A WEAVER OF DREAMS
It took Emily several weeks to make up her mind whether she liked Mr.
Carpenter or not. She knew she did not _dis_like him, not even though
his first greeting, shot at her on the opening day of school in a gruff
voice, accompanied by a startling lift of his spiky grey brows was, “So
you’re the girl that writes poetry, eh? Better stick to your needle and
duster. Too many fools in the world trying to write poetry and failing.
I tried it myself once. Got better sense now.”
“You don’t keep your nails clean,” thought Emily.
But he upset every kind of school tradition so speedily and thoroughly
that Ilse, who gloried in upsetting things and hated routine, was the
only scholar that liked him from the start. Some never liked him--the
Rhoda Stuart type for example--but most of them came to it after they
got used to never being used to anything. And Emily finally decided
that she liked him tremendously.
Mr. Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty--a tall man, with
an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey moustache and
eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of which all his
wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean, greyish
face, deeply lined. He lived in a little two-roomed house below the
school with a shy mouse of a wife. He 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 ever 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 especially 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 hear 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 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 Rhoda 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 for it but at last had to give in
and do as he willed. 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 ever
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 grey 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 Gray 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-grey 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.
Emily shot up so that winter that Aunt Laura had to let down the tucks
in her dresses. Aunt Ruth, who had come for a week’s visit, said she
was outgrowing her strength--consumptive children always did.
“I am _not_ consumptive,” Emily said. “The Starrs are tall,” she added,
with a touch of subtle malice hardly to be looked for in near-thirteen.
Aunt Ruth, who was sensitive in regard to her dumpiness, sniffed.
“It would be well if _that_ were the only thing in which you resemble
them,” she said. “How are you getting on in school?”
“Very well. I am the smartest scholar in my class,” answered Emily
composedly.
“You conceited child!” said Aunt Ruth.
“I’m _not_ conceited.” Emily looked scornful indignation. “Mr.
Carpenter said it and _he_ doesn’t flatter. Besides, I can’t help
seeing it myself.”
“Well, it is to be hoped you have some brains, because you haven’t
much in the way of looks,” said Aunt Ruth. “You’ve no complexion to
speak of--and that inky hair around your white face is startling. I see
you’re going to be a plain girl.”
“You wouldn’t say that to a grown-up person’s face,” said Emily with a
deliberate gravity which always exasperated Aunt Ruth because she could
not understand it in a child. “I don’t think it would hurt you to be as
polite to me as you are to other people.”
“I’m telling you your faults so you may correct them,” said Aunt Ruth
frigidly.
“It _isn’t_ my fault that my face is pale and my hair black,” protested
Emily. “I can’t correct that.”
“If you were a different girl,” said Aunt Ruth, “I would--”
“But I don’t _want_ to be a different girl,” said Emily decidedly. She
had no intention of lowering the Starr flag to Aunt Ruth. “I wouldn’t
want to be anybody but myself even if I am plain. Besides,” she added
impressively as she turned to go out of the room, “though I may not
be very good-looking now, when I go to heaven I believe I’ll be very
beautiful.”
“Some people think Emily quite pretty,” said Aunt Laura, but she did
not say it until Emily was out of hearing. She was Murray enough for
that.
“I don’t know where they see it,” said Aunt Ruth. “She’s vain and
pert and says things to be thought smart. You heard her just now. But
the thing I dislike most in her is that she is un-childlike--and deep
as the sea. Yes, she is, Laura--deep as the sea. You’ll find it out
to your cost one day if you disregard my warning. She’s capable of
anything. Sly is no word for it. You and Elizabeth don’t keep a tight
enough rein over her.”
“I’ve done my best,” said Elizabeth stiffly. She herself did think
she had been much too lenient with Emily--Laura and Jimmy were two to
one--but it nettled her to have Ruth say so.
Uncle Wallace also had an attack of worrying over Emily that winter.
He looked at her one day when he was at New Moon and remarked that she
was getting to be a big girl.
“How old are you, Emily?” He asked her that every time he came to New
Moon.
“Thirteen in May.”
“H’m. What are you going to do with her, Elizabeth?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Aunt Elizabeth coldly--or as
coldly as is possible to speak when one is pouring melted tallow into
candle-moulds.
