Emily's Quest (21 page)

I
t came clearly and suddenly on the air of a June evening. An old, old call – two higher notes and one long and soft and low. Emily Starr, dreaming at her window, heard it and stood up, her face suddenly gone white. Dreaming still – she must be! Teddy Kent was thousands of miles away, in the Orient – so much she knew from an item in a Montreal paper. Yes, she had dreamed it – imagined it.

It came again. And Emily
knew
that Teddy was there, waiting for her in Lofty John's bush – calling to her across the years. She went down slowly – out – across the garden. Of course Teddy was there – under the firs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should come to her there, in that old-world garden where the three Lombardies still kept guard. Nothing was wanting to bridge the years. There was no gulf. He put out his hands and drew her to him, with no conventional greeting. And spoke as if there were no years – no memories – between them.

“Don't tell me you can't love me – you can – you must – why, Emily” – his eyes had met the moonlit brilliance of hers for a moment – “you
do
.”

“It's dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other,” said Emily some minutes – or hours – later.

“I've been trying all my life to tell you I loved you,” said Teddy. “Do you remember that evening long ago in the Tomorrow Road after we left high school? Just as I was trying to scare up my courage to ask you if you'd wait for me you said night air was bad for you and went in. I thought it a poor excuse for getting rid of me – I knew you didn't care a hoot about night air. That set me back for years. When I heard about you and Aylmer Vincent – Mother wrote you were engaged – it was a nasty shock. For the first time it occurred to me that you really didn't belong to me, after all. And that winter you were ill – I was nearly wild. Away there in France where I couldn't see you. And people writing that Dean Priest was always with you and would probably marry you if you recovered. Then came the word that you
were
going to marry him. I won't talk of that. But when you
–you
– saved me from going to my death on the
Flavian
I knew you
did
belong to me, once and for all, whether
you
knew it or not. Then I tried again that morning by Blair Water – and again you snubbed me mercilessly. Shaking off my touch as if my hand were a snake. And you never answered my letter. Emily,
why
didn't you? You say you've always cared –”

“I never got the letter.”

“Never got it? But I mailed it –”

“Yes, I know. I must tell you – she said I was to tell you –” She told him briefly.

“My
mother
?. Did
that
?”

“You mustn't judge her harshly, Teddy. You know she wasn't like other women. Her quarrel with your father – did you know –”

“Yes, she told me all about that – when she came to me in Montreal. But
this –
Emily –”

“Let us just forget it – and forgive. She was so warped and unhappy she didn't know what she was doing. And I – I – was too proud – too proud to go when you called me that last time. I
wanted
to go – but I thought you were only amusing yourself–”

“I gave up hope then – finally. It had fooled me too often. I saw you at your window, shining, as it seemed to me, with an icy radiance like some cold, wintry star – I knew you heard me – it was the first time you had failed to answer our old call. There seemed nothing to do but forget you – if I could. I never succeeded, but I thought I did – except when I looked at Vega of the Lyre. And I was lonely. Ilse was a good pal. Besides, I think I thought I could talk to her about you – keep a little corner in your life as the husband of some one you loved. I knew Ilse didn't care much for me – I was only the consolation prize. But I thought we could jog along very well together and help each other keep away the fearful lonesomeness of the world. And then” –Teddy laughed at himself– “when she ‘left me at the altar' according to the very formula of Bertha M. Clay I was furious. She had made such a fool of me – me, who fancied I was beginning to cut quite a figure in the world. My word, how I hated women for awhile! And I was hurt, too. I had got very fond of Ilse – I really did love her – in a way.”

“In a way.” Emily felt no jealousy of that.

“I don't know as I'd take Ilse's leavings,” remarked Aunt Elizabeth.

Emily flashed on Aunt Elizabeth one of her old starry looks.

“Ilse's leavings. Why, Teddy has always belonged to me and I to him. Heart, soul and body,” said Emily.

Aunt Elizabeth shuddered. One ought to feel these things – perhaps – but it was indecent to say them.

“Always sly,” was Aunt Ruth's comment.

“She'd better marry him right off before she changes her mind
again”
said Aunt Addie.

“I suppose she won't wipe
his
kisses off,” said Uncle Wallace.

