Lucy Montgomery - Emily Climbs

"Was Perry Miller to dinner at DR. HARDY'S?" asked Aunt Elizabeth. This was another staggerer for her. The world... the Murray world... must be literally turned upside-down if Stovepipe Town was invited to dinner on Queen Street. At the same moment Aunt Ruth remembered with a pang of horror that Perry Miller had seen her in her pink flannel nightgown. It hadn't mattered before... he had been only the help-boy at New Moon. NOW he was Dr. Hardy's guest.

"Yes. Dr. Hardy thinks he is a very brilliant debater and says he has a future," said Emily. "Well," snapped Aunt Ruth, " I wish you would stop prowling about my house at all hours, writing novels. If you had been in your bed, as you should have been, this would never have happened."

"I wasn't writing novels," cried Emily. "I've never written a word of fiction since I promised Aunt Elizabeth. I wasn't writing ANYTHING. I told you I just went down to get my Jimmy-book."

"WHY couldn't you have left that where it was till morning?" persisted Aunt Ruth.

"Come, come," said Cousin Jimmy, "don't start up another argument. I want my supper. You girls go and get it."

Elizabeth and Laura left the room as meekly as if old Archibald Murray himself had commanded it. After a moment Ruth followed them. Things had not turned out just as she anticipated; but, after all, she was resigned. It would not have been a nice thing for a scandal like this concerning a Murray to be blown abroad, as must have happened if a verdict of guilty had been found against Emily.

"So THAT'S settled," said Cousin Jimmy to Emily as the door closed.

Emily drew a long breath. The quiet, dignified old room suddenly seemed very beautiful and friendly to her.

"Yes, thanks to you," she said, springing across it to give him an impetuous hug. "Now, scold me, Cousin Jimmy, scold me HARD."

"No, no. But it WOULD have been more prudent NOT to have opened that window, wouldn't it now, Pussy?"

"Of course it would. But prudence is such a shoddy virtue at times, Cousin Jimmy. One is ashamed of it... one likes to just go ahead and... and... "

"And hang consequences," supplied Cousin Jimmy.

"Something like that," Emily laughed. "I hate to go mincing through life, afraid to take a single long step for fear somebody is watching. I want to 'wave my wild tail and walk by my wild lone.' There wasn't a bit of real harm in my opening that window and talking to Perry. There wasn't even any harm in his trying to kiss me. He just did it to tease me. Oh, I HATE conventions. As you say... hang consequences."

"But we can't hang 'em, Pussy... that's just the trouble. They're more likely to hang us. I put it to you, Pussy... suppose... there's no harm in supposing it... that you were grown up and married and had a daughter of your age, and you went downstairs one night and found her as Aunt Ruth found you and Perry. WOULD you like it? WOULD you be well pleased? Honest, now?"

Emily stared hard at the fire for a moment.

"No, I wouldn't," she said at last. "But then... that's different. I wouldn't KNOW."

Cousin Jimmy chuckled.

"That's the point, Pussy. Other people can't KNOW. So we've got to watch our step. Oh, I'm only simple Jimmy Murray, but I can see we have to watch our step. Pussy, we're going to have roast spare- ribs for supper."

A savoury whiff crept in from the kitchen at that very moment... a homely, comfortable odour that had nothing in common with compromising situations and family skeletons. Emily gave Cousin Jimmy another hug.

"Better a dinner of herbs where Cousin Jimmy is than roast spare- ribs and Aunt Ruth therewith," she said.

"April 3, 19...

"There ARE times when I am tempted to believe in the influence of evil stars or the reality of unlucky days. Otherwise how can such diabolical things happen as do happen to well-meaning people? Aunt Ruth has only just begun to grow weary of recalling the night she found Perry kissing me in the dining-room, and now I'm in another ridiculous scrape.

"I will be honest. It was not dropping my umbrella which was responsible for it, neither was it the fact that I let the kitchen mirror at New Moon fall last Saturday and crack. It was just my own carelessness.

"St. John's Presbyterian church here in Shrewsbury became vacant at New Year's and has been hearing candidates. Mr. Towers of the Times asked me to report the sermons for his paper on such Sundays as I was not in Blair Water. The first sermon was good and I reported it with pleasure. The second one was harmless, very harmless, and I reported it without pain. But the third, which I heard last Sunday, was ridiculous. I said so to Aunt Ruth on the way home from church and Aunt Ruth said, 'Do you think YOU are competent to criticize a sermon?'

"Well, yes, I do!

"That sermon was a most inconsistent thing. Mr. Wickham contradicted himself half a dozen times. He mixed his metaphors... he attributed something to St. Paul that belonged to Shakespeare... he committed almost every conceivable literary sin, including the unpardonable one of being deadly dull. However, it was my business to report the sermon, so report it I did. Then I had to do something to get it out of my system, so I wrote, for my own satisfaction, an analysis of it. It was a crazy but delightful deed. I showed up all the inconsistencies, the misquotations, the weaknesses and the wobblings. I enjoyed writing it... I made it as pointed and satirical and satanical as I could... oh, I admit it was a very vitriolic document.

"Then I handed IT into the Times by mistake!

"Mr. Towers passed it over to the typesetter without reading it. He had a touching confidence in my work, which he will never have again. It came out the next day.

"I woke to find myself infamous.

"I expected Mr. Towers would be furious; but he is only mildly annoyed... and a little amused at the back of it. It isn't as if Mr. Wickham had been a settled minister here, of course. Nobody cared for him or his sermon and Mr. Towers is a Presbyterian, so the St. John's people can't accuse him of wanting to insult THEM. It is poor Emily B. on whom is laid the whole burden of condemnation. It appears most of them think I did it 'to show off.' Aunt Ruth is furious, Aunt Elizabeth outraged; Aunt Laura grieved, Cousin Jimmy alarmed. It is such a shocking thing to criticize a minister's sermon. It is a Murray tradition that ministers' sermons... Presbyterian Ministers' especially... are sacrosanct. My presumption and vanity will yet be the ruin of me, so Aunt Elizabeth coldly informs me. The only person who seems pleased is Mr. Carpenter. (Dean is away in New York. I know HE would like it, too.) Mr. Carpenter is telling every one that my 'report' is the best thing of its kind he ever read. But Mr. Carpenter is suspected of heresy, so his commendation will not go far to rehabilitate me.

"I feel wretched over the affair. My mistakes worry me more than my sins sometimes. And yet, an unholy something, 'way back in me, is grinning over it all. Every word in that 'report' was true. And more than true... appropriate. I didn't mix my metaphors.

"Now, to live this down!

"April 20, 19...

"'Awake thou north wind and come thou south. Blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out.'

"So chanted I as I went through the Land of Uprightness this evening... only I put 'woods' in place of garden. For spring is just around the corner and I have forgotten everything but gladness.

"We had a grey, rainy dawn but sunshine came in the afternoon and a bit of April frost to-night... just enough to make the earth firm. It seemed to me a night when the ancient gods might be met with in the lonely places. But I saw nothing except some sly things back among the fir copses that MAY have been companies of goblins, if they weren't merely shadows.