III
Of Teddy Emily never heard, save from occasional items in newspapers which represented him as advancing steadily in his career. He was beginning to have an international reputation as a portrait painter. The old days of magazine illustrations were gone and Emily was never now confronted with her own face - or her own smile - or her own eyes - looking out at her from some casual page.
One winter Mrs. Kent died. Before her death she sent Emily a brief note - the only word Emily had ever had from her.
"I am dying. When I am dead, Emily, tell Teddy about the letter. I've tried to tell him, but I couldn't. I couldn't tell my son I had done that. Tell him for me."
Emily smiled sadly as she put the letter away. It was too late to tell Teddy. He had long since ceased to care for her. And she - she would love him forever. And even though he knew it not, surely such love would hover around him all his life like an invisible benediction, not understood but dimly felt, guarding him from ill and keeping from him all things of harm and evil.
IV
That same winter it was bruited abroad that Jim Butterworth of Derry Pond, had bought or was about to buy the Disappointed House. He meant, so rumour said, to haul it away, rebuild and enlarge it; and doubtless when this was done he would install therein as mistress a certain buxom, thrifty damsel of Derry Pond known as "Geordie Bridge's Mabel." Emily heard the report with anguish. She slipped out that evening in the chill spring dusk and went up the dim overgrown path over the spruce hill to the front gate of the little house like an unquiet ghost. Surely it couldn't be true that Dean had sold it. The house belonged to the hill. One couldn't imagine the hill without it.
Once Emily had got Aunt Laura to see about bringing her own belongings from it - all but the gazing-ball. She could not bear to see that. It must be still hanging there, reflecting in its silver gloom by the dim light that fell through the slits of the shutters, the living-room just as it was when she and Dean had parted. Rumour said Dean had taken nothing from it. All he had put in it was still there.
The little house must be very cold. It was so long since there was a fire in it. How neglected - how lonely - how heartbroken it looked. No light in the window - grass growing thickly over the paths - rank weeds crowding around the long-unopened door.
Emily stretched out her arms as if she wanted to put them around the house. Daff rubbed against her ankles and purred pleadingly. He did not like damp, chilly prowls - the fireside at New Moon was better for a pussy not so young as he once was. Emily lifted the old cat and set him on the crumbling gatepost.
"Daff," she said, "there is an old fireplace in that house - with the ashes of a dead fire in it - a fireplace where pussies should bask and children dream. And that will never happen now, Daff, for Mabel Geordie doesn't like open fireplaces - dirty, dusty things - a Quebec heater is so much warmer and more economical. Don't you wish - or do you! - Daff, that you and I had been born sensible creatures, alive to the superior advantages of Quebec heaters!"
TWENTY-SEVEN
I
It came clearly and suddenly on the air of a June evening. An old, old call - two higher notes and one long and soft and low. Emily Starr, dreaming at her window, heard it and stood up, her face suddenly gone white. Dreaming still - she must be! Teddy Kent was thousands of miles away, in the Orient - so much she knew from an item in a Montreal paper. Yes, she had dreamed it - imagined it.
It came again. And Emily knew that Teddy was there, waiting for her in Lofty John's bush - calling to her across the years. She went down slowly - out - across the garden. Of course Teddy was there - under the firs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should come to her there, in that old-world garden where the three Lombardies still kept guard. Nothing was wanting to bridge the years. There was no gulf. He put out his hands and drew her to him, with no conventional greeting. And spoke as if there were no years - no memories - between them.
"Don't tell me you can't love me - you can - you must - why, Emily" - his eyes had met the moonlit brilliance of hers for a moment - "you do."
II
"It's dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other," said Emily some minutes - or hours - later.
"I've been trying all my life to tell you I loved you," said Teddy. "Do you remember that evening long ago in the Tomorrow Road after we left high school? Just as I was trying to scare up my courage to ask you if you'd wait for me you said night air was bad for you and went in. I thought it a poor excuse for getting rid of me - I knew you didn't care a hoot about night air. That set me back for years. When I heard about you and Aylmer Vincent - Mother wrote you were engaged - it was a nasty shock. For the first time it occurred to me that you really didn't belong to me, after all. And that winter you were ill - I was nearly wild. Away there in France where I couldn't see you. And people writing that Dean Priest was always with you and would probably marry you if you recovered. Then came the word that you were going to marry him. I won't talk of that. But when you -you - saved me from going to my death on the Flavian I knew you did belong to me, once and for all, whether you knew it or not. Then I tried again that morning by Blair Water - and again you snubbed me mercilessly. Shaking off my touch as if my hand were a snake. And you never answered my letter. Emily, why didn't you? You say you've always cared -"
"I never got the letter."
"Never got it? But I mailed it -"
"Yes, I know. I must tell you - she said I was to tell you -" She told him briefly.
"My mother?. Did that?"
