to me as it used to. Something is
gone
. I am not unhappy. But life seems a sort of negative affair. I enjoy it on the whole and have many beautiful moments. I have success – at least a sort of success – in growing measure and a keen appreciation of all the world and the times offer for delight and interest. But underneath it all is the haunting sense of emptiness.

“This is all because ‘full knee-deep lies the winter snow' and I can't go a-prowling. Wait till a thaw comes, when I can
get out to the balm of the fir-trees and the peace of the white places and the ‘strength of the hills' – what a beautiful old Biblical phrase that is! – and I shall be made whole once more.”

“Last night I simply could not endure any longer the vaseful of dyed grasses on my mantelpiece. What if they had been there for forty years! I seized them, opened the window and strewed them over the lawn. This soothed me so that I slept like an infant. But this morning Cousin Jimmy had gathered them all up and handed them secretly back to me with a gentle warning not to let them ‘blow out' again. Elizabeth would be horrified.

“I put them back in the vase. One cannot escape one's kismet.”

“Feb. 22, 19–     

“There was a creamy, misty sunset this evening and then moonlight. Such moonlight. It is such a night as one might fall asleep in and dream happy dreams of gardens and songs and companionship, feeling all the while through one's sleep the splendour and radiance of white moon-world outside as one hears soft, far-away music sounding through the thoughts and words that are born of it.

“I slipped away for a solitary walk through that fairy world of glamour. I went through the orchard where the black shadows of the trees fell over the snow – I went up to the gleaming white hill with the stars over it, I lurked along fir copses dim with mystery and along still, wood aisles where
the night hid from the moonshine. I loitered across a dreamland field of ebony and ivory. I had a tryst with my friend of old days, the Wind Woman. And every breath was a lyric and every thought an ecstasy and I've come back with a soul washed white and clean in the great crystal bath of the night.

“But Aunt Elizabeth said people would think me crazy if they saw me roaming around alone at this hour of the night. And Aunt Laura made me take a drink of hot black currant decoction lest I might have taken cold. Only Cousin Jimmy partly understood.

“‘You went out to escape. I know,' he whispered.

I whispered in return.”

“Feb. 26, 19–     

“Jasper Frost has been coming out here from Shrewsbury of late. I don't think he will come any more – after our conversation of last night. He told me he loved me with a love ‘that would last through eternity' But I thought an eternity with Jasper would be rather long. Aunt Elizabeth will be a little disappointed, poor dear. She likes Jasper and the Frosts are ‘a good family' I like him, too, but he is too prim and bandboxy

“‘Would you like a slovenly beau?' demanded Aunt Elizabeth.

“This posed me. Because I wouldn't.

“‘Surely there's a happy medium,' I protested.

“A girl shouldn't be too particular when she is' – I feel sure Aunt Elizabeth was going to say ‘nearly twenty-four.' But she changed it to ‘not
entirely
perfect herself.'

“I wish Mr. Carpenter had been alive to hear Aunt Elizabeth's italics. They were killing.”

“March 1, 19–     

“A wonderful music of night is coming to my window from Lofty John's bush. No,
not
Lofty John's bush any more.

“Emily Byrd Starr's bush!

“I bought it to-day, with the proceeds of my latest serial. And it is mine – mine – mine. All the lovely things in it are mine – its moonlit vistas – the grace of its one big elm against the starlight – its shadowy little dells – its June-bells and ferns – its crystalline spring – its wind music sweeter than an old Cremona. No one can ever cut it down or desecrate it in any way.

“I am so happy. The wind is my comrade and the evening star my friend.”

“March 23, 19–     

“Is there any sound in the world sadder and weirder than the wail of the wind around the eaves and past the windows on a stormy night? It sounds as if all the brokenhearted cries of fair, unhappy women who died and were forgotten ages ago were being re-echoed in the moaning wind of to-night. All my own past pain finds a voice in it as if it were moaning a
plea for re-entrance into the soul that has cast it out. There are strange sounds in that night wind clamouring there at my little window. I hear the cries of old sorrows in it – and the moans of old despairs – and the phantom songs of dead hopes. The night wind is the wandering soul of the past. It has no share in the future – and so it is mournful.”

“April 10, 19–     

“This morning I felt more like myself than I have for a long time. I was out for a walk over the Delectable Mountain. It was a very mild, still, misty morning with lovely pearl-grey skies and smell of spring in the air. Every turn and twist on that hill-road was an old friend to me. And everything was so young. April couldn't be old. The young spruces were so green and companionable with pearl-like beads of moisture fringing their needles.

“‘You are mine,' called the sea beyond Blair Water.

“‘We have a share in her,' said the hills.

“‘She is my sister,' said a polly fir-tree.

“Looking at them the flash came – my old supernal moment that has come so sadly seldom these past dreary months. Will I lose it altogether as I grow old? Will nothing but ‘the light of common day' be mine then?

“But at least it came to me this morning and I felt my immortality. After all, freedom is a matter of the soul.

“She has always a gift of healing for us if we come humbly to her. Corroding memories and discontents vanished. I felt
suddenly that some old gladness was yet waiting for me, just around the curve of the hill.

“The frogs are singing to-night. Why is
frog
such a funny, dear, charming, absurd word?”

“May 15, 19–     

“I know that when I am dead I shall sleep peaceably enough under the grasses through the summer and autumn and winter but when spring comes my heart will throb and stir in my sleep and call wistfully to all the voices calling far and wide in the world above me. Spring and morning were laughing to each other to-day and I went out to them and made a third.

“Ilse wrote to-day – a stingy little letter as far as news went – and spoke of coming home.

“‘I'm homesick,' she wrote. ‘Are the wild birds still singing in the Blair Water woods and are the waves still calling beyond the dunes? I want them. And oh, to see the moon rise over the harbour as we watched it do scores of times when we were children. And I want to see you. Letters are so unsatisfactory. There are so many things I'd like to talk over with you. Do you know I felt a little
old
to-day. It was a curious sensation.'

“She never mentioned Teddy's name. But she asked, ‘Is it true that Perry Miller is engaged to Judge Elmsley's daughter?'

“I don't think it is. But the mere report shows where Perry has climbed to already.”