Chapter 19 Emily Climbs by Lucy Montgomery
"Airy Voices"
"April 3, 19--
"There are times when I am tempted to believe in the influence of evil stars or the reality of unlucky days. Otherwise how can such diabolical things happen as do happen to well-meaning people? Aunt Ruth has only just begun to grow weary of recalling the night she found Perry kissing me in the dining-room, and now I'm in another ridiculous scrape.
"I will be honest. It was not dropping my umbrella which was responsible for it, neither was it the fact that I let the kitchen mirror at New Moon fall last Saturday and crack. It was just my own carelessness.
"St. John's Presbyterian church here in Shrewsbury became vacant at New Year's and has been hearing candidates. Mr. Towers of the Times asked me to report the sermons for his paper on such Sundays as I was not in Blair Water. The first sermon was good and I reported it with pleasure. The second one was harmless, very harmless, and I reported it without pain. But the third, which I heard last Sunday, was ridiculous. I said so to Aunt Ruth on the way home from church and Aunt Ruth said, 'Do you think you are competent to criticize a sermon?'
"Well, yes, I do!
"That sermon was a most inconsistent thing. Mr. Wickham contradicted himself half a dozen times. He mixed his metaphors--he attributed something to St. Paul that belonged to Shakespeare--he committed almost every conceivable literary sin, including the unpardonable one of being deadly dull. However, it was my business to report the sermon, so report it I did. Then I had to do something to get it out of my system, so I wrote, for my own satisfaction, an analysis of it. It was a crazy but delightful deed. I showed up all the inconsistencies, the misquotations, the weaknesses and the wobblings. I enjoyed writing it--I made it as pointed and satirical and satanical as I could--oh, I admit it was a very vitriolic document.
"Then I handed it into the Times by mistake!
"Mr. Towers passed it over to the typesetter without reading it. He had a touching confidence in my work, which he will never have again. It came out the next day.
"I woke to find myself infamous.
"I expected Mr. Towers would be furious; but he is only mildly annoyed--and a little amused at the back of it. It isn't as if Mr. Wickham had been a settled minister here, of course. Nobody cared for him or his sermon and Mr. Towers is a Presbyterian, so the St. John's people can't accuse him of wanting to insult them. It is poor Emily B. on whom is laid the whole burden of condemnation. It appears most of them think I did it 'to show off.' Aunt Ruth is furious, Aunt Elizabeth outraged; Aunt Laura grieved, Cousin Jimmy alarmed. It is such a shocking thing to criticize a minister's sermon. It is a Murray tradition that ministers' sermons--Presbyterian Ministers' especially--are sacrosanct. My presumption and vanity will yet be the ruin of me, so Aunt Elizabeth coldly informs me. The only person who seems pleased is Mr. Carpenter. (Dean is away in New York. I know he would like it, too.) Mr. Carpenter is telling every one that my 'report' is the best thing of its kind he ever read. But Mr. Carpenter is suspected of heresy, so his commendation will not go far to rehabilitate me.
"I feel wretched over the affair. My mistakes worry me more than my sins sometimes. And yet, an unholy something, 'way back in me, is grinning over it all. Every word in that 'report' was true. And more than true--appropriate. I didn't mix my metaphors.
"Now, to live this down!
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"April 20, 19--
"'Awake thou north wind and come thou south. Blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out.'
"So chanted I as I went through the Land of Uprightness this evening--only I put 'woods' in place of garden. For spring is just around the corner and I have forgotten everything but gladness.
"We had a grey, rainy dawn but sunshine came in the afternoon and a bit of April frost to-night--just enough to make the earth firm. It seemed to me a night when the ancient gods might be met with in the lonely places. But I saw nothing except some sly things back among the fir copses that may have been companies of goblins, if they weren't merely shadows.
"(I wonder why goblin is such an enchanting word and gobbling such an ugly one. And why is shadowy suggestive of all beauty while umbrageous is so ugly?)
