Emily Climbs (7 page)

“Tell them yourself,” suggested Miss Potter.

“Oh, no,
I
don’t want to get in wrong with my neighbours.
I
am not responsible for Emily Starr’s training, thank goodness. If I were I wouldn’t let her have so much to do with Jarback Priest, either. He’s the queerest of all those queer Priests. I’m sure he must have a bad influence over her. Those green eyes of his positively give me the creeps. I can’t find out that he believes in
anything
.”

(
Emily, sarcastically again:
“Not even the Devil?”) “There’s a queer story going around about him and Emily,” said Miss Potter. “I can’t make head or tail of it. They were seen on the big hill last Wednesday evening at sunset, behaving in a most extraordinary fashion. They would walk along with their eyes fixed on the sky – then suddenly stop – grasp each other by the arm and point upward. They did it time and again. Mrs. Price was watching them from the window and she can’t imagine what they were up to. It was too early for stars, and
she
couldn’t see a solitary thing in the sky. She laid awake all night wondering about it.”

“Well, it all comes to this – Emily Starr needs looking after,” said Mrs. Ann Cyrilla. “I sometimes feel that it would be wiser to stop Muriel and Gladys from going about so much with her.”

(
Emily, devoutly:
“I wish you
would
. They are so stupid and silly and they just stick around Ilse and me all the time.”)

“When all is said and done, I pity her,” said Miss Potter. “She’s so foolish and high-minded that she’ll get in wrong with
every one, and no decent, sensible man will ever be bothered with her. Geoff North says he went home with her once and that was enough for
him
.”

(
Emily, emphatically:
“I believe you! Geoff showed almost human intelligence in
that
remark.”)

“But then she probably won’t live through her teens. She looks very consumptive. Really, Ann Cyrilla, I
do
feel sorry for the poor thing.”

This was the proverbial last straw for Emily.
She
, whole Starr and half Murray, to be pitied by Beulah Potter! Mother Hubbard or no Mother Hubbard, it could not be borne! The closet door suddenly opened wide and Emily stood revealed, Mother Hubbard and all, against a background of boots and jumpers. Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes black. The mouths of Mrs. Ann Cyrilla and Miss Beulah Potter fell open and stayed open; their faces turned dull red; they were dumb.

Emily looked at them steadily for a minute of scornful, eloquent silence. Then, with the air of a queen, she swept across the kitchen and vanished through the sitting-room door, just as Aunt Elizabeth came up the sandstone steps with dignified apologies for keeping them waiting. Miss Potter and Mrs. Ann Cyrilla were so dumbfounded that they were hardly able to talk about the Ladies’ Aid, and got themselves confusedly away after a few jerky questions and answers. Aunt Elizabeth did not know what to make of them and thought they must have been unreasonably offended over having to wait. Then she dismissed the matter from her mind. A Murray did not care what Potters thought or did. The open closet door told no tales, and she did not know that up in the lookout chamber Emily was lying face downward across the bed crying passionately for shame and anger and humiliation. She felt degraded and hurt. It had all been the outcome of her own
silly vanity in the beginning – she acknowledged that – but her punishment had been
too
severe.

She did not mind so much what Miss Potter had said, but Mrs. Ann Cyrilla’s tiny barbs of malice
did
sting. She had liked pretty, pleasant Mrs. Ann Cyrilla, who had always seemed kind and friendly and had paid her many compliments. She had thought Mrs. Ann Cyrilla had really liked her. And now to find out that she would talk about her like this!

“Couldn’t they have said
one
good thing of me?” she sobbed. “Oh, I feel
soiled
somehow– between my own silliness and their malice – and all dirty and messed-up mentally. Will I ever feel
clean
again?”

She did not feel “clean” until she had written it all out in her diary. Then she took a less distorted view of it and summoned philosophy to her aid.

“Mr. Carpenter says we should make every experience teach us something,” she wrote. “He says every experience, no matter whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, has something for us if we are able to view it dispassionately. ‘That,’ he added bitterly, ‘is one of the pieces of good advice I have kept by me all my life and never been able to make any use of myself.’

“Very well, I shall try to view this dispassionately! I suppose the way to do it is to consider all that was said of me and decide just what was
true
and what false, and what merely distorted – which is worse than the false, I think.

