The Books: “Emily Climbs” (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Emily Climbs – by L.M. Montgomery Excerpt 4!

This is an excerpt from another one of my favorite chapters. In it – Lucy Maud seems to cram an entire lifetime of experience. You feel like this has really HAPPENED. Emily is staying at Aunt Ruth’s and going to high school. She enjoys it, except for the living with Aunt Ruth part. Then she gets involved with the spring play – and somehow, Aunt Ruth didn’t get, originally, that this would be an actual PLAY (and we all know PLAYS are evil and actors are even worse!!) – so on the night of the play, Ruth finds out what is going on – and forbids Emily to take part in it. Emily fights back. Ruth is firm and unyielding. Emily has a big part in the play – so she pleads. She says she will go be in the play anyway. Ruth says, “If you disobey me – don’t come back home tonight.” Or something like that. Emily is in a RAGE. She stalks off – she has finally HAD IT with Aunt Ruth. She does the play. It’s a great little triumph for her. She shines in her part, mainly because of the simmering RAGE beneath everything. Teddy walks her home. Emily doesn’t believe Ruth will lock her out or anything – but she goes up to the door, and finds it locked. It is March, it is cold, it is 10 o’clock at night … and she can’t get into the house. This is the last straw. Emily is fed up with Aunt Ruth and how Ruth treats her. So – in a fit of rage and purpose – she is ON FIRE (I love how Lucy Maud describes it – anger like that DOES burn!!) – she decides to walk home to New Moon. She will no longer put up with Aunt Ruth. If that means she can’t go to high school anymore, then so be it. It’s 7 miles home. Emily is not wearing proper boots – she’s wearing little kid slippers – it’s freezing cold … but she stalks home, the entire way – 7 miles – in a fury that carries her along. She gets home and it must be 2 or 3 in the morning – and she walks inside and Cousin Jimmy is up – totally shocked to see Emily, who is supposed to be in Shrewsbury, strolling into the kitchen. He realizes she is all upset and in a fury – so he sits her down, makes her eat doughnuts, and has her tell him all about it. So – for about 3 or 4 pages – Emily goes on complaining. It’s a very funny section – because Jimmy agrees with everything she says (when he can get a word in edgewise) – but slowly – over the course of the complaining – Emily starts to get the strange uneasy feeling that she has kind of acted like an overdramatic little fool. It’s so great the way Lucy Maud describes it … We’ve all done stuff like that, especially high-tempered hot-headed teenagers – anyone who is known as ‘sensitive’ or ‘dramamtic’ – has had moments like this. Where you fly off the handle – and you feel TOTALLY justified – and in a TOWERING RAGE of self-righteousness and injured dignity … and slowly … you realize … Uhm … hm. Maybe I overreacted? it’s not easy for Emily to admit this. She’s so full of pride, and she hates to concede to Aunt Ruth anymore. But JImmy – with a couple of his simple pointed statements – makes her see that she needs to suck it up, go home to Aunt Ruth, and realize that she needs to be GRATEFUL to Aunt Ruth for taking her in. Because of Aunt Ruth – Emily is getting her chance at more education. She needs to be thankful for that. Emily fights against this, in her mind … but gently … and without judging her TOO much … Jimmy prods her in the right direction.

So now it’s like – 4 or 5 a.m. and Emily decides to walk back to Shrewsbury. Jimmy is kind of horrified at this thought – maybe Emily should wait until Elizabeth wakes up – and someone can drive her back?? But Emily’s rage is done – she is no longer interested in making a big family SCENE – and she thinks it would be best if nobody knew about her little trek home.

So off she goes. To walk the 7 miles back home.

This walk back home is some of my favorite writing Lucy Maud has ever done.

Oh – and her little moment with Ruth at the very end is just perfection. It’s not what you expect to happen … you expect more of a scene, maybe … but watch how Emily handles the moment. It’s great.

