Emily Climbs (33 page)

“Of course I scolded Ilse. She is a glad, daring creature and counts no cost. She will always do whatever she takes it into her head to do, even if it were to turn a somersault in the church aisle. I love her – love her – love her; and what I will do without her next year I do not know. Our tomorrows will always be separated after this – and grow apart – and when we meet occasionally it will be as strangers. Oh, I know – I know.

“Ilse was furious over what she called Perry’s ‘presumption’ in thinking I could ever marry him.

“‘Oh, it was not presumption – it was condescension,’ I said laughing. ‘Perry belongs to the great ducal house of Carabas.’

“‘Oh, he’ll succeed, of course. But there’ll always be a flavour of Stovepipe Town about him,’ retorted Ilse.

“‘Why have you always been so hard on Perry, Ilse?’ I protested.

“‘He’s such a cackling oaf,’ said Ilse morosely.

“‘Oh, well, he’s just at the age when a boy knows everything,’ I said, feeling quite wise and elderly. ‘He will grow more ignorant and endurable after a while,’ I went on, feeling epigrammatic. ‘And he has improved in these Shrewsbury years,’ I concluded, feeling smug.

“‘You talk as if he were a cabbage,’ fumed Ilse. ‘For heaven’s sake, Emily, don’t be so superior and patronising!’

“There are times when Ilse is good for me. I know I deserved that.

“June 27, 19–

“Last night I dreamed I stood in the old summer-house at New Moon and saw the Lost Diamond sparkling on the
floor at my feet. I picked it up in delight. It lay in my hand for a moment – then it seemed to elude my grasp, flash through the, air, leaving a long, slender trail of brilliance behind it, and become a star in the western sky, just above the edge of the world. ‘It is my star – I must reach it before it sets,’ I thought, and started out. Suddenly Dean was beside me – and he, too, was following the star. I felt I must go slowly because he was lame and could not go fast – and all the time the star sank lower and lower. Yet I felt I couldn’t leave Dean. Then just as suddenly – things
do
happen like that in dreams – so nice – without a bit of trouble – Teddy was beside me, too, holding out his hands to me, with the look in his eyes I had seen twice before. I put my hands in his – and he drew me towards him – I was holding up my face – then Dean gave a bitter cry, ‘My star has set.’ I turned my head for just a glance – the star was gone – and I woke up in a dull, ugly, rainy dawn with no star – no Teddy – no kiss.

“I wonder what the dream meant – if it meant anything. I must not think it did. It is a Murray tradition not to be superstitious.

“June 28, 19–

“This is my last night in Shrewsbury. ‘Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home’ – tomorrow, when Cousin Jimmy is coming for me and my trunk in the old express wagon and I will ride back in that chariot of state to New Moon.

“These three Shrewsbury years seemed so long to me when I looked ahead to them. And now, looking back, they seem as yesterday when it has passed. I think I’ve won something in them. I don’t Ilse so many italics – I’ve acquired a little poise and self-control – I’ve got a bit of bitter, worldly wisdom – and I’ve learned to smile over a rejection slip.
I think that has been the hardest lesson of all to learn – and doubtless the most necessary.

“As I look back over these three years some things stand out so much more clearly and significantly than others, as if they had a special meaning all their own. And not always the things one might expect either. For instance, Evelyn’s enmity and even that horrible moustache incident seemed faded and unimportant. But the moment I saw my first poem in
Garden and Woodland
– oh, that
was
a moment – my walk to New Moon and back the night of the play – the writing of that queer little poem of mine that Mr. Carpenter tore up – my night on the haystack under the September moon – that splendid old woman who spanked the King – the moment in class when I discovered Keats’ lines about the ‘airy voices’ – and that other moment in the old John house when Teddy looked into my eyes – oh, it seems to me these are the things I will remember in the halls of Eternity when Evelyn Blake’s sneers and the John house scandal and Aunt Ruth’s nagging and the routine of lessons and examinations have been for ever forgotten. And my promise to Aunt Elizabeth
has
helped me, as Mr. Carpenter predicted. Not in my diary perhaps – I just let myself
go
here – one must have a ‘vent’ – but in my stories and Jimmy books.

“We had our class day exercises this afternoon. I wore my new cream organdy with the violets in it and carried a big bouquet of pink peonies. Dean, who is in Montreal on his way home, wired the florist here for a bouquet of roses for me – seventeen roses – one for each year of my life – and it was presented to me when I went up for my diploma. That was dear of Dean.

“Perry was class orator and made a fine speech. And he got the medal for general proficiency. It has been a stiff pull between him and Will Morris, but Perry has won out.

“I wrote and read the class day prophecy. It was very amusing and the audience seemed to enjoy it. I had another one in my Jimmy-book at home. It was much
more
amusing but it wouldn’t have done to read it.