“To begin with: hiding in the closet at all, just out of vanity, comes under my heading of bad deeds. And I
suppose
that appearing as I did, after I
had
stayed there so long, and covering them with confusion, was another. But if so, I can’t feel it ‘dispassionately’ yet, because I am sinfully glad I did it – yes, even if they did see me in the Mother Hubbard! I shall never forget their faces! Especially Mrs. Ann Cyrilla’s. Miss Potter
won’t worry over it long – she will say it served me right – but Mrs. Ann Cyrilla will never, to her dying day, get over being
found out
like that.

“Now for a review of their criticisms of Emily Byrd Starr and the decision as to whether said Emily Byrd Starr deserved the said criticisms, wholly or in part. Be honest now, Emily ‘look then into thy heart’ and try to see yourself, not as Miss Potter sees you or as you see yourself, but as you really are.

“(I think I’m going to find this interesting!)

“In the first place, Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said I was pig-headed.

“
Am
I pig-headed?

“I know I am determined, and Aunt Elizabeth says I am stubborn. But pig-headedness is worse than either of those. Determination is a good quality and even stubbornness has a saving grace in it if you have a little gumption as well. But a pig-headed person is one who is too stupid to see or understand the foolishness of a certain course and insists on taking it – insists, in short, on running full tilt into a stone wall.

“No, I am
not
pig-headed. I accept stone walls.

“But I take a good deal of convincing that they
are
stone walls and not cardboard imitations. Therefore, I
am
a little stubborn.

“Miss Potter said I was a flirt. This is wholly untrue, so I won’t discuss it. But she also said I ‘made eyes.’ Now do I? I don’t mean to – I know that; but it seems you can ‘make eyes’ without being conscious of it, so how am I going to prevent that? I can’t go about all the days of my life with my eyes dropped down. Dean said the other day:

“‘When you look at me like that, Star, there is nothing for me but to do as you ask.’

“And Aunt Elizabeth was quite annoyed last week because she said I was looking ‘improperly at Perry when I was
coaxing him to go to the Sunday School picnic. (Perry hates Sunday School picnics.)

“Now, in both cases I thought I was only looking
beseechingly
.

“Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said I wasn’t pretty. Is that true?”

Emily laid down her pen, went over to the mirror and took a “dispassionate” stock of her looks. Black of hair – smoke-purple of eye – crimson of lip. So far, not bad. Her forehead was too high, but the new way of doing her hair obviated that defect. Her skin was very white and her cheeks, which had been so pale in childhood, were now as delicately hued as a pink pearl. Her mouth was too large, but her teeth were good. Her slightly pointed ears gave her a fawn-like charm. Her neck had lines that she could not help liking. Her slender, immature figure was graceful; she knew, for Aunt Nancy had told her, that she had the Shipley ankle and instep. Emily looked very earnestly at Emily-in-the-Glass from several angles, and returned to her diary.

“I have decided that I am not pretty,” she wrote. “I think I
look
quite pretty when my hair is done a certain way, but a really pretty girl would be pretty no matter how her hair was done, so Mrs. Ann Cyrilla was right. But I feel sure that I am not so plain as she implied, either.

“Then she said I was sly – and
deep
. I don’t think it is any fault to be ‘deep,’ though she spoke as if she thought it was. I would rather be deep than shallow. But am I sly?
No
. I am
not
. Then what is it about me that makes people think I am sly? Aunt Ruth always insists that I am.
I
think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people, of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this – I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it
slyness when it is only self-defence. So I won’t worry over that.

“Miss Potter said an abominable thing – that I passed off clever speeches I had read in books, as my own – trying to be smart. That is
utterly false
. Honestly, I never ‘try to be smart.’ But – I
do
try often to see how a certain thing I’ve thought out sounds when it is put into words. Perhaps this is a kind of showing-off I must be careful about it.

“Jealous: no, I’m not that. I
do
like to be first, I admit. But it wasn’t because I was jealous of Ilse that I cried that night at the concert. I cried because I felt I had made a mess of my part. I
was
a stick, just as Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said. I can’t
act
a part somehow. Sometimes a certain part seems to suit me and then I can
be
it, but if not I’m no good in a dialogue. I only went in it to oblige Mrs. Johnson, and I felt horribly mortified because I knew she was disappointed. And I suppose my pride suffered a bit, but I never thought of being jealous of Ilse. I was proud of her – she does magnificently in a play.

