Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:
The Doctor’s Sweetheart
First story I’ll excerpt from is the one called “Emily’s Husband”. I like this one because of the characters. Emily is one of those classic Lucy Maud leads: she’s a woman for whom pride is everything. This (of course) takes her into pretty much sinful territory. She’s not just proud. She is hard. Who knows why. But that’s the way she is. Lucy Maud writes such people so well – they’re a common type in her work. She GETS the damage that such pride can wreak. She paid a price herself for her own pride – a price that she never stopped paying. Pride in these Lucy Maud archetypes often manifests itself in an imperious manner – a cold and haughty indifference … even when beneath, the person is experiencing turmoil, rage, lust, whatever. The self-control that it takes – for these characters to save face – is often wrenching. You ache for them to just let go!
Emily’s price that she paid is this: She married a man she loved – Stephen Fair. Stephen’s mother lived with them – and this ended up being the thing that drove Emily away. Mrs. Fair was supposedly sweet and nice – but she was one of those types that Lucy Maud despises: sweet and kitteny on the outside, but vicious on the inside. Mrs. Fair set out to make Emily’s life miserable – and she did. I don’t remember what the issue was – maybe she thought Emily wasn’t good enough for her son – but every word to Emily contained a barb, a dig, a hidden claw. Emily, with all her pride, and her sensitivity to insult – suffered in silence. Stephen felt the tension but didn’t take sides. Of course Emily felt that in not taking sides – he was choosing his mother. So finally Emily burst – and told him to choose. Choose your mother or me. I refuse to live with that bitch one more second. (Of course she didn’t say that, but it was implied!) Stephen, who was no slouch in the pride department, said – “Fine. Go home. If you leave though – don’t come back!” Emily – in a rage – stalked across the fields to her family home, where she had grown up, and where her older sister now lived. And Emily never returned to her husband’s home. 5 years went by. And over those years, Emily’s rage did not soften – but hardened. It hardened her character. She became unyielding, unforgiving, and rather terrifying. It was her way of protection. Lucy Maud writes that Emily KNEW she had been in the wrong – but there was something in her that just could not give in. Lucy Maud, instead of judging such people, always has compassion for them. She aches for those who cannot express themselves, who let themselves harden up. She knows that pain. So it’s a classic Lucy Maud situation. A fight leads to a long freeze. Even though the main parties live just across the way from each other – they never see each other, reference each other … until …
One day Emily comes home and gets some news … I am excerpting the beginning of the story. I just like how Lucy Maud sets Emily up here – the voice, the haughtiness, the pale skin, the superior attitude … It makes the end (which has Emily running over to her long-estranged husband’s house – in a frenzy – through a rain storm – with branches slicing across her face – her hair tangled in the wind – and bursting in the door, begging him for forgiveness …) SO much more satisfying. Because we know that she has never EVER let herself go like that.
Excerpt from The Doctor’s Sweetheart
Emily Fair got out of Hiram Jameson’s wagon at the gate. She took out her satchel and parasol and, in her clear, musical tones, thanked him for bringing her home. Emily had a very distinctive voice. It was very sweet always and very cold generally; sometimes it softened to tenderness with those she loved, but in it there was always an undertone of inflexibility and reserve. Nobody had ever heard Emily Fair’s voice tremble.
“You are more than welcome, Mrs. Fair,” said Hiram Jameson, with a glance of bold admiration. Emily met it with an unflinching indifference. She disliked Hiram Jameson. She had been furious under all her external composure because he had been at the station when she left the train.
Jameson perceived her scorn, but chose to disregard it.
“Proud as Lucifer,” he thought as he drove away. “Well, she’s none the worse of that. I don’t like your weak women — they’re always sly. If Stephen Fair doesn’t get better she’ll be free and then –”
He did not round out the thought, but he gloated over the memory of Emily, standing by the gate in the harsh, crude light of the autumn sunset, with her tawny, brown hair curling about her pale, oval face and the scornful glint in her large, dark-grey eyes.
Emily stood at the gate for some time after Jameson’s waggon had disappeared. When the brief burst of sunset splendour had faded out she turned and went into the garden where late asters and chrysanthemums still bloomed. She gathered some of the more perfect ones here and there. She loved flowers, but to-night the asters seemed to hurt her, for she presently dropped those she had gathered and deliberately set her foot on them.