Yet, on the whole, the clan were pleased. Much pleased. After all their anxieties over Emily's love-affairs, to see her “settled” so respectably with a “boy” well known to them, who had, so far as they knew at least, no bad habits and no disgraceful antecedents. And who was doing pretty well in the business of picture-painting. They would not exactly say so, but Old Kelly said it for them.

“Ah, now, that's something like,” said Old Kelly approvingly.

Dean wrote a little while before the quiet bridal at New Moon. A fat letter with an enclosure – a deed to the Disappointed House and all it contained.

“I want you to take this, Star, as my wedding gift. That house must not be disappointed again. I want it to live at last. You and Teddy can make use of it as a summer home. And
some day I will come to see you in it. I claim my old corner in your house of friendship now and then.”

“How very – dear – of Dean. And I am so glad – he is not hurt any longer.”

She was standing where the To-morrow Road opened out on the Blair Water valley. Behind her she heard Teddy's eager footsteps coming to
her
. Before her on the dark hill, against the sunset, was the little beloved grey house that was to be disappointed no longer.

THE END

I
wish I had been old enough to read
Emily's Quest
in 1927 when it was first published; or – failing that – that I had read it in my early teens. Coming to it as an adult, I can see it only as a period piece – a charming period piece, mind you – but a period piece, nonetheless.

I try to imagine what my responses would have been had I read it earlier. Unquestionably, I would have identified with Emily's wish to write. But because I had two older friends who were reporters on the local paper, it would not have occurred to me that it was difficult for a woman to be a writer, and so Montgomery's feminist concerns would have been wasted on me. I would have understood Emily's love of nature, and her idealistic, romantic view of the world. I would have recognized what she meant by “the flash,” and been fascinated by, and probably envious of, her psychic powers. When I came across “Aunt Laura, who owned to a Dr. Fell feeling about Mr. Wallace …” I would undoubtedly have been pleased that I could complete the verse, “I do not love thee Dr. Fell.” “Cremona” and “simoleons,” which I now know to mean “violin” and “dollars,” would have baffled me then. And I would
have been, as I am now, bewildered by the origin of “spleet-new” – a descriptive enough phrase in context, which is seemingly without derivation.

But as I was also reading Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
in my early teens – covertly, perhaps, and not without trauma – I suspect I would have found
Emily's Quest
too young for me; although, had I read it any younger, it would not have addressed my more childish interests, and I would have found it too old. I think L.M. Montgomery herself would have understood my reaction, for, in a letter to her friend G.B. MacMillan, she complained that “the public and publisher won't allow me to write of a young girl as she really is. One can write of children as they are … but when you come to write of the ‘miss' you have to depict a sweet insipid young thing – really a child grown older – to whom the basic realities of life and reactions to them are quite unknown.
Love
must scarcely be hinted at – yet young girls often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of
Emily's
type certainly would.”

In
Emily's Quest
, love is more than hinted at. It is the theme of the book. I can imagine a time when young teenage girls (not of my generation, and certainly not of the current one, in which twelve-year-olds, if they read at all, are said to prefer novels about teenage abortion) would have found the book a romantic story and even a guide to love. And because of the charm of the book, I cannot help but want young readers for it. I wonder if today a still younger group – more precocious than anything I have dreamed of– independent yet starry-eyed, now gobbles it up.

Emily is attracted to men, and her various love affairs (if one can call them that) might well have alerted young readers to the fact that, although English provides us with only one word for them, there are many kinds of love. To
Aunt Laura's “But there's only one way of loving,” Emily replies, “Oh, no, dearest of Victorian aunties … There are a dozen different ways.” Who would not have been helped by knowing – preferably before the event! – that if you are at the mercy of
eros
you can be “in love” one minute and “out of love” the next? – as Emily was with Aylmer Vincent; and that an immense liking for a person
(agape)
such as she felt for Dean Priest, is not the same as
amor
, which she felt for Teddy Kent. In addition, Emily's love for her aunts and tenderness for her uncle Jimmy might be described as
caritas
, a still different emotion. L.M. Montgomery helps us see that one word cannot serve for four such different emotions.

In a less knowing age, the book might have been informative and engrossing – for what subject is of greater interest? – not only to adolescents but to us all. Perhaps something in us recognizes that so strong a passion, or so great a fidelity, or such a willingness to serve or care for another must have links with a love that is higher, and beyond naming.

