Emily of New Moon
something for which she held Aunt Elizabeth responsible and for which
she felt she could never wholly forgive her. It did not seem possible
to get any substitute. As Cousin Jimmy had said, writing paper of any
kind was scarce at New Moon. Letters were seldom written, and when
they were a sheet of note-paper sufficed. Emily dared not ask Aunt
Elizabeth for any. There were times when she felt she would burst if
she couldn’t write out some of the things that came to her. She found
a certain safety valve in writing on her slate in school; but these
scribblings had to be rubbed off sooner or later--which left Emily with
a sense of loss--and there was always the danger that Miss Brownell
would see them. That, Emily felt, would be unendurable. No stranger
eyes must behold these sacred productions. Sometimes she let Rhoda read
them, though Rhoda rasped her by giggling over her finest flights.
Emily thought Rhoda as near perfection as a human being could be, but
giggling was her fault.
But there is a destiny which shapes the ends of young misses who are
born with the itch for writing tingling in their baby fingertips, and
in the fulness of time this destiny gave to Emily the desire of her
heart--gave it to her, too, on the very day when she most needed it.
That was the day, the ill-starred day, when Miss Brownell elected to
show the fifth class, by example as well as precept, how the _Bugle
Song_ should be read.
Standing on the platform Miss Brownell, who was not devoid of a
superficial, elocutionary knack, read those three wonderful verses.
Emily, who should have been doing a sum in long division, dropped her
pencil and listened entranced. She had never heard the _Bugle Song_
before--but now she heard it--and _saw_ it--the rose-red splendour
falling on those storied, snowy summits and ruined castles--the
lights that never were on land or sea streaming over the lakes--she
heard the wild echoes flying through the purple valleys and the misty
passes--the mere sound of the words seemed to make an exquisite echo
in her soul--and when Miss Brownell came to “Horns of elf-land faintly
blowing” Emily trembled with delight. She was snatched out of herself.
She forgot everything but the magic of that unequalled line--she sprang
from her seat, knocking her slate to the floor with a clatter, she
rushed up the aisle, she caught Miss Brownell’s arm.
“Oh, teacher,” she cried with passionate earnestness, “read that line
over again--oh, read that line over again!”
Miss Brownell, thus suddenly halted in her elocutionary display, looked
down into a rapt, uplifted face where great purplish-grey eyes were
shining with the radiance of a divine vision--and Miss Brownell was
angry. Angry with this breach of her strict discipline--angry with this
unseemly display of interest in a third class atom whose attention
should have been focused on long division. Miss Brownell shut her book
and shut her lips and gave Emily a resounding slap on her face.
“Go right back to your seat and mind your own business, Emily Starr,”
said Miss Brownell, her cold eyes malignant with her fury.
Emily, thus dashed to earth, moved back to her seat in a daze. Her
smitten cheek was crimson, but the wound was in her heart. One
moment ago in the seventh heaven--and now _this_--pain, humiliation,
misunderstanding! She could not bear it. What had she done to deserve
it? She had never been slapped in her life before. The degradation
and the injustice ate into her soul. She could not cry--this was “a
grief too deep for tears”--she went home from school in a suppressed
anguish of bitterness and shame and resentment--an anguish that had no
outlet, for she dared not tell her story at New Moon. Aunt Elizabeth,
she felt sure, would say that Miss Brownell had done quite right, and
even Aunt Laura, kind and sweet as she was, would not understand. She
would be grieved because Emily had misbehaved in school and had had to
be punished.
“Oh, if I could only tell Father all about it!” thought Emily.
She could not eat any supper--she did not think she would ever be able
to eat again. And oh, how she hated that unjust, horrid Miss Brownell!
She could never forgive her--never! If there were only some way in
which she could get square with Miss Brownell! Emily, sitting small and
pale and quiet at the New Moon supper table, was a seething volcano
of wounded feeling and misery and pride--ay, pride! Worse even than
the injustice was the sting of humiliation over this thing that had
happened. She, Emily Byrd Starr, on whom no hand had ever before been
ungently laid, had been slapped like a naughty baby before the whole
school. Who could endure this and live?
Then destiny stepped in and drew Aunt Laura to the sitting-room
bookcase to look in its lower compartment for a certain letter she
wanted to see. She took Emily with her to show her a curious old
snuff-box that had belonged to Hugh Murray, and in rummaging for it
lifted out a big, flat bundle of dusty paper--paper of a deep pink
colour in oddly long and narrow sheets.
“It’s time these old letter-bills were burned,” she said. “What a pile
of them! They’ve been here gathering dust for years and they are no
earthly good. Father once kept the post-office here at New Moon, you
know, Emily. The mail came only three times a week then, and each day
there was one of these long red ‘letter-bills,’ as they were called.
Mother always kept them, though when once used they were of no further
use. But I’m going to burn them right away.”
“Oh, Aunt Laura,” gasped Emily, so torn between desire and fear that
she could hardly speak. “Oh, don’t do that--give them to me--_please_
give them to me.”
“Why, child, what ever do you want of them?”
“Oh, Aunty, they have such lovely blank backs for writing on. Please,
Aunt Laura, it would be a _sin_ to burn those letter-bills.”
“You can have them, dear. Only you’d better not let Elizabeth see them.”
