“‘Oh, he’ll succeed, of course. But there’ll always be a flavour of Stovepipe Town about him,’ retorted Ilse.
“‘Why have you always been so hard on Perry, Ilse?’ I protested.
“‘He’s such a cackling oaf,’ said Ilse morosely.
“‘Oh, well, he’s just at the age when a boy knows everything,’ I said, feeling quite wise and elderly. ‘He will grow more ignorant and endurable after a while,’ I went on, feeling epigrammatic. ‘And he has improved in these Shrewsbury years,’ I concluded, feeling smug.
“‘You talk as if he were a cabbage,’ fumed Ilse. ‘For heaven’s sake, Emily, don’t be so superior and patronizing!’
“There are times when Ilse is good for me. I know I deserved that.
********
“June 27, 19 —
“Last night I dreamed I stood in the old summer-house at New Moon and saw the Lost Diamond sparkling on the floor at my feet. I picked it up in delight. It lay in my hand for a moment — then it seemed to elude my grasp, flash through the air, leaving a long, slender trail of brilliance behind it, and become a star in the western sky, just above the edge of the world. ‘It is my star — I must reach it before it sets,’ I thought, and started out. Suddenly Dean was beside me — and he, too, was following the star. I felt I must go slowly because he was lame and could not go fast — and all the time the star sank lower and lower. Yet I felt I couldn’t leave Dean. Then just as suddenly — things do happen like that in dreams — so nice — without a bit of trouble — Teddy was beside me, too, holding out his hands to me, with the look in his eyes I had seen twice before. I put my hands in his — and he drew me towards him — I was holding up my face — then Dean gave a bitter cry, ‘My star has set.’ I turned my head for just a glance — the star was gone — and I woke up in a dull, ugly, rainy dawn with no star — no Teddy — no kiss.
“I wonder what the dream meant — if it meant anything. I must not think it did. It is a Murray tradition not to be superstitious.
********
“June 28, 19 —
“This is my last night in Shrewsbury. ‘Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home’ — to-morrow, when Cousin Jimmy is coming for me and my trunk in the old express waggon and I will ride back in that chariot of state to New Moon.
“These three Shrewsbury years seemed so long to me when I looked ahead to them. And now, looking back, they seem as yesterday when it has passed. I think I’ve won something in them. I don’t use so many italics — I’ve acquired a little poise and self-control — I’ve got a bit of bitter worldly wisdom — and I’ve learned to smile over a rejection slip. I think that has been the hardest lesson of all to learn — and doubtless the most necessary.
“As I look back over these three years some things stand out so much more clearly and significantly than others, as if they had a special meaning all their own. And not always the things one might expect either. For instance, Evelyn’s enmity and even that horrible moustache incident seem faded and unimportant. But the moment I saw my first poem in Garden and Woodland — oh, that was a moment — my walk to New Moon and back the night of the play — the writing of that queer little poem of mine that Mr. Carpenter tore up — my night on the haystack under the September moon — that splendid old woman who spanked the King — the moment in class when I discovered Keats’ lines about the ‘airy voices’ — and that other moment in the old John house when Teddy looked into my eyes — oh, it seems to me these are the things I will remember in the halls of Eternity when Evelyn Blake’s sneers and the old John house scandal and Aunt Ruth’s nagging and the routine of lessons and examinations have been for ever forgotten. And my promise to Aunt Elizabeth has helped me, as Mr. Carpenter predicted. Not in my diary perhaps — I just let myself go here — one must have a ‘vent’ — but in my stories and Jimmy-books.
“We had our class day exercises this afternoon. I wore my new cream organdy with the violets in it and carried a big bouquet of pink peonies. Dean, who is in Montreal on his way home, wired the florist here for a bouquet of roses for me — seventeen roses — one for each year of my life — and it was presented to me when I went up for my diploma. That was dear of Dean.
“Perry was class orator and made a fine speech. And he got the medal for general proficiency. It has been a stiff pull between him and Will Morris, but Perry has won out.