"But I heard all kinds of fairy sounds and each gave me an exquisite vanishing joy as I went up the hill. There is always something satisfying in climbing to the top of a hill. And that is a hill-top I love. When I reached it I stood still and let the loveliness of the evening flow through me like music. How the Wind Woman was singing in the bits of birchland around me--how she whistled in the serrated tops of the trees against the sky! One of the thirteen new silver moons of the year was hanging over the harbour. I stood there and thought of many, many beautiful things--of wild, free brooks running through starlit April fields--of rippled grey-satin seas--of the grace of an elm against the moonlight--of roots stirring and thrilling in the earth--owls laughing in darkness--a curl of foam on a long sandy shore--a young moon setting over a dark hill--the grey of gulf storms.
"I had only seventy-five cents in the world but Paradise isn't bought with money.
"Then I sat down on an old boulder and tried to put those moments of delicate happiness into a poem. I caught the shape of them fairly well, I think--but not their soul. It escaped me.
"It was quite dark when I came back and the whole character of my Land of Uprightness seemed changed. It was eerie--almost sinister. I would have run if I could have dared. The trees, my old well-known friends, were strange and aloof. The sounds I heard were not the cheery, companionable sounds of daytime--nor the friendly, fairy sounds of the sunset--they were creeping and weird, as if the life of the woods had suddenly developed something almost hostile to me--something at least that was furtive and alien and unacquainted. I could fancy that I heard stealthy footsteps all around me--that strange eyes were watching me through the boughs. When I reached the open space and hopped over the fence into Aunt Ruth's back yard I felt as if I were escaping from some fascinating but not altogether hallowed locality--a place given over to Paganism and the revels of satyrs. I don't believe the woods are ever wholly Christian in the darkness. There is always a lurking life in them that dares not show itself to the sun but regains its own with the night.
"'You should not be out in the damp with that cough of yours,' said Aunt Ruth.
"But it wasn't the damp that hurt me--for I was hurt. It was that little fascinating whisper of something unholy. I was afraid of it--and yet I loved it. The beauty I had loved on the hill-top seemed suddenly quite tasteless beside it. I sat down in my room and wrote another poem. When I had written it I felt that I had exorcised something out of my soul and Emily-in-the-Glass seemed no longer a stranger to me.
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"Aunt Ruth has just brought in a dose of hot milk and cayenne pepper for my cough. It is on the table before me--I have to drink it--and it has made both Paradise and Pagan-land seem very foolish and unreal!
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"May 25, 19--
"Dean came home from New York last Friday and that evening we walked and talked in New Moon garden in a weird, uncanny twilight following a rainy day. I had a light dress on and as Dean came down the path he said,
"'When I saw you first I thought you were a wild, white cherry-tree--like that'--and he pointed to one that was leaning and beckoning, ghost-fair in the dusk, from Lofty John's bush.
"It was such a beautiful thing that just to be distantly compared to it made me feel very well pleased with myself, and it was lovely to have dear old Dean back again. So we had a delightful evening, and picked a big bunch of Cousin Jimmy's pansies and watched the grey rain-clouds draw together in great purple masses in the east, leaving the western sky all clear and star-powdered.
"'There is something in your company,' said Dean, 'that makes stars seem starrier and pansies purpler.'
"Wasn't that nice of him! How is it that his opinion of me and Aunt Ruth's opinion of me are so very different?
"He had a little flat parcel under his arm and when he went away he handed it to me.
"'I brought you that to counteract Lord Byron,' he said.
"It was a framed copy of the 'Portrait of Giovanna Degli Albizzi, wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ghirlanjo'--a Lady of the Quatro Cento. I brought it to Shrewsbury and have it hanging in my room. I love to look at the Lady Giovanna--that slim, beautiful young thing with her sleek coils of pale gold and her prim little curls and her fine, high-bred profile (did the painter flatter her?) and her white neck and open, unshadowed brow, with the indefinable air over it all of saintliness and remoteness and fate--for the Lady Giovanna died young.
