The Books: “Emily of New Moon” (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Emily of New Moon (The Emily Books, Book 1) – by L.M. Montgomery Excerpt 6!!

Oh, there’s just too much I want to excerpt. The whole section at Great-aunt Nancy’s – just the description of her HOUSE – I love it … her first conversation wtih Dean Priest – when Dean Priest, with his hunchback and his gleaming green eyes, decides to himself (actually, he says it out loud to Emily): “I think I’ll wait for you.” Emily has no idea what he’s talking about, of course … but we do. And you know what? He does wait for her. It’s kind of creepy, yes, but there’s something in Dean Priest that excites and challenges Emily – something she cannot get anywhere else. He respects her – he doesn’t talk down to her. Then there’s the beautiful section when she comes home and Elizabeth finally allows her to have her own room – she can have what was once her mother’s room. The section where Emily is allowed to go into that room for the first time, and look at the pictures that her mother (whom she never knew) had put on the wall … It helps Emily feel like she actually knows her mother. She loves her mother. Oh yes – and in the middle of all of this – Emily overhears Great-aunt Nancy and Caroline gossiping one day – and the story of Ilse Burnley’s mother running away with another man comes out. To say that Emily takes this hard is an understatement. She obsesses so much about it, it makes her so unhappy and worried and anxious … that she mopes about, she loses weight, she has no energy. She cant tell Ilse that she knows the story … and this worries her too. Her main conviction, though, is that “Ilse’s mother COULDN’T have done it.” She does not believe for a second that Ilse’s mother actually ran away. She COULDN’T have done it. Turns out that this is not just childish optimism and hope … We are moving towards Emily’s first experience with what Lucy Maud calls ‘second sight’. The kind of knowledge that has nothing to do with the brain, or the intellect. Knowledge that comes from … where. Who knows. Lucy Maud does not speculate – and Emily sure doesn’t either. She is almost embarrassed by this “gift” when it comes out. It doesn’t feel like a gift to her. But anyway – her spirit is so torn up by this horrible story of gossip … that she can’t get it out of her mind.

But I want to excerpt the part where Mr. Carpenter comes into her life. Because Mr. Carpenter is up there on my list of Most Favorite Lucy Maud Characters Created. I love him so much. It actually kinda hurts. I know it’s silly, and he’s a fictional character – but I truly love him.

I won’t say anymore – I’ll just post the excerpt. He’s the new teacher at Emily’s school. And he is completely different from the bitch in tights Miss Brownwell – who basically despised children, and was a bitter witch about her own life, so she punished her students about THAT. Bitch. Mr. Carpenter comes into the class … and is a horse of a different color.

I love him because – well, you can see how Lucy Maud hints at the fact that there are deep wells of sadness and agony in this man. And yet … he makes education come alive for these kids.

Excerpt from Emily of New Moon (The Emily Books, Book 1) – by L.M. Montgomery

Mr. Carpenter 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 every 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 especiall 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 can ehar 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 all 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 Rhode 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. 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 every 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 gray 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 Grey 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-gray 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.