“I wrote and read the class day prophecy. It was very amusing and the audience seemed to enjoy it. I had another one in my Jimmy-book at home. It was much more amusing but it wouldn’t have done to read it.
“I wrote my last society letter for Mr. Towers tonight. I’ve always hated that stunt but I wanted the few pennies it brought in and one mustn’t scorn the base degrees by which one ascends young ambition’s ladder.
“I’ve also been packing up. Aunt Ruth came up occasionally and looked at me as I packed but was oddly silent. Finally she said, with a sigh,
“‘I shall miss you awfully, Emily.’
“I never dreamed of her saying and feeling anything like that. And it made me feel uncomfortable. Since Aunt Ruth was so decent about the John house scandal I’ve felt differently towards her. But I couldn’t say I’d miss her.
“Yet something had to be said.
“‘I shall always be very grateful to you, Aunt Ruth, for what you have done for me these past three years.’
“‘I’ve tried to do my duty,’ said Aunt Ruth virtuously.
********
“I find I’m oddly sorry to leave this little room I’ve never liked and that has never liked me, and that long hill starred with lights — after all, I’ve had some wonderful moments here. And even poor dying Byron! But by no stretch of sentiment can I regret parting from Queen Alexandra’s chromo, or the vase of paper flowers. Of course, the Lady Giovanna goes with me. She belongs in my room at New Moon. She has always seemed like an exile here. It hurts me to think I shall never again hear the night wind in the Land of Uprightness. But I’ll have my night wind in Lofty John’s bush; I think Aunt Elizabeth means to let me have a kerosene lamp to write by — my door at New Moon shuts tight — and I will not have to drink cambric tea. I went at dusk to-night to that little pearly pool which has always been such a witching spot to linger near on spring evenings. Through the trees that fringed it faint hues of rose and saffron from the west stole across it. It was unruffled by a breath and every leaf and branch and fern and blade of grass was mirrored in it. I looked in — and saw my face; and by an odd twist of reflection from a bending bough I seemed to wear a leafy garland on my head — like a laurel crown.
“I took it as a good omen.
“Perhaps Teddy was only shy!”
THE END
EMILY’S QUEST
The final novel in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, Emily’s Quest follows Emily Byrd Starr into young adulthood. McClelland & Stewart published it in 1927. Emily and her close childhood friends, Ilse, Teddy, and Perry, have grown up and for now, gone their separate ways. Unlike her far flung friends, Emily chooses to remain home at New Moon Farm.
Over the course of Emily’s Quest, she gradually achieves success as a writer, while also dealing with tumultuous courtships, near-tragic illness, and the inevitability of changes in the lives of her family and friends. As is true with the first two Emily novels, Montgomery writes movingly of the challenges faced when caught between a fierce passion for an art and loyalty to loved ones. She transcribed directly some of her own journal entries into the novel. Parts of Emily’s Quest appeared in earlier incarnations, particularly in “White Magic,” (Woman’s Century, 1921) and “The Schoolmaster’s Letter” (Sunday Magazine, 1905).
Montgomery dedicated the novel to her cousin, Stella Campbell, who worked for the author when she lived at the Leaskdale Manse. Beginning in 1998 and filming on Prince Edward Island, CBC Television and Salter Street Films adapted the Emily novels into a TV series and in 2007, NHK and Tokyo Movie Shinsha adapted the novels into a 26 episode Japanese animated
series entitled Kaze no Shouje Emily (Emily, the Wind Girl).
A first edition copy of Emily’s Quest
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter I
I
“No more cambric-tea” had Emily Byrd Starr written in her diary when she came home to New Moon from Shrewsbury, with high school days behind her and immortality before her.
Which was a symbol. When Aunt Elizabeth Murray permitted Emily to drink real tea — as a matter of course and not as an occasional concession — she thereby tacitly consented to let Emily grow up. Emily had been considered grownup by other people for some time, especially by Cousin Andrew Murray and Friend Perry Miller, each of whom had asked her to marry him and been disdainfully refused for his pains. When Aunt Elizabeth found this out she knew it was no use to go on making Emily drink cambric-tea. Though, even then, Emily had no real hope that she would ever be permitted to wear silk stockings. A silk petticoat might be tolerated, being a hidden thing, in spite of its seductive rustle, but silk stockings were immoral.
