Emily of New Moon
“You don’t keep your nails clean,” thought Emily.
But he upset every kind of school tradition so speedily and thoroughly
that Ilse, who gloried in upsetting things and hated routine, was the
only scholar that liked him from the start. Some never liked him--the
Rhoda Stuart type for example--but most of them came to it after they
got used to never being used to anything. And Emily finally decided
that she liked him tremendously.
Mr. Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty--a tall man, with
an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey moustache and
eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of which all his
wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean, greyish
face, deeply lined. He lived in a little two-roomed house below the
school with a shy mouse of a wife. He never talked of his past or
offered any explanation of the fact that at his age he had no better
profession than teaching a district school for a pittance of salary,
but the truth leaked out after a while; for Prince Edward Island is a
small province and everybody in it knows something about everybody
else. So eventually Blair Water people, and even the school children,
understood that Mr. Carpenter had been a brilliant student in his youth
and had had his eye on the ministry. But at college he had got in with
a “fast set”--Blair Water people nodded heads slowly and whispered
the dreadful phrase portentously--and the fast set had ruined him. He
“took to drink” and went to the dogs generally. And the upshot of it
all was that Francis Carpenter, who had led his class in his first and
second years at McGill, and for whom his teachers had predicted a great
career, was a country school-teacher at forty-five with no prospect of
ever being anything else. Perhaps he was resigned to it--perhaps not.
Nobody ever knew, not even the brown mouse of a wife. Nobody in Blair
Water cared--he was a good teacher, and that was all that mattered.
Even if he did go on occasional “sprees” he always took Saturday for
them and was sober enough by Monday. Sober, and especially dignified,
wearing a rusty black frock coat which he never put on any other day
of the week. He did not invite pity and he did not pose as a tragedy.
But sometimes, when Emily looked at his face, bent over the arithmetic
problems of Blair Water School, she felt horribly sorry for him without
in the least understanding why.
He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at least
once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few minutes,
tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him patience,
abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his wrath in
particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few minutes Mr.
Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun bursting through a
storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating. Nobody seemed to
cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He never said any of the
biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say, which rankled and festered
for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on just and unjust and rolled
off harmlessly.
He could take a joke on himself in perfect good nature. “Do you hear
me? Do you hear me, sirrah?” he bellowed to Perry Miller one day. “Of
course I hear you,” retorted Perry coolly, “they could hear you in
Charlottetown.” Mr. Carpenter stared for a moment, then broke into a
great, jolly laugh.
His methods of teaching were so different from Miss Brownell’s that
the Blair Water pupils at first felt as if he had stood them on their
heads. Miss Brownell had been a martinet for order. Mr. Carpenter
never tried to keep order apparently. But somehow he kept the children
so busy that they had no time to do mischief. He taught history
tempestuously for a month, making his pupils play the different
characters and enact the incidents. He never bothered any one to
learn dates--but the dates stuck in the memory just the same. If, as
Mary Queen of Scots, you were beheaded by the school axe, kneeling
blindfolded at the doorstep, with Perry Miller, wearing a mask made out
of a piece of Aunt Laura’s old black silk, for executioner, wondering
what would happen if he brought the axe down _too_ hard, you did not
forget the year it happened; and if you fought the battle of Waterloo
all over the school playground, and heard Teddy Kent shouting, “Up,
Guards and at ’em!” as he led the last furious charge you remembered
1815 without half trying to.
Next month history would be thrust aside altogether and geography
would take its place, when school and playground were mapped out into
countries and you dressed up as the animals inhabiting them or traded
in various commodities over their rivers and cities. When Rhoda Stuart
had cheated you in a bargain in hides, you remembered that she had
bought the cargo from the Argentine Republic, and when Perry Miller
would not drink any water for a whole hot summer day because he was
crossing the Arabian Desert with a caravan of camels and could not
find an oasis, and then drank so much that he took terrible cramps and
Aunt Laura had to be up all night with him--you did not forget where
the said desert was. The trustees were quite scandalized over some of
the goings on and felt sure that the children were having too good a
time to be really learning anything.
If you wanted to learn Latin and French you had to do it by talking
your exercises, not writing them, and on Friday afternoons all lessons
were put aside and Mr. Carpenter made the children recite poems, make
speeches and declaim passages from Shakespeare and the Bible. This was
the day Ilse loved. Mr. Carpenter pounced on her gift like a starving
dog on a bone and drilled her without mercy. They had endless fights
and Ilse stamped her foot and called him names while the other pupils
wondered why she was not punished for it but at last had to give in
and do as he willed. Ilse went to school regularly--something she had
never done before. Mr. Carpenter had told her that if she were absent
for a day without good excuse she could take no part in the Friday
“exercises” and this would have killed her.
One day Mr. Carpenter had picked up Teddy’s slate and found a sketch
of himself on it, in one of his favourite if not exactly beautiful
attitudes. Teddy had labelled it “The Black Death”--half of the pupils
of the school having died that day of the Great Plague, and having
been carried out on stretchers to the Potter’s Field by the terrified
survivors.