"You mustn't judge her harshly, Teddy. You know she wasn't like other women. Her quarrel with your father - did you know -"
"Yes, she told me all about that - when she came to me in Montreal. But this - Emily -"
"Let us just forget it - and forgive. She was so warped and unhappy she didn't know what she was doing. And I - I - was too proud - too proud to go when you called me that last time. I wanted to go - but I thought you were only amusing yourself-"
"I gave up hope then - finally. It had fooled me too often. I saw you at your window, shining, as it seemed to me, with an icy radiance like some cold, wintry star - I knew you heard me - it was the first time you had failed to answer our old call. There seemed nothing to do but forget you - if I could. I never succeeded, but I thought I did - except when I looked at Vega of the Lyre. And I was lonely. Ilse was a good pal. Besides, I think I thought I could talk to her about you - keep a little corner in your life as the husband of some one you loved. I knew Ilse didn't care much for me - I was only the consolation prize. But I thought we could jog along very well together and help each other keep away the fearful lonesomeness of the world. And then" -Teddy laughed at himself- "when she 'left me at the altar' according to the very formula of Bertha M. Clay I was furious. She had made such a fool of me - me, who fancied I was beginning to cut quite a figure in the world. My word, how I hated women for awhile! And I was hurt, too. I had got very fond of Ilse - I really did love her - in a way."
"In a way." Emily felt no jealousy of that.
III
"I don't know as I'd take Ilse's leavings," remarked Aunt Elizabeth.
Emily flashed on Aunt Elizabeth one of her old starry looks.
"Ilse's leavings. Why, Teddy has always belonged to me and I to him. Heart, soul and body," said Emily.
Aunt Elizabeth shuddered. One ought to feel these things - perhaps - but it was indecent to say them.
"Always sly," was Aunt Ruth's comment.
"She'd better marry him right off before she changes her mind again" said Aunt Addie.
"I suppose she won't wipe his kisses off," said Uncle Wallace.
Yet, on the whole, the clan were pleased. Much pleased. After all their anxieties over Emily's love-affairs, to see her "settled" so respectably with a "boy" well known to them, who had, so far as they knew at least, no bad habits and no disgraceful antecedents. And who was doing pretty well in the business of picture-painting. They would not exactly say so, bu
t Old Kelly said it for them.
"Ah, now, that's something like," said Old Kelly approvingly.
IV
Dean wrote a little while before the quiet bridal at New Moon. A fat letter with an enclosure - a deed to the Disappointed House and all it contained.
"I want you to take this, Star, as my wedding gift. That house must not be disappointed again. I want it to live at last. You and Teddy can make use of it as a summer home. And some day I will come to see you in it. I claim my old corner in your house of friendship now and then."
"How very - dear - of Dean. And I am so glad - he is not hurt any longer."
She was standing where the Tomorrow Road opened out on the Blair Water valley. Behind her she heard Teddy's eager footsteps coming to her. Before her on the dark hill, against the sunset, was the little beloved grey house that was to be disappointed no longer.
THE END
AFTERWORD
BY P.K. PAGE
I wish I had been old enough to read Emily's Quest in 1927 when it was first published; or - failing that - that I had read it in my early teens. Coming to it as an adult, I can see it only as a period piece - a charming period piece, mind you - but a period piece, nonetheless.
I try to imagine what my responses would have been had I read it earlier. Unquestionably, I would have identified with Emily's wish to write. But because I had two older friends who were reporters on the local paper, it would not have occurred to me that it was difficult for a woman to be a writer, and so Montgomery's feminist concerns would have been wasted on me. I would have understood Emily's love of nature, and her idealistic, romantic view of the world. I would have recognized what she meant by "the flash," and been fascinated by, and probably envious of, her psychic powers. When I came across "Aunt Laura, who owned to a Dr. Fell feeling about Mr. Wallace ..." I would undoubtedly have been pleased that I could complete the verse, "I do not love thee Dr. Fell." "Cremona" and "simoleons," which I now know to mean "violin" and "dollars," would have baffled me then. And I would have been, as I am now, bewildered by the origin of "spleet-new" - a descriptive enough phrase in context, which is seemingly without derivation.
But as I was also reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in my early teens - covertly, perhaps, and not without trauma - I suspect I would have found Emily's Quest too young for me; although, had I read it any younger, it would not have addressed my more childish interests, and I would have found it too old. I think L.M. Montgomery herself would have understood my reaction, for, in a letter to her friend G.B. MacMillan, she complained that "the public and publisher won't allow me to write of a young girl as she really is. One can write of children as they are ... but when you come to write of the 'miss' you have to depict a sweet insipid young thing - really a child grown older - to whom the basic realities of life and reactions to them are quite unknown. Love must scarcely be hinted at - yet young girls often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of Emily's type certainly would."
In Emily's Quest, love is more than hinted at. It is the theme of the book. I can imagine a time when young teenage girls (not of my generation, and certainly not of the current one, in which twelve-year-olds, if they read at all, are said to prefer novels about teenage abortion) would have found the book a romantic story and even a guide to love. And because of the charm of the book, I cannot help but want young readers for it. I wonder if today a still younger group - more precocious than anything I have dreamed of-independent yet starry-eyed, now gobbles it up.