So Emily, of whom it was whispered somewhat mysteriously by people who knew her to people who didn’t know her, “she writes,” was accepted as one of the ladies of New Moon, where nothing had ever changed since her coming there seven years before and where the carved ornament on the sideboard still cast the same queer shadow of an Ethiopian silhouette on exactly the same place on the wall where she had noticed it delightedly on her first evening there. An old house that had lived its life long ago and so was very quiet and wise and a little mysterious. Also a little austere, but very kind. Some of the Blair Water and Shrewsbury people thought it was a dull place and outlook for a young girl and said she had been very foolish to refuse Miss Royal’s offer of “a position on a magazine” in New York. Throwing away such a good chance to make something of herself! But Emily, who had very clear-cut ideas of what she was going to make of herself, did not think life would be dull at New Moon or that she had lost her chance of Alpine climbing because she had elected to stay there.
She belonged by right divine to the Ancient and Noble Order of Story-tellers. Born thousands of years earlier she would have sat in the circle around the fires of the tribe and enchanted her listeners. Born in the foremost files of time she must reach her audience through many artificial mediums.
But the materials of story weaving are the same in all ages and all places. Births, deaths, marriages, scandals — these are the only really interesting things in the world. So she settled down very determinedly and happily to her pursuit of fame and fortune — and of something that was neither. For writing, to Emily Byrd Starr, was not primarily a matter of worldly lucre or laurel crown. It was something she had to do. A thing — an idea — whether of beauty or ugliness, tortured her until it was “written out.” Humorous and dramatic by instinct, the comedy and tragedy of life enthralled her and demanded expression through her pen. A world of lost but immortal dreams, lying just beyond the drop-curtain of the real, called to her for embodiment and interpretation — called with a voice she could not — dared not — disobey.
She was filled with youth’s joy in mere existence. Life was for ever luring and beckoning her onward. She knew that a hard struggle was before her; she knew that she must constantly offend Blair Water neighbours who would want her to write obituaries for them and who, if she used an unfamiliar word would say contemptuously that she was “talking big;” she knew there would be rejection slips galore; she knew there would be days when she would feel despairingly that she could not write and that it was of no use to try; days when the editorial phrase, “not necessarily a reflection on its merits,” would get on her nerves to such an extent that she would feel like imitating Marie Bashkirtseff and hurling the taunting, ticking, remorseless sitting-room clock out of the window; days when everything she had done or tried to do would slump — become mediocre and despicable; days when she would be tempted to bitter disbelief in her fundamental conviction that there was as much truth in the poetry of life as in the prose; days when the echo of that “random word” of the gods, for which she so avidly listened, would only seem to taunt her with its suggestions of unattainable perfection and loveliness beyond the reach of mortal ear or pen.
She knew that Aunt Elizabeth tolerated but never approved her mania for scribbling. In her last two years in Shrewsbury High School Emily, to Aunt Elizabeth’s almost incredulous amazement, had actually earned some money by her verses and stories. Hence the toleration. But no Murray had ever done such a thing before. And there was always that sense, which Dame Elizabeth Murray did not like, of being shut out of something. Aunt Elizabeth really resented the fact that Emily had another world, apart from the world of New Moon and Blair Water, a kingdom starry and illimitable, into which she could enter at will and into which not even the most determined and suspicious of aunts could follow her. I really think that if Emily’s eyes had not so often seemed to be looking at something dreamy and lovely and secretive Aunt Elizabeth might have had more sympathy with her ambitions. None of us, not even self-sufficing Murrays of New Moon, like to be barred out.