"And her embroidered velvet sleeves, slashed and puffed, very beautifully made and fitting the arm perfectly. The Lady Giovanna must have had a good dressmaker and, in spite of her saintliness, one thinks she was quite aware of the fact. I am always wishing that she would turn her head and let me see her full face.
"Aunt Ruth thinks she is queer-looking and evidently doubts the propriety of having her in the same room with the jewelled chromo of Queen Alexandra.
"I doubt it myself.
********
"June 10, 19--
"I do all my studying now by the pool in the Land of Uprightness, among those wonderful, tall, slender trees. I'm a Druidess in the woods--I regard trees with something more than love--worship.
"And then, too, trees, unlike so many humans, always improve on acquaintance. No matter how much you like them at the start you are sure to like them much better further on, and best of all when you have known them for years and enjoyed intercourse with them in all seasons. I know a hundred dear things about these trees in the Land of Uprightness that I didn't know when I came here two years ago.
"Trees have as much individuality as human beings. Not even two spruces are alike. There is always some kink or curve or bend of bough to single each one out from its fellows. Some trees love to grow sociably together, their branches twining, like Ilse and me with our arms about each other, whispering interminably of their secrets. Then there are more exclusive groups of four or five--clan-Murray trees; and there are hermits of trees who choose to stand apart in solitary state and who hold commune only with the winds of heaven. Yet these trees are often the best worth knowing. One feels it is more of a triumph to win their confidence than that of easier trees. To-night I suddenly saw a great, pulsating star resting on the very crest of the big fir that stands alone in the eastern corner and I had a sense of two majesties meeting that will abide with me for days and enchant everything--even classroom routine and dish-washing and Aunt Ruth's Saturday cleaning.
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"June 25, 19--
"We had our history examination to-day--the Tudor period. I've found it very fascinating--but more because of what isn't in the histories than of what is. They don't--they can't tell you what you would really like to know. What did Jane Seymour think of when she was awake in the dark? Of murdered Anne, or of pale, forsaken Katherine? Or just about the fashion of her new ruff? Did she ever think she had paid too high for her crown or was she satisfied with her bargain? And was she happy in those few hours after her little son was born--or did she see a ghostly procession beckoning her onward with them? Was Lady Jane Gray 'Janie' to her friends and did she ever have a fit of temper? What did Shakespeare's wife actually think of him? And was any man ever really in love with Queen Elizabeth? I am always asking questions like this when I study that pageant of kings and queens and geniuses and puppets put down in the school curriculum as 'The Tudor Period.'
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"July 7, 19--
"Two years of High School are over. The result of my exams was such as to please even Aunt Ruth, who condescended to say that she always knew I could study if I put my mind to it. In brief, I led my class. And I'm pleased. But I begin to understand what Dean meant when he said real education was what you dug out of life for yourself. After all, the things that have taught me the most these past two years have been my wanderings in the Land of Uprightness, and my night on the haystack, and the Lady Giovanna, and the old woman who spanked the King, and trying to write nothing but facts, and things like that. Even rejection slips and hating Evelyn Blake have taught me something. Speaking of Evelyn--she failed in her exams and will have to take her senior year over again. I am truly sorry.
"That sounds as if I were a most amiable, forgiving creature. Let me be perfectly frank. I am sorry she didn't pass, because if she had she wouldn't be in school next year.
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"July, 20, 19--
"Ilse and I go bathing every day now. Aunt Laura is always very particular about seeing that we have our bathing suits with us. I wonder if she ever heard any faint, far-off echoes of our moonlit petticoatedness.