Teddy expected a roar of denunciation, for the day before Garrett
Marshall had been ground into figurative pulp on being discovered with
the picture of a harmless cow on his slate--at least, Garrett said he
meant it for a cow. But now this amazing Mr. Carpenter only drew his
beetling brows together, looked earnestly at Teddy’s slate, put it down
on the desk, looked at Teddy, and said,
“I don’t know anything about drawing--I can’t help you, but, by gad, I
think hereafter you’d better give up those extra arithmetic problems in
the afternoon and draw pictures.”
Whereupon Garrett Marshall went home and told his father that “old
Carpenter” wasn’t fair and “made favourites” over Teddy Kent.
Mr. Carpenter went up to the Tansy Patch that evening and saw the
sketches in Teddy’s old barn-loft studio. Then he went into the house
and talked to Mrs. Kent. What he said and what she said nobody ever
knew. But Mr. Carpenter went away looking grim, as if he had met an
unexpected match. He took great pains with Teddy’s general school work
after that and procured from somewhere certain elementary text books on
drawing which he gave him, telling him not to take them home--a caution
Teddy did not require. He knew quite well that if he did they would
disappear as mysteriously as his cats had done. He had taken Emily’s
advice and told his mother he would not love _her_ if anything happened
to Leo, and Leo flourished and waxed fat and doggy. But Teddy was too
gentle at heart and too fond of his mother to make such a threat more
than once. He knew she had cried all that night after Mr. Carpenter had
been there, and prayed on her knees in her little bedroom most of the
next day, and looked at him with bitter, haunting eyes for a week. He
wished she were more like other fellows’ mothers but they loved each
other very much and had dear hours together in the little grey house on
the tansy hill. It was only when other people were about that Mrs. Kent
was queer and jealous.
“She’s always lovely when we’re alone,” Teddy had told Emily.
As for the other boys, Perry Miller was the only one Mr. Carpenter
bothered much with in the way of speeches--and he was as merciless
with him as with Ilse. Perry worked hard to please him and practiced
his speeches in barn and field--and even by nights in the kitchen
loft--until Aunt Elizabeth put a stop to _that_. Emily could not
understand why Mr. Carpenter would smile amiably and say, “Very good”
when Neddy Gray rattled off a speech glibly, without any expression
whatever, and then rage at Perry and denounce him as a dunce and a
nincompoop, by gad, because he had failed to give just the proper
emphasis on a certain word, or had timed his gesture a fraction of a
second too soon.
Neither could she understand why he made red pencil corrections
all over her compositions and rated her for split infinitives and
too lavish adjectives and strode up and down the aisle and hurled
objurgations at her because she didn’t know “a good place to stop when
she saw it, by gad,” and then told Rhoda Stuart and Nan Lee that their
compositions were very pretty and gave them back without so much as
a mark on them. Yet, in spite of it all, she liked him more and more
as time went on and autumn passed and winter came with its beautiful
bare-limbed trees, and soft pearl-grey skies that were slashed with
rifts of gold in the afternoons, and cleared to a jewelled pageantry of
stars over the wide white hills and valleys around New Moon.
Emily shot up so that winter that Aunt Laura had to let down the tucks
in her dresses. Aunt Ruth, who had come for a week’s visit, said she
was outgrowing her strength--consumptive children always did.
“I am _not_ consumptive,” Emily said. “The Starrs are tall,” she added,
with a touch of subtle malice hardly to be looked for in near-thirteen.
Aunt Ruth, who was sensitive in regard to her dumpiness, sniffed.
“It would be well if _that_ were the only thing in which you resemble
them,” she said. “How are you getting on in school?”
“Very well. I am the smartest scholar in my class,” answered Emily
composedly.
“You conceited child!” said Aunt Ruth.
“I’m _not_ conceited.” Emily looked scornful indignation. “Mr.
Carpenter said it and _he_ doesn’t flatter. Besides, I can’t help
seeing it myself.”
“Well, it is to be hoped you have some brains, because you haven’t
much in the way of looks,” said Aunt Ruth. “You’ve no complexion to
speak of--and that inky hair around your white face is startling. I see
you’re going to be a plain girl.”
“You wouldn’t say that to a grown-up person’s face,” said Emily with a
deliberate gravity which always exasperated Aunt Ruth because she could
not understand it in a child. “I don’t think it would hurt you to be as
polite to me as you are to other people.”
“I’m telling you your faults so you may correct them,” said Aunt Ruth
frigidly.
“It _isn’t_ my fault that my face is pale and my hair black,” protested
Emily. “I can’t correct that.”
“If you were a different girl,” said Aunt Ruth, “I would--”
“But I don’t _want_ to be a different girl,” said Emily decidedly. She
had no intention of lowering the Starr flag to Aunt Ruth. “I wouldn’t
want to be anybody but myself even if I am plain. Besides,” she added