Emily's Quest (4 page)

T
he year after Mr. Carpenter's death passed quietly for Emily – quietly, pleasantly – perhaps, though she tried to stifle the thought, a little monotonously. No Ilse – no Teddy – no Mr. Carpenter. Perry only very occasionally. But of course in the summer there was Dean. No girl with Dean Priest for a friend could be altogether lonely. They had always been such good friends, ever since the day, long ago, when she had fallen over the rocky bank of Malvern Bay and been rescued by Dean.
*
It did not matter in the least that he limped slightly and had a crooked shoulder, or that the dreamy brilliance of his green eyes sometimes gave his face an uncanny look. On the whole, there was no one in all the world she
liked
quite so well as Dean. When she thought this she always italicised the
liked
. There were some things Mr. Carpenter had not known.

Aunt Elizabeth never quite approved of Dean. But then Aunt Elizabeth had no great love for any Priest. There seemed
to be a temperamental incompatibility between the Murrays and the Priests that was never bridged over, even by the occasional marriage between the clans.

“Priests, indeed,” Aunt Elizabeth was wont to say contemptuously, relegating the whole clan, root and branch, to limbo with one wave of her thin, unbeautiful Murray hand. “Priests, indeed!”

“Murray is Murray and Priest is Priest and never the twain shall meet,” Emily shamelessly mischievously misquoted Kipling once when Dean had asked in pretended despair why none of her aunts liked him.

“Your old Great-aunt Nancy over there at Priest Pond detests me,” he said, with the little whimsical smile that sometimes gave him the look of an amused gnome. “And the Ladies Laura and Elizabeth treat me with the frosty politeness reserved by the Murrays for their dearest foes. Oh, I think I know why.”

Emily flushed. She, too, was beginning to have an unwelcome suspicion why Aunts Elizabeth and Laura were even more frostily polite to Dean than of yore. She did not want to have it; she thrust it fiercely out and locked the door of thought upon it whenever it intruded there. But the thing whined on her doorstep and would not be banished. Dean, like everything and everybody else, seemed to have changed overnight. And what did the change imply – hint? Emily refused to answer this question. The only answer that suggested itself was too absurd. And too unwelcome.

Was Dean Priest changing from friend to lover? Nonsense. Arrant nonsense. Disagreeable nonsense. For she did not want him as a lover and she did want him madly as a friend. She
couldn't
lose his friendship. It was too dear, delightful, stimulating, wonderful. Why did such devilish things ever
happen? When Emily reached this point in her disconnected musings she always stopped and retraced her mental steps fiercely, terrified to realise that she was almost on the point of admitting that “the something devilish” had already happened or was in process of happening.

In one way it was almost a relief to her when Dean said casually one November evening:

“I suppose I must soon be thinking of my annual migration.”

“Where are you going this year?” asked Emily.

“Japan. I've never been there. Don't want to go now particularly. But what's the use of staying? Would you want to talk to me in the sitting-room all winter with the aunts in hearing?”

“No,” said Emily between a laugh and a shiver. She recalled one fiendish autumn evening of streaming rain and howling wind when they couldn't walk in the garden but had to sit in the room where Aunt Elizabeth was knitting and Aunt Laura crocheting by the table. It had been awful. And again why? Why couldn't they talk as freely and whimsically and intimately then as they did in the garden? The answer to this at least was not to be expressed in any terms of sex. Was it because they talked of so many things Aunt Elizabeth could not understand and so disapproved of? Perhaps. But whatever the cause Dean might as well have been at the other side of the world for all the real conversation that was possible.

“So I might as well go,” said Dean, waiting for this exquisite, tall, white girl in an old garden to say she would miss him horribly. She had said it every one of his flitting autumns for many years. But she did not say it this time. She found she dared not.

Again, why?

Dean was looking at her with eyes that could be tender or sorrowful or passionate, as he willed, and which now seemed to be a mixture of all three expressions. He
must
hear her say she would miss him. His true reason for going away again this winter was to make her realise how much she missed him – make her feel that she could not live without him.