"But so far our dips have been in the afternoon. And afterwards we have a glorious wallow on sun-warm, golden sands, with the gauzy dunes behind us stretching to the harbour, and the lazy blue sea before us, dotted over with sails that are silver in the magic of the sunlight. Oh, life is good--good--good. In spite of three rejection slips that came to-day. Those very editors will be asking for my work some day! Meanwhile Aunt Laura is teaching me how to make a certain rich and complicated kind of chocolate cake after a recipe which a friend of hers in Virginia sent her thirty years ago. Nobody in Blair Water has ever been able to get it and Aunt Laura made me solemnly promise I would never reveal it.
"The real name of the cake is Devil's Food, but Aunt Elizabeth will not have it called that.
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"Aug. 2, 19--
"I was down seeing Mr. Carpenter this evening. He has been laid up with rheumatism and one can see he is getting old. He was very cranky with the scholars last year and there was some protest against keeping him on, but it was done. Most of the Blair Water people have sense enough to realize that with all his crankiness Mr. Carpenter is a teacher in a thousand.
"'One can't teach fools amiably,' he growled, when the trustees told him there were complaints about his harshness.
"Perhaps it was his rheumatism that made Mr. Carpenter rather crusty over the poems I took to him for criticism. When he read the one I had composed that April night on a hill-top he tossed it back to me--'pretty little gossamer thing,' he said.
"And I had really thought the poem expressed in some measure the enchantment of that evening. How I must have failed!
"Then I gave him the poem I had written after I had come in that night. He read it over twice, then he deliberately tore it into strips.
"'Now--why?' I said, rather annoyed. 'There was nothing wrong about that poem, Mr. Carpenter.'
"'Not about its body,' he said. 'Every line of it, taken by itself, might be read in Sunday-school. But its soul--what mood were you in when you wrote that in heaven's name?'
"'The mood of the Golden Age,' I said.
"'No--of an age far before that. That poem was sheer Paganism, girl, though I don't think you realize it. To be sure, from the point of view of literature it's worth a thousand of your pretty songs. All the same, that way danger lies. Better stick to your own age. You're part of it and can possess it without its possessing you. Emily, there was a streak of diabolism in that poem. It's enough to make me believe that poets are inspired--by some spirits outside themselves. Didn't you feel possessed when you wrote it?'
"'Yes,' I said, remembering. I felt rather glad Mr. Carpenter had torn the poem up. I could never have done it myself. I have destroyed a great many of my poems that seemed trash on successive readings, but this one never seemed so and it always brought back the strange charm and terror of that walk. But Mr. Carpenter was right--I feel it.
"He also berated me because I happened to mention I had been reading Mrs. Hemans' poems. Aunt Laura has a cherished volume, bound in faded blue and gold, with an inscription from an admirer. In Aunt Laura's youth it was the thing to give your adored a volume of poetry on her birthday. The things Mr. Carpenter said about Mrs. Hemans were not fit to write in a young lady's diary. I suppose he is right in the main--yet I do like some of her poems. Just here and there comes a line or verse that haunts me for days, delightfully.
"The march of the hosts as Alaric passed
is one--though I can't give any reason for my liking it--one never can give reasons for enchantment--and another is,
"The sounds of the sea and the sounds of the night
Were around Clotilde as she knelt to pray
In a chapel where the mighty lay
On the old Provencal shore.
"That isn't great poetry--but there's a bit of magic in it for all that--concentrated in the last line, I think. I never read it without feeling that I am Clotilde, kneeling there--'on the old Provencal shore'--with the banners of forgotten wars waving over me.
"Mr. Carpenter sneered at my 'liking for slops' and told me to go and read the Elsie books! But when I was coming away he paid me the first personal compliment I ever had from him.
"'I like that blue dress you've got on. And you know how to wear it. That's good. I can't bear to see a woman badly dressed. It hurts me--and it must hurt God Almighty. I've no use for dowds and I'm sure He hasn't. After all, if you know how to dress yourself it won't matter if you do like Mrs. Hemans.'
"I met Old Kelly on the way home and he stopped and gave me a bag of candy and sent his 'rispects to him.'
