Читать книгу Emily's Quest - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 32

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Emily flung herself into work feverishly after Teddy had gone. Through long summer days and nights she wrote, while the purple stains deepened under her eves and the rose stains faded out of her cheeks. Aunt Elizabeth thought she was killing herself and for the first time was reconciled to her intimacy with Jarback Priest, since he dragged Emily away from her desk in the evenings at least for walks and talks in the fresh air. That summer Emily paid off the last of her indebtedness to Uncle Wallace and Aunt Ruth with her “pot-boilers.”

But there was more than pot-boiling a-doing. In her first anguish of loneliness, as she lay awake at three o’clock, Emily had remembered a certain wild winter night when she and Ilse and Perry and Teddy had been “stormed in” in the old John House on the Derry Pond Road;^[1] remembered all the scandal and suffering that had arisen therefrom; and remembered also that night of rapt delight “thinking out” a story that had flashed into her mind at a certain gay, significant speech of Teddy’s. At least, she had thought it significant then. Well, that was all over. But wasn’t the story somewhere? She had written the outline of that alluring, fanciful tale in a Jimmy-book the next day. Emily sprang out of bed in the still summer moonlight, lighted one of the famous candles of New Moon, and rummaged through a pile of old Jimmy-books. Yes, here it was. A Seller of Dreams. Emily squatted down on her haunches and read it through. It was good. Again it seized hold of her imagination and called forth all her creative impulse. She would write it out—she would begin that very moment. Flinging a dressing-gown over her white shoulders to protect them from the keen gulf air she sat down before her open window and began to write. Everything else was forgotten—for a time at least—in the subtle, all-embracing joy of creation. Teddy was nothing but a dim memory—love was a blown-out candle. Nothing mattered but her story. The characters came to life under her hand and swarmed through her consciousness, vivid, alluring, compelling. Wit, tears, and laughter trickled from her pen. She lived and breathed in another world and came back to New Moon only at dawn to find her lamp burned out, and her table littered with manuscript—the first four chapters of her book. Her book! What magic and delight and awe and incredulity in the thought.

For weeks Emily seemed to live really only when she was writing it. Dean found her strangely rapt and remote, absent and impersonal. Her conversation was as dull as it was possible for Emily’s conversation to be, and while her body sat or walked beside him her soul was—where? In some region where he could not follow, at all events. It had escaped him.