Lucy Montgomery - Emily Climbs

"July 7, 19...

"Two years of High School are over. The result of my exams was such as to please even Aunt Ruth, who condescended to say that she always knew I could study if I put my mind to it. In brief, I led my class. And I'm pleased. But I begin to understand what Dean meant when he said real education was what you dug out of life for yourself. After all, the things that have taught me the most these past two years have been my wanderings in the Land of Uprightness, and my night on the haystack, and the Lady Giovanna, and the old woman who spanked the King, and trying to write nothing but FACTS, and things like that. Even rejection slips and hating Evelyn Blake have taught me something. Speaking of Evelyn... she failed in her exams and will have to take her senior year over again. I am truly sorry.

"That sounds as if I were a most amiable, forgiving creature. Let me be perfectly frank. I am sorry she didn't pass, because if she had she wouldn't be in school next year.

"July 20, 19...

"Ilse and I go bathing every day now. Aunt Laura is always very particular about seeing that we have our bathing suits with us. I wonder if she ever heard any faint, far-off echoes of our moonlit petticoatedness.

"But so far our dips have been in the afternoon. And afterwards we have a glorious wallow on sun-warm, golden sands, with the gauzy dunes behind us stretching to the harbour, and the lazy blue sea before us, dotted over with sails that are silver in the magic of the sunlight. Oh, life is good... good... good. In spite of three rejection slips that came to-day. Those very editors will be ASKING for my work some day! Meanwhile Aunt Laura is teaching me how to make a certain rich and complicated kind of chocolate cake after a recipe which a friend of hers in Virginia sent her thirty years ago. Nobody in Blair Water has ever been able to get it and Aunt Laura made me solemnly promise I would never reveal it.

"The real name of the cake is Devil's Food, but Aunt Elizabeth will not have it called that.

"Aug. 2, 19...

"I was down seeing Mr. Carpenter this evening. He has been laid up with rheumatism and one can see he is getting old. He was very cranky with the scholars last year and there was some protest against keeping him on, but it was done. Most of the Blair Water people have sense enough to realize that with all his crankiness Mr. Carpenter is a teacher in a thousand.

"'One can't teach fools amiably,' he growled, when the trustees told him there were complaints about his harshness.

"Perhaps it was his rheumatism that made Mr. Carpenter rather crusty over the poems I took to him for criticism. When he read the one I had composed that April night on a hill-top he tossed it back to me... 'pretty little gossamer thing,' he said.

"And I had really thought the poem expressed in some measure the enchantment of that evening. How I must have failed!

"Then I gave him the poem I had written after I had come in that night. He read it over twice, then he deliberately tore it into strips.

"'Now... WHY?' I said, rather annoyed. 'There was nothing wrong about that poem, Mr. Carpenter.'

"'Not about its body,' he said. 'Every line of it, taken by itself, might be read in Sunday-school. But its SOUL... what mood were you in when you wrote that in heaven's name?'

"'The mood of the Golden Age,' I said.

"'No... of an age far before that. That poem was sheer Paganism, girl, though I don't think you realize it. To be sure, from the point of view of literature it's worth a thousand of your pretty songs. All the same, that way danger lies. Better stick to your own age. You're part of it and can possess it without its possessing you. Emily, there was a streak of diabolism in that poem. It's enough to make me believe that poets ARE inspired... by some spirits outside themselves. Didn't you feel POSSESSED when you wrote it?'

"'Yes,' I said, remembering. I felt rather glad Mr. Carpenter had torn the poem up. I could never have done it myself. I have destroyed a great many of my poems that seemed trash on successive readings, but this one never seemed so and it always brought back the strange charm and terror of that walk. But Mr. Carpenter was right... I feel it.

"He also berated me because I happened to mention I had been reading Mrs. Hemans' poems. Aunt Laura has a cherished volume, bound in faded blue and gold, with an inscription from an admirer. In Aunt Laura's youth it was the thing to give your adored a volume of poetry on her birthday. The things Mr. Carpenter said about Mrs. Hemans were not fit to write in a young lady's diary. I suppose he is right in the main... yet I DO like some of her poems. Just here and there comes a line or verse that haunts me for days, delightfully.

"The march of the hosts as Alaric passed

is one... though I can't give any REASON for my liking it... one never CAN give reasons for enchantment... and another is,

"The sounds of the sea and the sounds of the night Were around Clotilde as she knelt to pray In a chapel where the mighty lay On the old Provencal shore.

"That isn't great poetry... but there's a bit of magic in it for all that... concentrated in the last line, I think. I never read it without feeling that I am Clotilde, kneeling there... 'on the old Provencal shore'... with the banners of forgotten wars waving over me.

"Mr. Carpenter sneered at my 'liking for slops' and told me to go and read the Elsie books! But when I was coming away he paid me the first personal compliment I ever had from him.

"'I like that blue dress you've got on. And you know how to wear it. That's good. I can't bear to see a woman badly dressed. It hurts me... and it must hurt God Almighty. I've no use for dowds and I'm sure He hasn't. After all, if you know how to dress yourself it won't matter if you do like Mrs. Hemans.'

"I met Old Kelly on the way home and he stopped and gave me a bag of candy and sent his 'rispects to HIM.'

"August 15, 19...

"This is a wonderful year for columbines. The old orchard is full of them... all in lovely white and purple and fairy blue and dreamy pink colour. They are half wild and so have a charm no real tamed garden flower ever has. And what a name... COLUMBINE is poetry itself. How much lovelier the common names of flowers are than the horrid Latiny names the florists stick in their catalogues. Heartsease and Bride's Bouquet, Prince's Feather, Snap-dragon, Flora's Paint Brush, Dusty Millers, Bachelor's Buttons, Baby's Breath, Love-in-a-mist... oh, I love them all.

"September 1, 19...

"Two things happened to-day. One was a letter from Great-aunt Nancy to Aunt Elizabeth. Aunt Nancy has never taken any notice of my existence since my visit to Priest Pond four years ago. But she is still alive, ninety-four years old, and from all accounts quite lively yet. She wrote some sarcastic things in her letter, about both me and Aunt Elizabeth; but she wound up by offering to pay all my expenses in Shrewsbury next year, including my board to Aunt Ruth.

"I am very glad. In spite of Aunt Nancy's sarcasm I don't mind feeling indebted to her. SHE has never nagged or patronized me... or did anything for me because she felt it her 'duty.' 'Hang duty,' she said in her letter. 'I'm doing this because it will vex some of the Priests, and because Wallace is putting on too many airs about "helping to educate Emily." I dare say you feel yourself that you've done virtuously. Tell Emily to go back to Shrewsbury and learn all she can... but to hide it and show her ankles.' Aunt Elizabeth was horrified at this and wouldn't show me the letter. But Cousin Jimmy told me what was in it.

"The second thing was that Aunt Elizabeth informed me that, since Aunt Nancy was paying my expenses, she, Aunt Elizabeth, felt that she ought not to hold me any longer to my promise about writing fiction. I was, she told me, free to do as I chose about that matter.