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"August 15, 19--
"This is a wonderful year for columbines. The old orchard is full of them--all in lovely white and purple and fairy blue and dreamy pink colour. They are half wild and so have a charm no real tamed garden flower ever has. And what a name--columbine is poetry itself. How much lovelier the common names of flowers are than the horrid Latiny names the florists stick in their catalogues. Heartsease and Bride's Bouquet, Prince's Feather, Snap-dragon, Flora's Paint Brush, Dusty Millers, Bachelor's Buttons, Baby's Breath, Love-in-a-mist--oh, I love them all.
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"September 1, 19--
"Two things happened to-day. One was a letter from Great-aunt Nancy to Aunt Elizabeth. Aunt Nancy has never taken any notice of my existence since my visit to Priest Pond four years ago. But she is still alive, ninety-four years old, and from all accounts quite lively yet. She wrote some sarcastic things in her letter, about both me and Aunt Elizabeth; but she wound up by offering to pay all my expenses in Shrewsbury next year, including my board to Aunt Ruth.
"I am very glad. In spite of Aunt Nancy's sarcasm I don't mind feeling indebted to her. She has never nagged or patronized me--or did anything for me because she felt it her 'duty.' 'Hang duty,' she said in her letter. 'I'm doing this because it will vex some of the Priests, and because Wallace is putting on too many airs about "helping to educate Emily." I dare say you feel yourself that you've done virtuously. Tell Emily to go back to Shrewsbury and learn all she can--but to hide it and show her ankles.' Aunt Elizabeth was horrified at this and wouldn't show me the letter. But Cousin Jimmy told me what was in it.
"The second thing was that Aunt Elizabeth informed me that, since Aunt Nancy was paying my expenses, she, Aunt Elizabeth, felt that she ought not to hold me any longer to my promise about writing fiction. I was, she told me, free to do as I chose about that matter.
"'Though I shall never approve of your writing fiction,' she said, gravely. 'At least I hope you will not neglect your studies.'
"Oh, no, dear Aunt Elizabeth, I won't neglect them. But I feel like a released prisoner. My fingers tingle to grasp a pen--my brain teems with plots. I've a score of fascinating dream characters I want to write about. Oh, if there only were not such a chasm between seeing a thing and getting it down on paper!
"'Ever since you got that cheque for a story last winter Elizabeth's been wondering if she oughtn't to let you write,' Cousin Jimmy told me. 'But she couldn't bring herself to back down till Aunt Nancy's letter gave her the excuse. Money makes the Murray mare go, Emily. Want some more Yankee stamps?'
"Mrs. Kent has told Teddy he can go for another year. After that he doesn't know what will happen. So we are all going back and I am so happy that I want to write it in Italics.
********
"September 10, 19--
"I have been elected president of the Senior class for this year. And the Skulls and Owls sent me a notice that I had been elected a member of their august fraternity without the formality of an application.
"Evelyn Blake, by the way, is at present laid up with tonsilitis!
"I accepted the presidency--but I wrote a note to the Skull and Owl declining membership with awful politeness.
"After black-beaning me last year, indeed!
********
"October 7, 19--
"There was great excitement to-day in class when Dr. Hardy made a certain announcement. Kathleen Darcy's uncle, who is a Professor of McGill, is visiting here, and he has taken it into his head to offer a prize for the best poem, written by a pupil of Shrewsbury High School--said prize being a complete set of Parkman. The poems must be handed in by the first of November, and are to be 'not less than twenty lines, and no more than sixty.' Sounds as if a tape-measure was the first requisite. I have been wildly hunting through my Jimmy-books to-night and have decided to send in Wild Grapes. It is my second best poem. A Song of Sixpence is my best, but it has only fifteen lines and to add any more would spoil it. I think I can improve Wild Grapes a bit. There are two or three words in it I've always been dubious about. They don't exactly express fully what I want to say, but I can't find any others that do, either. I wish one could coin words, as I used to do long ago when I wrote letters to Father and just invented a word whenever I wanted one. But then, Father would have understood the words if he had ever seen the letters--while I am afraid the judges in the contest wouldn't.
