Lucy Montgomery - Emily Climbs

"Where can we sleep? Hang ourselves over this fence?"

"Over on that haystack," said Emily. "It's only half finished... Hardscrabble fashion. The top is flat... there's a ladder leaning against it... the hay is dry and clean... the night is summer warm... there are no mosquitoes this time of year... we can put our raincoats over us to keep off the dew. Why not?"

Ilse looked at the haystack in the corner of the little pasture... and began to laugh assentingly.

"What will Aunt Ruth say?"

"Aunt Ruth need never know it. I'll be sly for once with a vengeance. Besides, I've always longed to sleep out in the open. It's been one of the secret wishes I believed were for ever unattainable, hedged about as I am with aunts. And now it has tumbled into my lap like a gift thrown down by the gods. It's really such good luck as to be uncanny."

"Suppose it rains," said Ilse, who, nevertheless, found the idea very alluring.

"It won't rain... there isn't a cloud in sight except those great fluffy rose-and-white ones piling up over Indian Head. They're the kind of clouds that always make me feel that I'd love to soar up on wings as eagles and swoop right down into the middle of them."

It was easy to ascend the little haystack. They sank down on its top with sighs of content, realizing that they were tireder than they had thought. The stack was built of the wild, fragrant grasses of the little pasture, and yielded an indescribably alluring aroma, such as no cultivated clover can give. They could see nothing but a great sky of faint rose above them, pricked with early stars, and the dim fringe of tree-tops around the field. Bats and swallows swooped darkly above them against the paling western gold... delicate fragrances exhaled from the mosses and ferns just over the fence under the trees... a couple of aspen poplars in the corner talked in silvery whispers, of the gossip of the woods. They laughed together in sheer lawless pleasure. An ancient enchantment was suddenly upon them, and the white magic of the sky and the dark magic of the woods wove the final spell of a potent incantation.

"Such loveliness as this doesn't seem real," murmured Emily. "It's so wonderful it HURTS me. I'm afraid to speak out loud for fear it will vanish. Were we vexed with that horrid old man and his beastly politics to-day, Ilse? Why, he doesn't exist... not in THIS world, anyway. I hear the Wind Woman running with soft, soft footsteps over the hill. I shall always think of the wind as a personality. She is a shrew when she blows from the north... a lonely seeker when she blows from the east... a laughing girl when she comes from the west... and to-night from the south a little grey fairy."

"How do you think of such things?" asked Ilse. This was a question which, for some mysterious reason, always annoyed Emily.

"I don't think of them... they COME," she answered rather shortly.

Ilse resented the tone.

"For heaven's sake, Emily, don't be such a crank!" she exclaimed.

For a second the wonderful world in which Emily was at the moment living, trembled and wavered like a disturbed reflection in water. Then...

"Don't let's quarrel HERE," she implored. "One of us might push the other off the haystack."

Ilse burst out laughing. Nobody can really laugh and keep angry. So their night under the stars was not spoiled by a fight. They talked for a while in whispers, of schoolgirl secrets and dreams and fears. They even talked of getting married some time in the future. Of course they shouldn't have, but they DID. Ilse, it appeared, was slightly pessimistic in regard to her matrimonial chances.

"The boys like me as a pal but I don't believe any one will ever really fall in love with me."

"Nonsense," said Emily reassuringly. "Nine out of ten men will fall in love with you."

"But it will be the tenth I'll want," persisted Ilse gloomily.

And then they talked of almost everything else in the world. Finally, they made a solemn compact that whichever one of them died first was to come back to the other if it were possible. How many such compacts have been made! And has even one ever been kept?

Then Ilse grew drowsy and fell asleep. But Emily did not sleep... did not want to sleep. It was too dear a night to go to sleep, she felt. She wanted to lie awake for the pleasure of it and think over a thousand things.

Emily always looked back to that night spent under the stars as a sort of milestone. Everything in it and of it ministered to her. It filled her with its beauty, which she must later give to the world. She wished that she could coin some magic word that might express it.

The round moon rose. Did an old witch in a high-crowned hat ride past it on a broomstick? No, it was only a bat and the little tip of a hemlock-tree by the fence. She made a poem on it at once, the lines singing themselves through her consciousness without effort. With one side of her nature she liked writing prose best... with the other she liked writing poetry. This side was uppermost to-night and her very thoughts ran into rhyme. A great, pulsating star hung low in the sky over Indian Head. Emily gazed on it and recalled Teddy's old fancy of his previous existence in a star. The idea seized on her imagination and she spun a dream-life, lived in some happy planet circling round that mighty, far-off sun. Then came the northern lights... drifts of pale fire over the sky... spears of light, as of empyrean armies... pale, elusive hosts retreating and advancing. Emily lay and watched them in rapture. Her soul was washed pure in that great bath of splendour. She was a high priestess of loveliness assisting at the divine rites of her worship... and she knew her goddess smiled.

She was glad Ilse was asleep. Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful... as if the finite were for a second infinity... as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity... as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty. Oh... beauty... Emily shivered with the pure ecstasy of it. She loved it... it filled her being to-night as never before. She was afraid to move or breathe lest she break the current of beauty that was flowing through her. Life seemed like a wonderful instrument on which to play supernal harmonies.

"Oh, God, make me worthy of it... oh, make me worthy of it," she prayed. Could she ever be worthy of such a message... could she dare try to carry some of the loveliness of that "dialogue divine" back to the everyday world of sordid market-place and clamorous street? She MUST give it... she could not keep it to herself. Would the world listen... understand... feel? Only if she were faithful to the trust and gave out that which was committed to her, careless of blame or praise. High priestess of beauty... yes, she would serve at no other shrine!

She fell asleep in this rapt mood... dreamed that she was Sappho springing from the Leucadian rock... woke to find herself at the bottom of the haystack with Ilse's startled face peering down at her. Fortunately so much of the stack had slipped down with her that she was able to say cautiously,

"I think I'm all in one piece still."

When you have fallen asleep listening to the hymns of the gods it is something of an anti-climax to be awakened by an ignominious tumble from a haystack. But at least it had aroused them in time to see the sunrise over Indian Head, which was worth the sacrifice of several hours of inglorious ease.

"Besides, I might never have known what an exquisite thing a spider's web beaded with dew is," said Emily. "LOOK at it... swung between those two tall, plumy grasses."