Lucy Montgomery - Emily Climbs

"I must write all these things down in my Jimmy-book to-morrow. They are fascinating... but, after all, I like writing of beautiful things better. Only... these things have a TANG beautiful things don't have some way. Those woods out there... how wonderful they are in their silver and shadow. The moonlight is doing strange things to the tombstones... it makes even the ugly ones beautiful. But it's terribly hot... it is smothering here... and those thunder-growls are coming nearer. I hope Ilse and I will get home before the storm breaks. Oh, Mr. Sampson, Mr. Sampson, God isn't an angry God... you don't know anything about Him if you say that... He's sorrowful, I'm sure, when we're foolish and wicked, but He doesn't fly into tantrums. Your God and Ellen Greene's God are exactly alike. I'd like to get up and tell you so, but it isn't a Murray tradition to sass back in church. You make God ugly... and He's beautiful. I hate you for making God ugly, you fat little man."

Whereupon Mr. Sampson, who had several times noted Emily's intent, probing gaze, and thought he was impressing her tremendously with a sense of her unsaved condition, finished with a final urgent whoop of entreaty, and sat down. The audience in the close, oppressive atmosphere of the crowded, lamplit church gave an audible sigh of relief, and scarcely waited for the hymn and benediction before crowding out to purer air. Emily, caught in the current, and parted from Aunt Laura, was swept out by way of the choir door to the left of the pulpit. It was some time before she could disentangle herself from the throng and hurry around to the front where she expected to meet Ilse. Here was another dense, though rapidly thinning crowd, in which she found no trace of Ilse. Suddenly Emily noticed that she did not have her hymn-book. Hastily she dashed back to the choir door. She must have left her hymn-book in the pew... and it would never do to leave it there. In it she had placed for safe-keeping a slip of paper on which she had furtively jotted down some fragmentary notes during the last hymn... a rather biting description of scrawny Miss Potter in the choir... a couple of satiric sentences regarding Mr. Sampson himself... and a few random fancies which she desired most of all to hide because there was in them something of dream and vision which would have made the reading of them by alien eyes a sacrilege.

Old Jacob Banks, the sexton, a little blind and more than a little deaf, was turning out the lamps as she went in. He had reached the two on the wall behind the pulpit. Emily caught her hymn-book from the rack... her slip of paper was not in it. By the faint gleam of light, as Jacob Banks turned out the last lamp, she saw it on the floor, under the seat of the pew in front. She kneeled down and reached after it. As she did so Jacob went out and locked the choir door. Emily did not notice his going... the church was still faintly illuminated by the moon that as yet outrode the rapidly climbing thunder-heads. That was not the right slip of paper after all... WHERE could it be?... oh, here, at last. She caught it up and ran to the door which would not open.

For the first time Emily realized that Jacob Banks had gone... that she was alone in the church. She wasted time trying to open the door... then in calling Mr. Banks. Finally she ran down the aisle into the front porch. As she did so she heard the last buggy turn gridingly at the gate and drive away: at the same time the moon was suddenly swallowed up by the black clouds and the church was engulfed in darkness... close, hot, smothering, almost tangible darkness. Emily screamed in sudden panic... beat on the door... frantically twisted the handle... screamed again. Oh, everybody could not have gone... surely somebody would hear her! "Aunt Laura"... "Cousin Jimmy"... "Ilse"... then finally in a wail of despair... "Oh, Teddy... Teddy!"

A blue-white stream of lightning swept the porch, followed by a crash of thunder. One of the worst storms in Blair Water annals had begun... and Emily Starr was locked alone in the dark church in the maple woods... she, who had always been afraid of thunderstorms with a reasonless, instinctive fear which she could never banish and only partially control.

She sank, quivering, on a step of the gallery stairs, and huddled there in a heap. Surely some one would come back when it was discovered she was missing. But WOULD it be discovered? Who would miss her? Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy would suppose she was with Ilse, as had been arranged. Ilse, who had evidently gone, believing that Emily was not coming with her, would suppose she had gone home to New Moon. Nobody knew where she was... nobody would come back for her. She must stay here in this horrible, lonely, black, echoing place... for now the church she knew so well and loved for its old associations of Sunday-school and song and homely faces of dear friends had become a ghostly, alien place full of haunting terrors. There was no escape. The windows could not be opened. The church was ventilated by transom-like panes near the top of them, which were opened and shut by pulling a wire. She could not get up to them, and she could not have got through them if she had.

She cowered down on the step, shuddering from head to foot. By now the thunder and lightning were almost incessant: rain blew against the windows, not in drops but sheets, and intermittent volleys of hail bombarded them. The wind had risen suddenly with the storm and shrieked around the church. It was not her old dear friend of childhood, the bat-winged, misty "Wind Woman," but a legion of yelling witches. "The Prince of the Power of the Air rules the wind," she had heard Mad Mr. Morrison say once. Why should she think of Mad Mr. Morrison now? How the windows rattled as if demon riders of the storm were shaking them! She had heard a wild tale of some one hearing the organ play in the empty church one night several years ago. SUPPOSE IT BEGAN PLAYING NOW! No fancy seemed too grotesque or horrible to come true. Didn't the stairs creak? The blackness between the lightnings was so intense that it looked THICK. Emily was frightened of it touching her and buried her face in her lap.

Presently, however, she got a grip on herself and began to reflect that she was not living up to Murray traditions. Murrays were not supposed to go to pieces like this. Murrays were not foolishly panicky in thunder-storms. Those old Murrays sleeping in the private graveyard across the pond would have scorned her as a degenerate descendant. Aunt Elizabeth would have said that it was the Starr coming out in her. She must be brave: after all, she had lived through worse hours than this... the night she had eaten of Lofty John's poisoned apple*... the afternoon she had fallen over the rocks of Malvern Bay. This had come so suddenly on her that she had been in the throes of terror before she could brace herself against it. She MUST pick up. Nothing dreadful was going to happen to her... nothing worse than staying all night in the church. In the morning she could attract the attention of some one passing. She had been here over an hour now, and nothing had happened to her... unless indeed her hair had turned white, as she understood hair sometimes did. There had been such a funny, crinkly, crawly feeling at the roots of it at times. Emily held out her long braid, ready for the next flash. When it came she saw that her hair was still black. She sighed with relief and began to chirk up. The storm was passing. The thunder-peals were growing fainter and fewer, though the rain continued to fall and the wind to drive and shriek around the church, whining through the big keyhole eerily.

* See Emily of New Moon.

Emily straightened her shoulders and cautiously let down her feet to a lower step. She thought she had better try to get back into the church. If another cloud came up, the steeple might be struck... steeples were always getting struck, she remembered: it might come crashing down on the, porch right over her. She would go in and sit down in the Murray pew: she would be cool and sensible and collected: she was ashamed of her panic... but it HAD been terrible.