"Wild Grapes should certainly win the prize. This isn't conceit or vanity or presumption. It's just knowing. If the prize were for mathematics Kath Darcy should win it. If it were for beauty Hazel Ellis would win it. If it were for all round proficiency, Perry Miller--for elocution, Ilse--for drawing, Teddy. But since it is for poetry, E. B. Starr is the one!
"We are studying Tennyson and Keats in Senior Literature this year. I like Tennyson but sometimes he enrages me. He is beautiful--not too beautiful, as Keats is--the Perfect Artist. But he never lets us forget the artist--we are always conscious of it--he is never swept away by some splendid mountain torrent of feeling. Not he--he flows on serenely between well-ordered banks and carefully laid-out gardens. And no matter how much one loves a garden one doesn't want to be cooped up in it all the time--one likes an excursion now and then into the wilderness. At least Emily Byrd Starr does--to the sorrow of her relations.
"Keats is too full of beauty. When I read his poetry I feel stifled in roses and long for a breath of frosty air or the austerity of a chill mountain peak. But, oh, he has some lines--
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerylands forlorn--
"When I read them I always feel a sort of despair! What is the use of trying to do what has been done, once and for all?
"But I found some other lines that inspire me--I have written them on the index-page of my new Jimmy-book.
"He ne'er is crowned
With immortality who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
"Oh, it's true. We must follow our 'airy voices,' follow them through every discouragement and doubt and disbelief till they lead us to our City of Fulfilment, wherever it may be.
"I had four rejections in the mail to-day, raucously shrieking failure at me. Airy Voices grow faint in such a clamour. But I'll hear them again. And I will follow--I will not be discouraged. Years ago I wrote a 'vow'--I found it the other day in an old packet in my cupboard--that I would 'climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.'
"I'll keep on climbing!
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"October 20, 19--
"I read my Chronicles of an Old Garden over the other night. I think I can improve it considerably, now that Aunt Elizabeth has lifted the ban. I wanted Mr. Carpenter to read it, but he said,
"'Lord, girl, I can't wade through all that stuff. My eyes are bad. What is it--a book? Jade, it will be time ten years from now for you to be writing books.'
"'I've got to practise,' I said indignantly.
"'Oh, practise--practise--but don't try out the results on me. I'm too old--I really am, Jade. I don't mind a short--a very short story--now and then--but let a poor old devil off the books.'
"I might ask Dean what he thinks of it. But Dean does laugh now at my ambitions--very cautiously and kindly--but he does laugh. And Teddy thinks everything I write perfect, so he's no use as a critic. I wonder--I wonder if any publisher would accept The Chronicles? I'm sure I've seen books of the kind that weren't much better.
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"November 11, 19--
"This evening I spent "expurgating" a novel for Mr. Towers' use and behoof. When Mr. Towers was away in August on his vacation the sub-editor, Mr. Grady, began to run a serial in the Times called A Bleeding Heart. Instead of getting A. P. A. stuff, as Mr. Towers always does, Mr. Grady simply bought the reprint of a sensational and sentimental English novel at the Shoppe and began publishing it. It was very long and only about half of it has appeared. Mr. Towers saw that it would run all winter in its present form. So he bade me take it and cut out 'all unnecessary stuff.' I have followed instruction mercilessly--'cutting out' most of the kisses and embraces, two-thirds of the love-making and all the descriptions, with the happy results that I have reduced it to about a quarter of its normal length; and all I can say is may heaven have mercy on the soul of the compositor who has to set it in its present mutilated condition.
