Emily Climbs Read Free Page B

another that night – Aunt Elizabeth’s rules were as those of Mede and Persian: she put away her diary in the little right-hand cupboard above the mantel, covered her dying fire, undressed and blew out her candle. The room slowly filled with the faint, ghostly snow-light of a night when a full moon is behind the driving storm-clouds. And just as Emily was ready to slip into her high black bedstead a sudden inspiration came – a splendid new idea for a story. For a minute she shivered reluctantly: the room was getting cold. But the idea would not be denied. Emily slipped her hand between the feather tick of her bed and the chaff mattress and produced a half-burned candle, secreted there for just such an emergency.
    It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.
    She lighted her candle, put on her stockings and a heavy coat, got out another half-filled Jimmy-book, and began to write by the single, uncertain candle which made a pale oasis of light in the shadows of the room. In that oasis Emily wrote, her black head bent over her book, as the hours of night crept away and the other occupants of New Moon slumbered soundly; she grew chill and cramped, but she was quite unconscious of it. Her eyes burned – her cheeks glowed – words came like troopsof obedient genii to the call of her pen. When at last her candle went out with a sputter and a hiss in its little pool of melted tallow, she came back to reality with a sigh and a shiver. It was two, by the clock, and she was very tired and very cold; but she had finished her story and it was the best she had ever written. She crept into her cold nest with a sense of completion and victory, born of the working out of her creative impulse, and fell asleep to the lullaby of the waning storm.

SALAD DAYS
    T his book is not going to be wholly, or even mainly, made up of extracts from Emily’s diary; but, byway of linking up matters unimportant enough for a chapter in themselves, and yet necessary for a proper understanding of her personality and environment, I am going to include some more of them. Besides, when one has material ready to hand, why not Ilse it? Emily’s “diary,” with all its youthful crudities and italics, really gives a better interpretation of her and of her imaginative and introspective mind, in that, her fourteenth spring, than any biographer, however sympathetic, could do. So let us take another peep into the yellowed pages of that old “Jimmy-book,” written long ago in the “look-out” of New Moon.
    “February 15, 19–
    “I have decided that I will write down, in this journal, every day, all my good deeds and all my bad ones. I got the idea out of a book, and it appeals to me. I mean to be as honest about it as I can. It will be easy, of course, to write down the good deeds, but not so easy to record the bad ones.
    “I did only one bad thing today– only one thing
I
think bad, that is. I was impertinent to Aunt Elizabeth. She thought I took too long washing the dishes. I didn’t suppose there was any hurry and I was composing a story called
The Secret of the Mill
. Aunt Elizabeth looked at me and then at the clock, and said in her most disagreeable way,
    “‘Is the snail your sister, Emily?’
    “‘No! Snails are no relation to
me,’
I said
haughtily
.
    “It was not what I said, but the way I said it that was impertinent.
And I meant it to be
. I was very angry – sarcastic speeches always aggravate me. Afterwards I was very sorry that I had been in a temper – but I was sorry because it was
foolish
and
undignified
not because it was
wicked
. So I suppose that was not true repentance.
    “As for my good deeds, I did two today. I saved two little lives. Saucy Sal had caught a poor snow-bird and I took it from her. It flew off quite briskly, and I am sure it felt