“Will you miss me, Emily?”

“That goes without saying,” answered Emily lightly – too lightly: Other years she had been very frank and serious about it. Dean was not altogether regretful for the change. But he could guess nothing of the attitude of mind behind it. She must have changed because she felt something – suspected something, of what he had striven for years to hide and suppress as rank madness. What then? Did this new lightness indicate that she didn't want to make a too important thing of admitting she would miss him? Or was it only the instinctive defence of a woman against something that implied or evoked too much?

“It will be so dreadful here this winter without you and Teddy and Ilse that I will not let myself think of it at all,” went on Emily. “Last winter was bad. And this – I know somehow – will be worse. But I'll have my work.”

“Oh, yes, your work,” agreed Dean with the little, tolerant, half-amused inflection in his voice that always came now when he spoke of her “work,” as if it tickled him hugely that she should call her pretty scribbling “work.” Well, one must humour the charming child. He could not have said so more plainly in words. His implications cut across Emily's sensitive soul like a whiplash. And all at once her work and her ambitions became – momentarily at least – as childish and unimportant as he considered them. She could not hold her own conviction against him. He must know. He was so clever – so
well-educated. He
must
know. That was the agony of it. She could not ignore his opinion. Emily knew deep down in her heart that she would never be able wholly to believe in herself until Dean Priest admitted that she could do something honestly worth while in its way. And if he never admitted it –

“I shall carry pictures of you wherever I go, Star,” Dean was saying. Star was his old nickname for her – not as a pun on her name but because he said she reminded him of a star. “I shall see you sitting in your room by that old lookout window, spinning your pretty cobwebs – pacing up and down in this old garden – wandering in the Yesterday Road – looking out to sea. Whenever I shall recall a bit of Blair Water loveliness I shall see you in it. After all, all other beauty is only a background for a beautiful woman.”

“Her pretty cobwebs –” ah, there it was. That was all Emily heard. She did not even realise that he was telling her he thought
her
a beautiful woman.

“Do you think what I write is nothing but cobwebs, Dean?” she asked chokingly.

Dean looked surprised, doing it very well.

“Star, what else is it? What do you think it is yourself? I'm glad you can amuse yourself by writing. It's a splendid thing to have a little hobby of the kind. And if you can pick up a few shekels by it – well, that's all very well too in this kind of a world. But I'd hate to have you dream of being a Brontë or an Austen – and wake to find you'd wasted your youth on a dream.”

“I don't fancy myself a Brontë or an Austen,” said Emily. “But you didn't talk like that long ago, Dean. You used to think then I
could
do something some day.”

“We don't bruise the pretty visions of a child,” said Dean. “But it's foolish to carry childish dreams over into
maturity Better face facts. You write charming things of their kind, Emily. Be content with that and don't waste your best years yearning for the unattainable or striving to reach some height far beyond your grasp.”

Dean was not looking at Emily. He was leaning on the old sundial and scowling down at it with the air of a man who was forcing himself to say a disagreeable thing because he felt it was his duty.

“I
won't
be just a mere scribbler of pretty stories,” cried Emily rebelliously He looked into her face. She was as tall as he was – a trifle taller, though he would not admit it.

“You do not need to be anything but what you are,” he said in a low vibrant tone. “A woman such as this old New Moon has never seen before. You can do more with those eyes – that smile – than you can ever do with your pen.”

“You sound like Great-aunt Nancy Priest,” said Emily cruelly and contemptuously.

But had he not been cruel and contemptuous to her? Three o'clock that night found her wide-eyed and anguished. She had lain through sleepless hours face to face with two hateful convictions. One was that she could never do anything worth doing with her pen. The other was that she was going to lose Dean's friendship. For friendship was all she could give him and it would not satisfy him. She must hurt him. And oh, how could she hurt Dean whom life had used so cruelly? She had said “no” to Andrew Murray and laughed a refusal to Perry Miller without a qualm. But this was an utterly different thing.