II
Those of you who have already followed Emily through her years of New Moon and Shrewsbury* must have a tolerable notion what she looked like. For those of you to whom she comes as a stranger let me draw a portrait of her as she seemed to the outward eye at the enchanted portal of seventeen, walking where the golden chrysanthemums lighted up an old autumnal, maritime garden. A place of peace, that garden of New Moon. An enchanted pleasaunce, full of rich, sensuous colours and wonderful spiritual shadows. Scents of pine and rose were in it; boom of bees, threnody of wind, murmurs of the blue Atlantic gulf; and always the soft sighing of the firs in Lofty John Sullivan’s “bush” to the north of it. Emily loved every flower and shadow and sound in it, every beautiful old tree in and around it, especially her own intimate, beloved trees — a cluster of wild cherries in the south-west corner, Three Princesses of Lombardy, a certain maiden-like wild plum on the brook path, the big spruce in the centre of the garden, a silver maple and a pine farther on, an aspen in another corner always coquetting with gay little winds, and a whole row of stately white birches in Lofty John’s bush.
* See Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs.
Emily was always glad that she lived where there were many trees — old ancestral trees, planted and tended by hands long dead, bound up with everything of joy and sorrow that visited the lives in their shadows.
A slender, virginal young thing. Hair like black silk. Purplish-grey eyes, with violet shadows under them that always seemed darker and more alluring after Emily had sat up to some unholy and un-Elizabethan hour completing a story or working out the skeleton of a plot; scarlet lips with a Murray-like crease at the corners; ears with Puckish, slightly pointed tips. Perhaps it was the crease and the ears that made certain people think her something of a puss. An exquisite line of chin and neck; a smile with a trick in it; such a slow-blossoming thing with a sudden radiance of fulfilment. And ankles that scandalous old Aunt Nancy Priest of Priest Pond commended. Faint stains of rose in her rounded cheeks that sometimes suddenly deepened to crimson. Very little could bring that transforming flush — a wind off the sea, a sudden glimpse of blue upland, a flame-red poppy, white sails going ou
t of the harbour in the magic of morning, gulf-waters silver under the moon, a Wedgwood-blue columbine in the old orchard. Or a certain whistle in Lofty John’s bush.
With all this — pretty? I cannot tell you. Emily was never mentioned when Blair Water beauties were being tabulated. But no one who looked upon her face ever forgot it. No one, meeting Emily the second time ever had to say “Er — your face seems familiar but—” Generations of lovely women were behind her. They had all given her something of personality. She had the grace of running water. Something, too, of its sparkle and limpidity. A thought swayed her like a strong wind. An emotion shook her as a tempest shakes a rose. She was one of those vital creatures of whom, when they do die, we say it seems impossible that they can be dead. Against the background of her practical, sensible clan she shone like a diamond flame. Many people liked her, many disliked her. No one was ever wholly indifferent to her.
Once, when Emily had been very small, living with her father down in the little old house at Maywood, where he had died, she had started out to seek the rainbow’s end. Over long wet fields and hills she ran, hopeful, expectant. But as she ran the wonderful arch was faded — was dim — was gone. Emily was alone in an alien valley, not too sure in which direction lay home. For a moment her lips quivered, her eyes filled. Then she lifted her face and smiled gallantly at the empty sky.
“There will be other rainbows,” she said.
Emily was a chaser of rainbows.
III
Life at New Moon had changed. She must adjust herself to it. A certain loneliness must be reckoned with. Ilse Burnley, the madcap pal of seven faithful years, had gone to the School of Literature and Expression in Montreal. The two girls parted with the tears and vows of girlhood. Never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest — perhaps the more because of that very closeness — meet again after a separation there is always a chill, lesser or greater, of change. Neither finds the other quite the same. This is natural and inevitable. Human nature is ever growing or retrogressing — never stationary. But still, with all our philosophy, who of us can repress a little feeling of bewildered disappointment when we realize that our friend is not and never can be just the same as before — even though the change may be by way of improvement? Emily, with the strange intuition which supplied the place of experience, felt this as Ilse did not, and felt that in a sense she was bidding good-bye for ever to the Ilse of New Moon days and Shrewsbury years.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 282