“Why, she’ll soon be grown up. She can’t expect you to provide for her
indefinitely”--
“I don’t,” Emily whispered resentfully under her breath.
“--and it’s time we decided what is best to be done for her.”
“The Murray women have never had to work out for a living,” said Aunt
Elizabeth, as if that disposed of the matter.
“Emily is only half Murray,” said Wallace. “Besides, times are
changing. You and Laura will not live forever, Elizabeth, and when you
are gone New Moon goes to Oliver’s Andrew. In my opinion Emily should
be fitted to support herself if necessary.”
Emily did not like Uncle Wallace but she was very grateful to him at
that moment. Whatever his motives were he was proposing the very thing
she secretly yearned for.
“I would suggest,” said Uncle Wallace, “that she be sent to Queen’s
Academy to get a teacher’s license. Teaching is a genteel, lady-like
occupation. _I_ will do my share in providing for the expense of it.”
A blind person might have seen that Uncle Wallace thought this very
splendid of himself.
“If you do,” thought Emily, “I’ll pay every cent back to you as soon as
I’m able to earn it.”
But Aunt Elizabeth was adamant.
“I do not believe in girls going out into the world,” she said. “I
don’t mean Emily to go to Queen’s. I told Mr. Carpenter so when he
came to see me about her taking up the Entrance work. He was very
rude--school-teachers knew their place better in my father’s time. But
I made him understand, I think. I’m rather surprised at _you_, Wallace.
You did not send your own daughter out to work.”
“_My_ daughter had parents to provide for her,” retorted Uncle Wallace
pompously. “Emily is an orphan. I imagined from what I had heard about
her that she would prefer earning her own living to living on charity.”
“So I would,” cried out Emily. “So I would, Uncle Wallace. Oh, Aunt
Elizabeth, please let me study for the Entrance. Please! I’ll pay you
back every cent you spend on it--I will indeed. I pledge you my word of
honour.”
“It does not happen to be a question of money,” said Aunt Elizabeth
in her stateliest manner. “I undertook to provide for you, Emily, and
I will do it. When you are older I may send you to the High School in
Shrewbury for a couple of years. I am not decrying education. But you
are not going to be a slave to the public--no Murray girl ever was
_that_.”
Emily realising the uselessness of pleading, went out in the same
bitter disappointment she had felt after Mr. Carpenter’s visit. Then
Aunt Elizabeth looked at Wallace.
“Have you forgotten what came of sending Juliet to Queen’s?” she asked
significantly.
If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry
had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged
determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status at New
Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had ceased to
refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she recognised that
though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was not going to remain
one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s patching up his ragged bits
of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him with his lessons in the kitchen
after supper, nor did she growl when Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a
certain small wage--though older boys than Perry were still glad to put
in the winter months choring for board and lodging in some comfortable
home. If a future premier was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth
wanted to have some small share in the making. It was credible and
commendable that a boy should have ambitions. A girl was an entirely
different matter. A girl’s place was at home.
Emily helped Perry work out algebra problems and heard his lessons in
French and Latin. She picked up more thus than Aunt Elizabeth would
have approved and more still when the Entrance pupils talked those
languages in school. It was quite an easy matter for a girl who had
once upon a time invented a language of her own. When George Bates,
by way of showing off, asked her one day in French--_his_ French, of
which Mr. Carpenter had once said doubtfully that perhaps God might
understand it--“Have you the ink of my grandmother and the shoebrush of
my cousin and the umbrella of my aunt’s husband in your desk?” Emily
retorted quite as glibly and _quite_ as Frenchily, “No, but I have the
pen of your father and the cheese of the innkeeper and the towel of
your uncle’s maidservant in my basket.”
To console herself for her disappointment in regard to the Entrance
class Emily wrote more poetry than ever. It was especially delightful
to write poetry on a winter evening when the storm winds howled without
and heaped the garden and orchard with big ghostly drifts, starred
over with rabbits’ candles. She also wrote several stories--desperate
love affairs wherein she struggled heroically against the difficulties
of affectionate dialogue; tales of bandits and pirates--Emily liked
these because there was no necessity for bandits and pirates to
converse lovingly; tragedies of earls and countesses whose conversation
she dearly loved to pepper with scraps of French; and a dozen other
subjects she didn’t know anything about. She also meditated beginning a
novel but decided it would be too hard to get enough paper for it. The
letter-bills were all done now and the Jimmy-books were not big enough,
though a new one always appeared mysteriously in her school basket when
the old one was almost full. Cousin Jimmy seemed to have an uncanny
prescience of the proper time--that was part of his Jimmyness.