Emily sat up in bed in the darkness and moaned in a despair that was none the less real and painful because of the
indisputable fact that thirty years later she might be wondering what on earth she had been moaning about.

“I wish there were no such things as lovers and love-making in the world,” she said with savage intensity, honestly believing she meant it.

Like everybody, in daylight Emily found things much less tragic and more endurable than in the darkness. A nice fat cheque and a kind letter of appreciation with it restored a good deal of her self-respect and ambition. Very likely, too, she had imagined implications into Dean's words and looks that he never meant. She was not going to be a silly goose, fancying that every man, young or old, who liked to talk to her, or even to pay her compliments in shadowy, moonlit gardens, was in love with her. Dean was old enough to be her father.

Dean's unsentimental parting when he went away confirmed her in this comforting assurance and left her free to miss him without any reservations. Miss him she did abominably. The rain in autumn fields that year was a very sorrowful thing and so were the grey ghost-fogs coming slowly in from the gulf. Emily was glad when snow and sparkle came. She was very busy, writing such long hours, often far into the night, that Aunt Laura began to worry over her health and Aunt Elizabeth once or twice remarked protestingly that the price of coal-oil had gone up. As Emily paid for her own coal-oil this hint had no effect on her. She was very keen about making enough money to repay Uncle Wallace and Aunt Ruth what they had spent on her high school years. Aunt Elizabeth thought this was a praiseworthy ambition. The Murrays were an independent folk. It was a clan by-word that the Murrays
had a boat of their own at the Flood. No promiscuous Ark for
them
.

Of course there were still many rejections – which Cousin Jimmy carried home from the post-office speechless with indignation. But the percentage of acceptances rose steadily. Every new magazine conquered meant a step upward on her Alpine path. She knew she was steadily gaining the mastery over her art. Even the “love talk” that had bothered her so much in the old days came easily now. Had Teddy Kent's eyes taught her so much? If she had taken time to think she might have been very lonely. There were some bad hours. Especially after a letter had come from Ilse full of all her gay doings in Montreal, her triumphs in the School of Oratory and her pretty new gowns. In the long twilights when she looked shiveringly from the windows of the old farmhouse and thought how very white and cold and solitary were the snow fields on the hill, how darkly remote and tragic the Three Princesses, she lost confidence in her star. She wanted summer; fields of daisies; seas misty with moonrise or purple with sunset; companionship; Teddy. In such moments she always knew she wanted Teddy.

Teddy seemed far away. They still corresponded faithfully, but the correspondence was not what it was. Suddenly in the autumn Teddy's letters had grown slightly colder and more formal. At this first hint of frost the temperature of Emily's dropped noticeably.

But she had hours of rapture and insight that shed a glory backward and forward. Hours when she left the creative faculty within her, burning like a never-dying flame. Rare,
sublime moments when she felt as a god, perfectly happy and undesirous. And there was always her dream-world into which she could escape from monotony and loneliness, and taste strange, sweet happiness unmarred by any cloud or shadow. Sometimes she slipped mentally back into childhood and had delightful adventures she would have been ashamed to tell her adult world.

She liked to prowl about a good deal by herself, especially in twilight or moonlight alone with the stars and the trees, rarest of companions.

“I can't be contented indoors on a moonlit night. I have to be up and away,” she told Aunt Elizabeth, who did not approve of prowling. Aunt Elizabeth never lost her uneasy consciousness that Emily's mother had eloped. And anyhow, prowling was odd. None of the other Blair Water girls prowled.

There were walks over the hills in the owl's light when the stars rose – one after another, the great constellations of myth and legend. There were frosty moonrises that hurt her with their beauty; spires of pointed firs against fiery sunsets; spruce copses dim with mystery; pacings to and fro on the To-morrow Road. Not the To-morrow Road of June, blossom-misted, tender in young green. Nor yet the To-morrow Road of October, splendid in crimson and gold. But the To-morrow Road of a still, snowy winter twilight – a white, mysterious, silent place full of wizardry. Emily loved it better than all her other dear spots. The spirit delight of that dream-haunted solitude never cloyed – its remote charm never palled.