“I won’t--I won’t,” breathed Emily.
She gathered her precious booty into her arms and fairly ran
upstairs--and then upstairs again into the garret, where she already
had her “favourite haunt,” in which her uncomfortable habit of thinking
of things thousands of miles away could not vex Aunt Elizabeth. This
was the quiet corner of the dormer window, where shadows always moved
about, softly and swingingly, and beautiful mosaics patterned the bare
floor. From it one could see over the tree-tops right down to the Blair
Water. The walls were hung around with great bundles of soft fluffy
rolls, all ready for spinning, and hanks of untwisted yarn. Sometimes
Aunt Laura spun on the great wheel at the other end of the garret and
Emily loved the whirr of it.
In the recess of the dormer window she crouched--breathlessly she
selected a letter-bill and extracted a lead pencil from her pocket. An
old sheet of cardboard served as a desk; she began to write feverishly.
“Dear Father”--and then she poured out her tale of the day--of her
rapture and her pain--writing heedlessly and intently until the sunset
faded into dim, star-litten twilight. The chickens went unfed--Cousin
Jimmy had to go himself for the cows--Saucy Sal got no new milk--Aunt
Laura had to wash the dishes--what mattered it? Emily, in the
delightful throes of literary composition, was lost to all worldly
things.
When she had covered the backs of four letter-bills she could see to
write no more. But she had emptied out her soul and it was once more
free from evil passions. She even felt curiously indifferent to Miss
Brownell. Emily folded up her letter-bills and wrote clearly across the
packet,
_Mr. Douglas Starr,
On the Road to Heaven._
Then she stepped softly across to an old, worn-out sofa in a far corner
and knelt down, stowing away her letter and her “letter-bills” snugly
on a little shelf formed by a board nailed across it underneath.
Emily had discovered this one day when playing in the garret and had
noted it as a lovely hiding-place for secret documents. Nobody would
ever come across them there. She had writing paper enough to last for
months--there must be hundreds of those jolly old letter-bills.
“Oh,” cried Emily, dancing down the garret stairs, “I feel as if I was
made out of star-dust.”
Thereafter few evenings passed on which Emily did not steal up to the
garret and write a letter, long or short, to her father. The bitterness
died out of her grief. Writing to him seemed to bring him so near; and
she told him everything, with a certain honesty of confession that
was characteristic of her--her triumphs, her failures, her joys, her
sorrows, everything went down on the letter-bills of a Government which
had not been so economical of paper as it afterwards became. There was
fully half a yard of paper in each bill and Emily wrote a small hand
and made the most of every inch.
“I like New Moon. It’s so _stately_ and _splendid_ here,” she told her
father. “And it seems as if we must be very aristokratik when we have a
sun dyal. I can’t help feeling proud of it all. I am afraid I have too
much pride and so I ask God every night to take _most_ of it away but
not quite all. It is very easy to get a repputation for pride in Blair
Water school. If you walk straight and hold your head up you are a
proud one. Rhoda is proud, too, because her father ought to be King of
England. I wonder how Queen Victoria would feel if she knew that. It’s
very wonderful to have a friend who would be a princess if every one
had their rites. I love Rhoda with all my heart. She is so sweet and
kind. But I don’t like her giggles. And when I told her I could see the
school wallpaper small in the air she said You lie. It hurt me awfully
to have my dearest friend say that to me. And it hurt me worse when I
woke up in the night and thought about it. I had to stay awake ever so
long, too, because I was tired lying on one side and I was afraid to
turn over because Aunt Elizabeth would think I was figitting.
“I didn’t dare tell Rhoda about the Wind Woman because I suppose
that really is a kind of lie, though she seems so real to me. I hear
her now singing up on the roof around the big chimneys. I have no
Emily-in-the-glass here. The looking-glasses are all too high up in
the rooms I’ve been in. I’ve never been in the look-out. It is always
locked. It was Mother’s room and Cousin Jimmy says her father locked
it up after she ran away with you and Aunt Elizabeth keeps it locked
still out of respect to his memory, though Cousin Jimmy says Aunt
Elizabeth used to fight with her father something scandalus when he was
alive though no outsider knew of it because of the Murray pride. I feel
that way myself. When Rhoda asked me if Aunt Elizabeth burned candles
because she was old-fashioned I answered hawtily no, it was a Murray
tradishun. Cousin Jimmy has told me all the tradishuns of the Murrays.
Saucy Sal is very well and bosses the barns but still she will not have
kittens and I can’t understand it. I asked Aunt Elizabeth about it and
she said nice little girls didn’t talk about such things but I cannot
see why kittens are impropper. When Aunt Elizabeth is away Aunt Laura
and I smuggle Sal into the house but when Aunt Elizabeth comes back I
always feel gilty and wish I hadn’t. _But the next time I do it again._
I think that very strange. I never hear about dear Mike. I wrote Ellen
Greene and asked about him and she replyed and never mentioned Mike but
told me all about her roomatism. As if I cared about her roomatism.
“Rhoda is going to have a birthday party and she is going to invite
me. I am so exited. You know I never was to a party before. I think
about it a great deal and picture it out. Rhoda is not going to invite
all the girls but only a favered few. I hope Aunt Elizabeth will let