A sudden gust of wind came over the brown, sodden fields and the ragged maples around the garden writhed and wailed. The air was raw and chill. The rain that had threatened all day was very near. Emily shivered and went into the house.
Amelia Phillips was bending over the fire. She came forward and took Emily’s parcels and wraps with a certain gentleness that sat oddly on her grim personality.
“Are you tired? I’m glad you’re back. Did you walk from the station?”
“No. Hiram Jameson was there and offered to drive me home. I’d rather have walked. It’s going to be a storm, I think. Where is John?”
“He went to the village after supper,” answered Amelia, lighting a lamp. “We needed some things from the store.”
The light flared up as she spoke and brought out her strong, almost harsh features and deep-set black eyes. Amelia Phillips looked like an overdone sketch in charcoal.
“Has anything happened in Woodford while I’ve been away?” asked Emily indifferently. Plainly she did not expect an affirmative answer. Woodford life was not eventful.
Amelia glanced at her sharply. So she had not heard! Amelia had expected that Hiram Jameson would have told her. She wished that he had, for she never felt sure of Emily. The older sister knew that beneath that surface reserve was a passionate nature, brooking no restraint when once it overleaped the bounds of her Puritan self-control. Amelia Phillips, with all her naturally keen insight and her acquired knowledge of Emily’s character, had never been able to fathom the latter’s attitude of mind towards her husband. From the time that Emily had come back to her girlhood home, five years before, Stephen Fair’s name had never crossed her lips.
“I suppose you haven’t heard that Stephen is very ill,” said Amelia shortly.
Not a feature of Emily’s face changed. Only in her voice when she spoke was a curious jarring, as if a false note had been struck in a silver melody.
“What is the matter with him?”
“Typhoid,” answered Amelia briefly. She felt relieved that Emily had taken it so calmly. Amelia hated Stephen Fair with all the intensity of her nature because she believed that he had treated Emily ill, but she had always been distrustful that Emily in her heart of hearts loved her husband still. That, in Amelia Phillips’ opinion, would have betrayed a weakness not to be tolerated.
Emily looked at the lamp unwinkingly.
“That wick needs trimming,” she said. Then, with a sudden recurrence of the untuneful note:
“Is he dangerously ill?”
“We haven’t heard for three days. The doctors were not anxious about him Monday, though they said it was a pretty severe case.”
A faint, wraith-like change of expression drifted over Emily’s beautiful face and was gone in a moment. What was it – relief? Regret? It would have been impossible to say. When she next spoke her vibrant voice was as perfectly melodious as usual.
“I think I will go to bed, Amelia. John will not be back until late I suppose, and I am very tired. There comes the rain. I suppose it will spoil all the flowers. They will be beaten to pieces.”
In the dark hall Emily paused for a moment and opened the front door to be cut in the face with a whip-like dash of rain. She peered out into the thickly gathering gloom. Beyond, in the garden, she saw the asters tossed about, phantom-like. The wind around the many-cornered old farmhouse was full of wails and sobs.
The clock in the sitting-room struck eight. Emily shivered and shut the door. She remembered that she had been married at eight o’clock that very morning seven years ago. She thought she could see herself coming down the stairs in her white dress with her bouquet of asters. For a moment she was glad that those mocking flowers in the garden would be all beaten to death before morning by the lash of wind and rain.
Then she recovered her mental poise and put the hateful memories away from her as she went steadily up the narrow stairs and along the hall with its curious slant as the house had settled, to her own room under the north-western eaves.
When she had put out the light and gone to bed she found that she could not sleep. She pretended to believe that it was the noise of the storm that kept her awake. Not even to herself would Emily confess that she was waiting and listening nervously for John’s return home. That would have been to admit a weakness, and Emily Fair, like Amelia, despised weakness.
Every few minutes a gust of wind smote the house, with a roar as of a wild beast, and bombarded Emily’s window with a volley of rattling drops. In the silences that came between the gusts she heard the soft, steady pouring of the rain on the garden paths below, mingled with a faint murmur that came up from the creek beyond the barns where the pine boughs were thrashing in the storm. Emily suddenly thought of a weird story she had once read years before and long forgotten – a story of a soul that went out in a night of storm and blackness and lost its way between earth and heaven. She shuddered and drew the counterpane over her face.
“Of all things I hate a fall storm most,” she muttered. “It frightens me.”
Shades of Anne and Gilbert, eh?
You’re right! I hadn’t thought of that!
God forbid Gilbert died before Anne had her night of epiphany.