Lucy Montgomery: Emily's Quest

"Good little sport," muttered Mr. Carpenter after the second exchange of winks. "Glad... you're there."

At three o'clock he grew rather restless. Aunt Louisa came in again.

"He can't die till the tide goes out, you know," she explained to Emily in a solemn whisper.

"Get out of this with your superstitious blather," said Mr. Carpenter loudly and clearly. "I'll die when I'm d... n well ready, tide or no tide."

Horrified Aunt Louisa excused him to Emily on the ground that he was wandering in his mind and slipped out.

"Excuse my common way, won't you?" said Mr. Carpenter. "I HAD to shock her out. Couldn't have that elderly female person... round watching me die. Given her... a good yarn to tell... the rest of her... life. Awful... warning. And yet... she's a good soul. So good... she bores me. No evil in her. Somehow... one needs... a spice... of evil... in every personality. It's the... pinch of... salt... that brings out... the flavour."

Another silence. Then he added gravely,

"Trouble is... the Cook... makes the pinch... too large... in most cases. Inexperienced Cook... wiser after... a few eternities."

Emily thought he really was "wandering" now but he smiled at her.

"Glad you're here... little pal. Don't mind being... here... do you?"

"No," said Emily.

"When a Murray says... no... she means it."

After another silence Mr. Carpenter began again, this time more to himself, as it seemed, than anyone else.

"Going out... out beyond the dawn. Past the morning star. Used to think I'd be frightened. Not frightened. Funny. Think how much I'm going to know... in just a few more minutes, Emily. Wiser than anybody else living. Always wanted to know... to KNOW. Never liked guesses. Done with curiosity... about life. Just curious now... about death. I'll know the truth, Emily... just a few more minutes and I'll know the... truth. No more guessing. And if... it's as I think... I'll be... young again. You can't know what... it means. You... who ARE young... can't have... the least idea... what it means... to be young... AGAIN."

His voice sank into restless muttering for a time, then rose clearly,

"Emily, promise me... that you'll never write... to please anybody... but yourself."

Emily hesitated a moment. Just what did such a promise mean?

"Promise," whispered Mr. Carpenter insistently.

Emily promised.

"That's right," said Mr. Carpenter with a sigh of relief. "Keep that... and you'll be... all right. No use trying to please everybody. No use trying to please... critics. Live under your own hat. Don't be... led away... by those howls about realism. Remember... pine woods are just as real as... pigsties... and a darn sight pleasanter to be in. You'll get there... sometime... you have the root... of the matter... in you. And don't... tell the world... everything. That's what's the... matter... with our... literature. Lost the charm of mystery... and reserve. There's something else I wanted to say... some caution... I can't... seem to remember... "

"Don't try," said Emily gently. "Don't tire yourself."

"Not... tired. Feel quite through... with being tired. I'm dying... I'm a failure... poor as a rat. But after all, Emily... I've had a... darned interesting time."

Mr. Carpenter shut his eyes and looked so deathlike that Emily made an involuntary movement of alarm. He lifted a bleached hand.

"No... don't call her. Don't call that weeping lady back. Just yourself, little Emily of New Moon. Clever little girl, Emily. What was it... I wanted to say to her?"

A moment or two later he opened his eyes and said in a loud, clear voice, "Open the door... open the door. Death must not be kept waiting."

Emily ran to the little door and set it wide. A strong wind of the grey sea rushed in. Aunt Louisa ran in from the kitchen.

"The tide has turned... he's going out with it... he's gone."

Not quite. As Emily bent over him the keen, shaggy-brown eyes opened for the last time. Mr. Carpenter essayed a wink but could not compass it.

"I've... thought of it," he whispered. "Beware... of... italics."

Was there a little impish chuckle at the end of the words? Aunt Louisa always declared there was. Graceless old Mr. Carpenter had died laughing... saying something about Italians. Of course he was delirious. But Aunt Louisa always felt it had been a very unedifying deathbed. She was thankful that few such had come in her experience.

Emily went blindly home and wept for her old friend in the room of her dreams. What a gallant old soul he was... going out into the shadow... or into the sunlight?... with a laugh and a jest. Whatever his faults there had never been anything of the coward about old Mr. Carpenter. Her world, she knew, would be a colder place now that he was gone. It seemed many years since she had left New Moon in the darkness. She felt some inward monition that told her she had come to a certain parting of the ways of life. Mr. Carpenter's death would not make any external difference for her. Nevertheless, it was as a milestone to which in after years she could look back and say,

"After I passed that point everything was different."

All her life she had grown, as it seemed, by these fits and starts. Going on quietly and changelessly for months and years; then all at once suddenly realizing that she had left some "low-vaulted past" and emerged into some "new temple" of the soul more spacious than all that had gone before. Though always, at first, with a chill of change and a sense of loss.

The 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 italicized the "liked." There were some things Mr. Carpenter had not known.

*See Emily of New Moon.

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 marriages 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.