“I wrote my last society letter for Mr. Towers tonight. I’ve always hated that stunt but I wanted the few pennies it brought in and one mustn’t scorn the base degrees by which one ascends young ambition’s ladder.

“I’ve also been packing up. Aunt Ruth came up occasionally and looked at me as I packed but was oddly silent. Finally she said, with a sigh,

“‘I shall miss you awfully, Emily.’

“I never dreamed of her saying and feeling anything like that. And it made me feel uncomfortable. Since Aunt Ruth was so decent about the John house scandal I’ve felt differently towards her. But I couldn’t say I’d miss her.

“Yet something had to be said.

“‘I shall always be very grateful to you, Aunt Ruth, for what you have done for me these past three years.’

“‘I’ve tried to do my duty,’ said Aunt Ruth virtuously.

“I find I’m oddly sorry to leave this little room I’ve never liked and that has never liked me, and that long hill starred with lights – after all, I’ve had some wonderful moments here. And even poor dying Byron! But by no stretch of sentiment can I regret parting from Queen Alexandra’s chromo, or the vase of paper flowers. Of course, the Lady Giovanna goes with me. She
belongs
in my room at New Moon. She has always seemed like an exile here. It hurts me to think I shall never again hear the night wind in the Land of Uprightness. But I’ll have my night wind in Lofty John’s bush; I think Aunt Elizabeth means to let me have a kerosene lamp to write by – my door
at New Moon shuts
tight
– and I will not have to drink cambric tea. I went at dusk tonight to that little pearly pool which has always been such a witching spot to linger near on spring evenings. Through the trees that fringed it faint hues of rose and saffron from the west stole across it. It was ruffled by a breath and every leaf and branch and fern and blade of grass was mirrored in it. I looked in – and saw my face; and by an odd twist of reflection from a bending bough I seemed to wear a leafy garland on my head – like a laurel crown.

“I took it as a good omen.

“Perhaps Teddy was only shy!”

THE END

I
t is curious how, at various stages of my early reading life, I wanted to become the literary characters I admired. Before I removed Lucy Maud Montgomery’s three Emily books from the shelves of the North Toronto Library at the age of eleven and a half, I had already been the Little Mermaid, David Copperfield, Peter Pan and/or Wendy (depending on my mood), Nancy Drew (briefly), Mary from
The Secret Garden
, Jo of
Little Women
, and – for a certain dark and troubled period – Catherine of
Wuthering Heights
, Anne of Green Gables, and the semi-fictional Bernadette of Lourdes all at the same time. These young people, most of whom came from another era, drifted in and out of my personality like ghosts, taking possession of my psyche and then taking leave of that murky, unformed region with equal capriciousness. When Emily took up residence, however, she was there to stay. It was as if the three books were mirrors in which I could see not only who girls such as myself had been, who we were now, but who we might eventually come to be. I could see my grandmother at fourteen polishing floors and putting up preserves in the tradition of her ancestors, my mother at twelve borrowing
the village’s only typewriter from the bank because she was going to write a novel, and my several aunts in their farm kitchens looking lovingly, albeit askance, at some of my more bizarre activities. The world that Emily Starr walked around in was familiar and “other” all at the same time. It was rural Ontario
and
Prince Edward Island. It was the country schools my cousins attended. (I belonged to the branch of the family that had moved to the city.) It was high-buttoned boots instead of saddle shoes. Nevertheless, I was certain that it was all mine, that I was home.

As I turned twelve, and then thirteen, I read the books again and again. I was deeply in love with Teddy, liked – for inexplicable reasons – Aunt Ruth and Aunt Elizabeth better than Aunt Laura, wished passionately to discover a Mr. Carpenter somewhere in my scholastic activities, attributed the physical and mental characteristics of Ilse to my bewildered best friend, scrutinized and then responded fiercely to beautiful landscapes, wrote sentimental poetry, and kept desperate diaries. And so it came to be that, long before a single word of mine was typeset, I knew about the joy of a slim rather than a fat envelope arriving in the mail, of seeing something one has created, right there on a printed page (irrelevant that that page be part of a seed catalogue), and the absolute ecstasy of finding the right words and the right form in which to Ilse them. Even as I write this, the child in me can hardly believe that I
am
writing this. I gasp in rapture and clasp the envelope with the publisher’s name on it to my chest. Another step forward on the Alpine Path.

After I found Emily, and before I began falling in love with the wrong people, there was a period during which I read books more dispassionately, with less desperation. I had found, after all, the shoes in which I wished to walk, had in
some way lost that amateur status so necessary to acts of utter identification. All of my other selves disappeared, except for a glimmer of Louisa May Alcott’s American Jo and the French mystic Bernadette.