“Yes, I contradict. I admit that
is
one of my faults. But people do say such outrageous things! And why isn’t it as bad for people to contradict me? They do it continually – and I am
right
just as often as they are.

“Sarcastic? Yes, I’m afraid that is another of my faults. Touchy– no, I’m
not
. I’m only
sensitive
. And proud? Well, yes, I
am
a little proud – but not nearly as proud as people think me. I can’t help carrying my head at a certain angle and I can’t help feeling it is a great thing to have a century of good, upright people with fine traditions and considerable brains behind you. Not like the Potters – upstarts of yesterday!

“Oh, how those women garbled things about poor Ilse. We couldn’t, I suppose, expect a Potter or the wife of a Potter to recognize the sleep-walking scene from
Lady Macbeth
. I have told Ilse repeatedly that she ought to see that all doors are
shut when she tries it over. She is quite wonderful in it. She
never
was at that charivari – she only said she’d
like
to go. And as for the moonlight bathing – that was true enough except that we had
some
stitches on. There was nothing dreadful about it. It was perfectly beautiful – though now it is all spoiled and degraded by being dragged about in common gossip. I wish Ilse hadn’t told about it.

“We had gone away up the sandshore for a walk. It was a moonlit night and the sandshore was wonderful. The Wind Woman was rustling in the grasses on the dunes and there was a long, gentle wash of little gleaming waves on the shore. We wanted to bathe, but at first we thought we couldn’t because we didn’t have our bathing dresses. So we sat on the sands and talked of a hundred things. It was real conversation – not just talk. The great gulf stretched out before us, silvery, gleaming, alluring, going farther and farther into the mists of the northern sky. It was like an ocean in ‘fairylands forlorn.’

“I said:

“‘I would like to get into a ship and sail straight out there – out – out – where would I land?’

“‘Anticosti, I expect,’ said Ilse – a bit too prosaically, I thought.

“‘No – no – Ultima Thule, I think,’ I said dreamily. ‘Some beautiful unknown shore where “the rain never falls, and the wind never blows.” Perhaps the country back of the North Wind where
Diamond went
. One could sail to it over that silver sea on a night like this.’

“
‘That was
heaven, I think,’ said Ilse.

“Then we talked about immortality, and Ilse said she was afraid of it – afraid of living for ever and for ever; she said she was sure she would get awfully tired of herself. I said I thought I liked Dean’s idea of a succession of lives – I can’t make out
from him whether he really believes that or not – and Ilse said that might be all very well if you were sure of being born again as a decent person, but how about it if you weren’t?

“‘Well, you have to take some risk in any kind of immortality’ I said.

“‘Anyhow,’ said Ilse, ‘whether I am myself or somebody else next time, I do hope I won’t have such a dreadful temper. If I just go on being myself I’ll smash my harp and tear my halo to pieces and pull all the feathers out of the other angels’ wings half an hour after getting to heaven. You know I will, Emily. I can’t help it. I had a fiendish quarrel with Perry yesterday again. It was all my fault – but of course he vexed me by his boasting. I
wish
I could control my temper.’

“I don’t mind Ilse’s rages one bit now – I know she never means anything she says in them. I never say anything back. I just smile at her and if I’ve a bit of paper handy I jot down the things she says. This infuriates her so that she chokes with anger and can’t say anything more. At all others times Ilse is a darling and such good fun.

“‘You can’t control your rages because you like going into them,’ I said.

“Ilse stared at me.

“‘I don’t – I don’t.’

“You do. You enjoy them,’ I insisted.

“‘Well, of course,’ said Ilse, grinning, ‘I
do
have a good time while they last. It’s awfully
satisfying
to say the most insulting things and call the worst names. I believe you’re right, Emily. I
do
enjoy them. Queer I never thought of it. I suppose if I really were unhappy in them I wouldn’t go into them. But after they’re over – I’m so remorseful. I cried for an hour yesterday after fighting with Perry’