"Summer and autumn have gone. It seems to me they go more quickly than they used to. The golden-rod has turned white in the corners of the Land of Uprightness and the frost lies like a silver scarf on the ground o' mornings. The evening winds that go 'piping down the valleys wild' are heart-broken searchers, seeking for things loved and lost, calling in vain on elf and fay. For the fairy folk, if they be not all fled afar to the southlands, must be curled up asleep in the hearts of the firs or among the roots of the ferns.
"And every night we have murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson across the harbour, with a star above them like a saved soul gazing with compassionate eyes into pits of torment where sinful spirits are being purged from the stains of earthly pilgrimage.
"Would I dare to show the above sentence to Mr. Carpenter? I would not. Therefore there is something fearfully wrong with it.
"I know what's wrong with it, now that I've written it in cold blood. It's 'fine writing.' And yet it's just what I felt when I stood on the hill beyond the Land of Uprightness to-night and looked across the harbour. And who cares what this old journal thinks?
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"December 2, 19--
"The results of the prize poem competition were announced to-day. Evelyn Blake is the winner with a poem entitled A Legend of Abegweit.
"There isn't anything to say--so I say it.
"Besides, Aunt Ruth has said everything!
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"December 15, 19--
"Evelyn's prize poem was printed in the Times this week with her photograph and a biographical sketch. The set of Parkman is on exhibition in the windows of the Booke Shoppe.
"A Legend of Abegweit is a fairly good poem. It is in ballad style, and rhythm and rhyme are correct--which could not be said of any other poem of Evelyn's I've ever seen.
"Evelyn Blake has said of everything of mine she ever saw in print that she was sure I copied it from somewhere. I hate to imitate her--but I know that she never wrote that poem. It isn't any expression of her at all. She might as well have imitated Dr. Hardy's handwriting and claimed it as her own. Her mincing, copperplate script is as much like Dr. Hardy's black, forcible scrawl as that poem is like her.
"Besides, though A Legend of Abegweit is fairly good it is not as good as Wild Grapes.
"I am not going to say so to anyone but down it goes in this journal. Because it's true.
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"December 20, 19--
"I showed A Legend of Abegweit and Wild Grapes to Mr. Carpenter. When he had read them both he said, 'Who were the judges?'
"I told him.
"'Give them my compliments and tell them they're asses.' he said.
"I feel comforted. I won't tell the judges--or anyone--that they're asses. But it soothes me to know they are.
"The strange thing is--Aunt Elizabeth asked to see Wild Grapes and when she had read it she said,
"'I am no judge of poetry, of course, but it seems to me that yours is of a higher order.'
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"Jan. 4, 19--
"I spent the Christmas week at Uncle Oliver's. I didn't like it. It was too noisy. I would have liked it years ago but they never asked me then. I had to eat when I wasn't hungry--play parchesi when I didn't want to--talk when I wanted to be silent. I was never alone for one moment all the time I was there. Besides, Andrew is getting to be such a nuisance. And Aunt Addie was odiously kind and motherly. I just felt all the time like a cat who is held on a lap where it doesn't want to be and gently, firmly stroked. I had to sleep with Jen, who is my first cousin and just my age, and who thinks in her heart I'm not half good enough for Andrew but is going to try, with the blessing of God, to make the best of it. Jen is a nice, sensible girl and she and I are friendish. That is a word of my own coining. Jen and I are more than mere acquaintances but not really friendly. We will always be friendish and never more than friendish. We don't talk the same language.
"When I got home to dear New Moon I went up to my room and shut the door and revelled in solitude.
"School opened yesterday. To-day in the Booke Shoppe I had an internal laugh. Mrs. Rodney and Mrs. Elder were looking over some books and Mrs. Elder said,
"'That story in the Times--A Bleeding Heart--was the strangest one I ever read. It wandered on, chapter after chapter, for weeks, and never seemed to get anywhere, and then it just finished up in eight chapters lickety-split. I can't understand it.'
"I could have solved the mystery for her but I didn't."