Excerpt from Emily Climbs – by L.M. Montgomery

Emily went back to Shrewsbury through the clear moonlight. She had expected the walk to be dreary and weary, robbed of the impetus anger and rebellion had given. But she found that it had become transmuted into a thing of beauty – and Emily was one of “the eternal slaves of beauty,” of whom Carman sings, who are yet “masters of the world.” She was tired, but her tiredness showed itself in a certain exaltation of feeling and imagination such as she often experienced when over-fatigued. Thought was quick and active. She had a series of brilliant imaginary conversations and thought out so many epigrams that she was agreeably surprised at herself. It was good to feel vivid and interesting and all-alive once more. She was alone but not lonely.

As she walked along she dramatised the night. There was about it a wild, lawless charm that appealed to a certain wild, lawless strain hidden deep in Emily’s nature – a strain that wished to walk where it would with no guidance but its own – the strain of the gypsy and the poet, the genius and the fool.

The big fir trees, released from their burden of snow, were tossing their arms freely and wildly and gladly across the moonlit fields. Was anything ever so beautiful as the shadows of those grey, clean-limbed maples on the road at her feet? The houses she passed were full of intriguing mystery. She liked to think of the people who lay there dreaming and saw in sleep what waking life denied them – of little children’s dear hands folded in exquisite slumber – of hearts that, perhaps, kept sorrowful, wakeful vigils – of lonely arms that reached out in the emptiness of the night – all while she, Emily, flitted by like a shadowy wraith of the small hours.

And it was easy to think, too, that other things were abroad – things that were not mortal or human. She always lived on the edge of fairyland and now she stepped right over it. The Wind Woman was really whistling eerily in the reeds of the swamp – she was sure she heard the dear, diabolical chuckles of owls in the spruce copses – something frisked across her path – it might be a rabbit or it might be a Little Grey Person: the trees put on half pleasing, half terrifying shapes they never wore by day. The dead thistles of last year were goblin groups along the fences: that shaggy, old yellow birch was some satyr of the woodland: the footsteps of the old gods echoed around her: those gnarled stumps on the hill field were surely Pan piping through moonlight and shadow with his troop of laughing fauns. It was delightful to believe they were.

“One loses so much when one becomes incredulous,” said Emily – and then thought that was a rather clever remark and wished she had a Jimmy-book to write it down.

So, having washed her soul free from bitterness in the aerial bath of the spring night and tingling from head to foot with the wild, strange, sweet life of the spirit, she came to Aunt Ruth’s when the faint, purplish hills east of the harbour were growing clear under a whitening sky. She had expected to find the door still locked; but the knob turned as she tried it and she went in.

Aunt Ruth was up and was lighting the kitchen fire.

On the way from New Moon Emily had thought over a dozen different ways of saying what she meant to say – and now she used not one of them. At the last moment an impish inspiration came to her. Before Aunt Ruth could – or would – speak, Emily said,

“Aunt Ruth, I’ve come back to tell you that I forgive you, but that this must not happen again.”

To tell the truth, Ruth Dutton was considerably relieved that Emily had come back. She had been afraid of Elizabeth and Laura – Murray family rows were bitter things – and truly a little afraid of the results to Emily herself if she had really gone to New Moon in those thin shoes and that insufficient coat. For Ruth Dutton was not a fiend – only a rather stupid, stubborn little barnyard fowl trying to train up a skylark. She was honestly afraid that Emily might catch a cold and go into consumption. And if Emily took it into her head not to come back to Shrewsbury – well, that would “make talk”, and Ruth Dutton hated “talk” when she or her doings was the subject. So, all things considered, she decided to ignore the impertinence of Emily’s greeting.

“Did you spend the night on the streets?” she asked grimly.

“Oh, dear no – I went out to New Moon – had a chat with Cousin Jimmy and some lunch – then walked back.”

“Did Elizabeth see you? Or Laura?”

“No. They were asleep.”

Mrs. Dutton reflected that this was just as well.

“Well,” she said coldly, “you have been guilty of great ingratitude, Em’ly, but I’ll forgive you this time–” then stopped abruptly. Hadn’t that been said already this morning? Before she could think of a substitute remark Emily had vanished upstairs. Mistress Ruth Dutton was left with the unpleasant sensation that, somehow or other, she had not come out of the affair quite as triumphantly as she should have.