Emily of New Moon: Chapters 27–31

“‘Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home,’” she declaimed feelingly, standing at the top of the long, dark, shining staircase and apostrophizing the row of grim Priest photographs hanging on the wall.

Fat! They’ll be positively corpulent, Star.

“She doesn’t like anything I like. I’m afraid she’ll poison Leo very soon. I—I wish she wasn’t so fond of me,” he burst out, in the beginning of a revolt against this abnormal jealousy of love, which he felt rather than understood to be a fetter that was becoming galling.

One thing that marked her return—one of those little household “epochs” that make a keener impression on the memory and imagination than perhaps their real importance warrants—was the fact that she was given a room of her own.

“Your mother,” she said, looking coldly at Emily over the flame of the candle—an attitude that gave a rather gruesome effect to her aquiline features—“ran away—flouted her family and broke her father’s heart. She was a silly, ungrateful, disobedient girl. I hope you will never disgrace your family by such conduct.”

There was no use in wasting perfectly good admonitions on a child like this.

Emily, very glad that there was an Emily, opened her lookout window as high as it would go, got into bed and drifted off to sleep, feeling a happiness that was so deep as to be almost pain as she listened to the sonorous sweep of the night wind among the great trees in Lofty John’s bush.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Miss Brownell had been a martinet for order.

He taught history tempestuously for a month, making his pupils play the different characters and enact the incidents.

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.

She herself did think she had been much too lenient with Emily—Laura and Jimmy were two to one—but it nettled her to have Ruth say so.

But Aunt Elizabeth was adamant.
“I do not believe in girls going out into the world,” she said.

If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged determination he showed in all other matters.

Even the milky splendour of the still, mild winter evening and the purple bloom over the hillside woods that presaged a thaw could not give her the accustomed soul-thrill.

Yet she did not learn wisdom therefrom but pursued her policy of repression all the more rigorously; for it occasionally came home to her, as Laura let down tucks, that Emily was on the verge of beginning to grow up and that various breakers and reefs loomed ahead, ominously magnified in the mist of unseen years.

Aunt Elizabeth applied the pruning shears; and found no pliant, snippable root but that same underlying streak of granite.

There had been occasions when she had connived with Aunt Laura to hoodwink Aunt Elizabeth on some little matter, but she found she could not do it in this. This had to be open and above-board.

Emily had no idea what mischief—she could not recall anything she had done recently that should bring her up before the tribunal Aunt Elizabeth occasionally held in the parlour.

Aunt Elizabeth had at last discerned the way to conquer Emily.

It would be pleasant to be able to record that after the reconciliation in the lookout Emily and Aunt Elizabeth lived in entire amity and harmony.

He is always ready to hector and advise other people. He’d better look at home. He’ll come over here and order me to do this or that, or not to do it, for Emily; but if I say one word to him about Ilse he blows the roof off.

Emily went rather languidly upstairs to the lookout.

She was the only woman in the House and, as this was before the days of the suffragettes, she had to endure many sneers and innuendoes and insults from the ungallant males around her.

“The atrocious crime of being a woman which the honourable member has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny, but shall content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their sex and not one of that number who are ignorant in spite of manhood and experience.”

Jimmy Joe Belle, when asked plainly, confessed that his “young ones” had come out with measles the very day after they had been at New Moon. There was therefore not much doubt as to Emily’s malady.

Emily's convalescence was rather slow.

Physically she recovered with normal celerity but a certain spiritual and emotional languor persisted for a time.

No wonder the day seemed fraught with tremendous issues to Emily.

“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr. Carpenter have it all his own way.

Aim and Endeavour—too didactic—too didactic. You’ve no right to try to teach until you’re old—and then you won’t want to—

‘Beguiling laughter and old song
Of merry maids and men’

“Ten good lines out of four hundred, Emily—comparatively good, that is—and all the rest balderdash—balderdash, Emily.”

You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice—by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go—not even when she shuts her ears forever to their plea.

But you don’t know what’s ahead of you—the stony hills—the steep ascents—the buffets—the discouragements.