The connection with the latter is not really as farfetched as it might seem, for I firmly believe that Emily Starr, particularly the adolescent girl of
Emily Climbs
, is a candidate for sainthood; not, in the hackneyed sense of the term, as a distributor of goodness and mercy, but as the recipient of a “call,” a “vocation.” Much like two other rural and literary Emilys, Emily Brontë of Haworth and Emily Dickinson of Amherst, she is subject to the mystical “flash” – a moment of intense focus and supreme awareness, has psychic experiences, and never for one moment doubts the authenticity of her vocation. This is the force that moves her through life, the glass through which she views the world around her. It survives, in fact makes Ilse of, rage, grief, hilarity, depression, and joy. It is her companion and confidant, her dreams and consolation.

The very first chapter of
Emily Climbs
, then, is entitled aptly “Writing Herself Out,” and in it we are introduced, by means of her diary, to Emily’s landscape – her room and its view, the New Moon Farm – and to the characters that people it: the mild and the fierce aunt, the poetic “simple” Cousin Jimmy, the irascible italic-hating teacher Mr. Carpenter, her dead father, the strange Dean Priest, her eccentric best friend Ilse, and her secret love, the visually talented Teddy. What sets these characters apart from those in other Montgomery novels is that they seem to be placed in the protagonist’s life for the simple purpose of causing her to write. This is not only because Emily responds to their activities, their strengths and weaknesses, but also because each, in his or her own way effects the writing process itself. Cousin Jimmy, himself a poet
who might have been great had he not, in his own words, fallen down a well, provides Emily with a series of black notebooks in which she keeps her diaries. The ferocious Mr. Carpenter criticizes and encourages her work. Dean Priest is her link to history and the world: a link that will eventually result in betrayal but that for the purposes of this middle book operates as an exotic educational device. The death of her beloved father created in Emily, at an early age, the need to write, a need that manifested itself in a series of letters to him, letters that in time evolved into her diary. The appearance of Teddy in her life re-activates this need to communicate with the impossible by putting her under the spell of an apparently unrequited love. And, last but not at all least, the authoritarian parental figure of Aunt Elizabeth objects to Emily’s “scribbling nonsense,” thereby adding the necessary element of limited access and the forbidden to the young girl’s treasured vocation.

One cannot help but speculate about the autobiographical aspect of a series of Montgomery novels that deal with a young orphaned girl who is struggling to become a writer in Prince Edward Island. It is my feeling, however, that in
Emily Climbs
Montgomery is not so much attempting to recreate her own past as she is attempting to create an idealized world for a youthful creative spirit. In short, she is building the past as she would have liked to experience it: one with just the right combination of resolved and unresolved relationships, successes and failures, joys and sorrow. One in which the daydreaming girl is met with enough resistance from the ordinary world to instil in her the knowledge that she is “apart” (yet not so much as to silence her), where pitfalls, when they occur, strengthen rather than destroy her, and where isolation in a rural setting on a Canadian island may present some obstacles to her career but not to her vocation.

One of the most moving scenes in
Emily Climbs
concerns this last issue. A seventeen-year-old Emily has been offered the chance by a successful editor to move to New York. Although she is initially thrilled by the idea, she cannot help listening to an older, even crankier Mr. Carpenter, who fears she will become as “Yankeefied” as the editor who is luring her away. “Janet Royal
is
Yankeefied,” he states:

When Emily complains in her own defence that “There’s no chance to do
anything
here,” her old teacher retaliates with a reference to the Brontës. “No,” he says, “no more than there was in Haworth Parsonage.”

It is not, however, Mr. Carpenter’s words that cause Emily to remain in Canada; rather it is her deep attachment to her own geography. As, reaching a decision, she wanders around the New Moon farm looking from the windows of her small room or gazing at the orchard from the garden, we realize that the outer landscape of these surroundings reflects exactly the inner landscape in which Emily’s imagination finds its voice. To leave New Moon and Prince Edward Island would be roughly equivalent, for this Canadian girl, to committing literary suicide. As she tells the successful editor, “Some fountain of living water would dry up in my soul if I left the land I love.”

Trite though that line, out of context, may seem, I wept when I read it at eleven and a half, I wept when I read it at twenty-five, and I weep when I read it now for the simple reason that I know it is the truth. Emily realizes that it is the spirit of the place that keeps her there; the same spirit that has enriched and will continue to enrich her writing.

This is what Montgomery has given us, then, in
Emily Climbs:
a portrait of the young creative spirit of this country at adolescence – a time that is both immensely fertile and heartbreakingly fragile. Out of the raw materials of the best of her own life, she has created a world in which that young spirit can flourish and has peopled it with characters who either assist or resist the heroine and her calling, but who are, nevertheless, always drawn with great love. And she has given us a landscape, both inner and outer, that we are able to recognize as our own.