Then one night, as she lay in her lookout bed and watched a full moon
gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley, she had a
sudden dazzling idea.
She would send her latest poem to the Charlottetown _Enterprise_.
The _Enterprise_ had a Poet’s Corner where “original” verses were
frequently printed. Privately Emily thought her own were quite as
good--as probably they were, for most of the _Enterprise_ “poems” were
sad trash.
Emily was so excited over the idea that she could not sleep for the
greater part of the night--and didn’t want to. It was glorious to lie
there, thrilling in the darkness, and picture the whole thing out. She
saw her verses in print signed E. Byrd Starr--she saw Aunt Laura’s
eyes shining with pride--she saw Mr. Carpenter pointing them out to
strangers--“the work of a pupil of mine, by gad”--she saw all her
schoolmates envying her or admiring, according to type--she saw herself
with one foot at least firmly planted on the ladder of fame--one hill
at least of the Alpine Path crested, with a new and glorious prospect
opening therefrom.
Morning came. Emily went to school, so absent-minded because of her
secret that she did badly in everything and was raged at by Mr.
Carpenter. But it all slipped off her like the proverbial water off a
duck’s back. Her body was in Blair Water school but her spirit was in
kingdoms empyreal.
As soon as school was out she betook herself to the garret with half a
sheet of blue-lined notepaper. Very painstakingly she copied down the
poem, being especially careful to dot every _i_ and cross every _t_.
She wrote it on both sides of the paper, being in blissful ignorance
of any taboo thereon. Then she read it aloud delightedly, not omitting
the title _Evening Dreams_. There was one line in it she tasted two or
three times:
The haunting elfin music of the air.
“I think that line is _very_ good,” said Emily. “I wonder now how I
happened to think of it.”
She mailed her poem the next day and lived in a delicious mystic
rapture until the following Saturday. When the _Enterprise_ came she
opened it with tremulous eagerness and ice-cold fingers, and turned to
the Poet’s Corner. Now for her great moment!
There was not a sign of an Evening Dream about it!
Emily threw down the _Enterprise_ and fled to the garret dormer where,
face downward on the old haircloth sofa, she wept out her bitterness
of disappointment. She drained the draught of failure to the very
dregs. It was horribly real and tragic to her. She felt exactly as if
she had been slapped in the face. She was crushed in the very dust of
humiliation and was sure she could never rise again.
How thankful she was that she hadn’t told Teddy anything about it--she
had been so strongly tempted to, and only refrained because she didn’t
want to spoil the dramatic surprise of the moment when she would show
him the verses with her name signed to them. She _had_ told Perry,
and Perry was furious when he saw her tear-stained face later on in
the dairy, as they strained the milk together. Ordinarily Emily loved
this, but to-night the savour had gone out of the world. Even the
milky splendour of the still, mild winter evening and the purple bloom
over the hillside woods that presaged a thaw could not give her the
accustomed soul-thrill.
“I’m going to Charlottetown if I have to walk and I’ll bust that
_Enterprise_ editor’s head,” said Perry, with the expression which,
thirty years later, warned the members of his party to scatter for
cover.
“That wouldn’t be any use,” said Emily drearily. “He didn’t think it
good enough to print--that is what hurts me so, Perry--he didn’t think
it any good. Busting his head wouldn’t change _that_.”
It took her a week to recover from the blow. Then she wrote a story
in which the editor of the _Enterprise_ played the part of a dark and
desperate villain who found lodging eventually behind prison bars.
This got the venom out of her system and she forgot all about him in
the delight of writing a poem addressed to “Sweet Lady April.” But
I question if she ever really forgave him--even when she discovered
eventually that you must _not_ write on both sides of the paper--even
when she read over _Evening Dreams_ a year later and wondered how she
could ever have thought it any good.
This sort of thing was happening frequently now. Every time she read
her little hoard of manuscripts over she found some of which the fairy
gold had unaccountably turned to withered leaves, fit only for the
burning. Emily burned them,--but it hurt her a little. Outgrowing
things we love is never a pleasant process.