Lucy Montgomery - Emily's Quest

"No"... firmly... "he can't."

Why couldn't they understand? Abraham HAD whiskers... WANTED whiskers... was determined to have whiskers. SHE couldn't change him.

"It's time we remembered that these people have no real existence," rebuked Aunt Elizabeth.

But once... Emily counted it her greatest triumph... Aunt Elizabeth laughed. She was so ashamed of it she would not even smile all the rest of the reading.

"Elizabeth thinks God doesn't like to hear us laugh," Cousin Jimmy whispered behind his hand to Laura. If Elizabeth had not been lying there with a broken leg Laura would have smiled. But to smile under the circumstances seemed like taking an unfair advantage of her.

Cousin Jimmy went downstairs shaking his head and murmuring, "HOW does she do it? How DOES she do it! I can write poetry... but THIS. Those folks are alive!"

One of them was too much alive in Aunt Elizabeth's opinion.

"That Nicholas Applegath is too much like old Douglas Courcy, of Shrewsbury," she said. "I told you not to put any people we knew in it."

"Why, I never saw Douglas Courcy."

"It's him to the life. Even Jimmy noticed it. You must cut him out, Emily."

But Emily obstinately refused to "cut him out." Old Nicholas was one of the best characters in her book. She was very much absorbed in it by this time. The composition of it was never the ecstatic rite the creation of A Seller of Dreams had been, but it was very fascinating. She forgot all vexing and haunting things while she was writing it. The last chapter was finished the very day the splints were taken off Aunt Elizabeth's leg and she was carried down to the kitchen lounge.

"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.

Too sick at heart to war With failure any more.

"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."

As 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... 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...

"This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately 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."