Emily is attracted to men, and her various love affairs (if one can call them that) might well have alerted young readers to the fact that, although English provides us with only one word for them, there are many kinds of love. To Aunt Laura's "But there's only one way of loving," Emily replies, "Oh, no, dearest of Victorian aunties ... There are a dozen different ways." Who would not have been helped by knowing - preferably before the event! - that if you are at the mercy of eros you can be "in love" one minute and "out of love" the next? - as Emily was with Aylmer Vincent; and that an immense liking for a person (agape) such as she felt for Dean Priest, is not the same as amor, which she felt for Teddy Kent. In addition, Emily's love for her aunts and tenderness for her uncle Jimmy might be described as caritas, a still different emotion. L.M. Montgomery helps us see that one word cannot serve for four such different emotions.
In a less knowing age, the book might have been informative and engrossing - for what subject is of greater interest? - not only to adolescents but to us all. Perhaps something in us recognizes that so strong a passion, or so great a fidelity, or such a willingness to serve or care for another must have links with a love that is higher, and beyond naming.
It was in 1920, after completing six Anne books, that L.M. Montgomery confessed she had "gone completely 'stale' on Anne and must get a new heroine." That was the year Emily was born. The same year also saw her copying passages from Olive Schreiner into her journal. "There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers; everlastings that never wither; speedwells that wait for the wind to fan them out of life; blood-red mountain lilies that pour their voluptuous sweetness out for one day and lie in the dust at night. There is no flower that has the charm of all - the speedwell's purity, the everlasting's strength, the mountain-lily's warmth; but who knows whether there is no love that holds all - friendship, passion, worship?" To which Montgomery adds, "Yes, I think there must be a love which embraces them all - but it is rarer than a blue diamond."
Love, clearly, was very much on her mind. And not without reason. In 1911, when she was thirty-six, having failed to find her "blue diamond," she married Ewan Macdonald, a minister, for whom she felt no grand passion. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they make ministers' wives," she wrote to G.B. MacMillan, her confidant over many years. And in 1920, towards the end of a long list of things she claimed to like, we find, "I like good spruce gum. I like my husband. I like people to like me."
It is not surprising that she damned with faint praise, for hers was a difficult marriage. Today, there would be a clinical term for her husband's melancholia, which took the form of believing himself predestined to hell. Highly strung herself, she kept sane by writing. Between Anne of Green Gables in 1908 and Rilla of Ingleside in 1920 - in addition to a memoir, articles, stories, and poems - she published eleven novels. In February 1922, two years after she conceived the idea, she had finished Emily of New Moon. Emily Climbs followed two years later, and Emily's Quest two years later again.
I find it hard to see these three books separately. The child is so clearly mother to the woman. They might be one long book that begins magically - L.M. Montgomery has an extraordinary eye for children. But as the book progresses, and we ask more of it, it becomes thinner, offers us less. When we want soul we are given temperament. It is not that Montgomery has no talent for character. The Emily we meet in Emily's Quest is the same Emily we met in Emily of New Moon, different only in that she spells better, is taller, and finds "the 'love-talk' that had bothered her so much" in writing her early stories has become easier. She is a charming young woman, still romantic, idealistic, and passionate. She reads Marie Bashkirtseff, The Story of An African Farm, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, the poems of Alice Meynell, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Marjorie Pickthall. And as a true Canadian (Montgomery was born one year after Prince Edward Island entered Confederation), she resists the golden lure of the United States, convinced that she can write just as well, if not better, in Prince Edward Island. In this belief she is encouraged by an increasing number of literary successes; and, when discouraged - as from time to time she inevitably is - she turns for inspiration to lines from "The Fringed Gentian":
Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep,
That leads to heights sublime.
How I may reach that far-off goal
Of true and honored fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman's humb
le name.
That L.M. Montgomery was, herself, inspired by the same verse seems evident from the fact that she called her memoir The Alpine Path.
In the light shed by her journals, it is startlingly apparent that Emily and L.M. Montgomery have much in common. I draw attention to this with some reluctance. As a writer myself, I find irritating the belittling of the creative imagination implicit in the belief that all fiction is autobiographical. Yet in this case, the similarities cannot be overlooked.
Both L.M. Montgomery and her heroine were high-spirited, fun-loving girls, brought up by elderly relatives who had little understanding of the young; both kept journals; both wanted to be writers; and both had to press to acquire higher levels of education. This is only the beginning. The list could go on and on. (Even the name Emily - M L ee - is almost L.M. backwards with a y attached.) If we still have any lingering doubts as to the origins of Emily, we can turn to L.M. Montgomery herself: "People were never right in saying I was Anne, but, in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily."
Having read the journals, I can only agree. But one glaring factual difference, among many lesser ones, distinguishes the two women. Emily, unlike her author, marries the man she loves. I cannot help wondering if L.M. Montgomery found vicarious pleasure in giving Emily the "blue diamond" she would have liked for herself. Emily's own words from Emily Climbs persuade me that it is, at least, a possibility: "I read a story tonight. It ended unhappily. I was wretched until I had invented a happy ending for it. I shall always end my stories happily. I don't care whether it's 'true to life' or not. It's true to life as it should be and that's a better truth than the other."