It was in 1920, after completing six Anne books, that L.M. Montgomery confessed she had “gone completely ‘stale' on Anne and
must
get a new heroine.” That was the year Emily was born. The same year also saw her copying passages from Olive Schreiner into her journal. “There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers; everlastings that never wither; speedwells that wait for the wind to fan them out of life; blood-red mountain lilies that pour their voluptuous sweetness out for one day and lie in the dust at night. There is no flower that has the charm of all – the speedwell's purity, the everlasting's strength, the mountain-lily's warmth; but who knows whether there is no love that holds all – friendship, passion, worship?” To which Montgomery adds, “Yes, I think there must be a love which embraces them all – but it is rarer than a blue diamond.”

Love, clearly, was very much on her mind. And not without reason. In 1911, when she was thirty-six, having failed to find her “blue diamond,” she married Ewan Macdonald, a minister, for whom she felt no grand passion. “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they make ministers' wives,” she wrote to G.B. MacMillan, her confidant over many years. And in 1920, towards the end of a long list of things she claimed to
like
, we find, “I like good spruce gum. I like my husband. I like people to like me.”

It is not surprising that she damned with faint praise, for hers was a difficult marriage. Today, there would be a clinical term for her husband's melancholia, which took the form of believing himself predestined to hell. Highly strung herself, she kept sane by writing. Between
Anne of Green Gables
in 1908 and
Rilla of Ingleside
in 1920 – in addition to a memoir, articles, stories, and poems – she published eleven novels. In February 1922, two years after she conceived the idea, she had finished
Emily of New Moon. Emily Climbs
followed two years later, and
Emily's Quest
two years later again.

I find it hard to see these three books separately. The child is so clearly mother to the woman. They might be one long book that begins magically – L.M. Montgomery has an extraordinary eye for children. But as the book progresses, and we ask more of it, it becomes thinner, offers us less. When we want soul we are given temperament. It is not that Montgomery has no talent for character. The Emily we meet in
Emily's Quest
is the same Emily we met in
Emily of New Moon
, different only in that she spells better, is taller, and finds “the ‘love-talk' that had bothered her so much” in writing her early stories has become easier. She is a charming young woman, still romantic, idealistic, and passionate. She reads Marie Bashkirtseff,
The Story of An African Farm
, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, the poems of
Alice Meynell, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Marjorie Pickthall. And as a true Canadian (Montgomery was born one year after Prince Edward Island entered Confederation), she resists the golden lure of the United States, convinced that she can write just as well, if not better, in Prince Edward Island. In this belief she is encouraged by an increasing number of literary successes; and, when discouraged – as from time to time she inevitably is – she turns for inspiration to lines from “The Fringed Gentian”:

That L.M. Montgomery was, herself, inspired by the same verse seems evident from the fact that she called her memoir
The Alpine Path
.

In the light shed by her journals, it is startlingly apparent that Emily and L.M. Montgomery have much in common. I draw attention to this with some reluctance. As a writer myself, I find irritating the belittling of the creative imagination implicit in the belief that all fiction is autobiographical. Yet in this case, the similarities cannot be overlooked.

Both L.M. Montgomery and her heroine were high-spirited, fun-loving girls, brought up by elderly relatives who had little understanding of the young; both kept journals; both wanted to be writers; and both had to press to acquire higher levels of education. This is only the beginning. The
list could go on and on. (Even the name Emily – M L ee – is almost L.M. backwards with a
y
attached.) If we still have any lingering doubts as to the origins of Emily, we can turn to L.M. Montgomery herself: “People were never right in saying I was Anne, but,
in some respects
, they will be right if they write me down as Emily.”

Having read the journals, I can only agree. But one glaring factual difference, among many lesser ones, distinguishes the two women. Emily, unlike her author, marries the man she loves. I cannot help wondering if L.M. Montgomery found vicarious pleasure in giving Emily the “blue diamond” she would have liked for herself. Emily's own words from
Emily Climbs
persuade me that it is, at least, a possibility: “I read a story tonight. It ended unhappily. I was wretched until I had invented a happy ending for it. I shall always end
my
stories happily. I don't care whether it's ‘true to life' or not. It's true to life as it
should be
and that's a better truth than the other.”

It may even be a truer truth. And I think L.M. Montgomery knew it.