Emily Climbs (1925)

Chapter 15: "The Thing That Couldn't"

When the door had closed behind Mistress McIntyre, the girls got up and dressed rather laggingly. Emily thought of the day before her with some distaste. The fine flavour of adventure and romance with which they had started out had vanished, and canvassing a country road for subscriptions had suddenly become irksome. Physically, they were both tireder than they thought.

"It seems like an age since we left Shrewsbury," grumbled Ilse as she pulled on her stockings.

Emily had an even stronger feeling of a long passage of time. Her wakeful, enraptured night under the moon had seemed in itself like a year of some strange soul-growth. And this past night had been wakeful also, in a very different way, and she had roused from her brief sleep at its close with an odd, rather unpleasant sensation of some confused and troubled journey--a sensation which old Mistress McIntyre's story had banished for a time, but which now returned as she brushed her hair.

"I feel as if I had been wandering--somewhere--for hours," she said. "And I dreamed I found little Allan--but I don't know where. It was horrible to wake up feeling that I had known just immediately before I woke and had forgotten."

"I slept like a log," said Ilse, yawning. "I didn't even dream. Emily, I want to get away from this house and this place as soon as I can. I feel as if I were in a nightmare--as if something horrible were pressing me down and I couldn't escape from it. It would be different if I could do anything--help in any way. But since I can't, I just want to escape from it. I forgot it for a few minutes while the old lady was telling her story--heartless old thing! She wasn't worrying one bit about poor little lost Allan."

"I think she stopped worrying long ago," said Emily dreamily. "That's what people mean when they say she isn't right. People who don't worry a little never are right--like Cousin Jimmy. But that was a great story. I'm going to write it for my first essay--and later on I'll see about having it printed. I'm sure it would make a splendid sketch for some magazine, if I can only catch the savour and vivacity she put into it. I think I'll jot down some of her expressions right away in my Jimmy-book before I forget them."

"Oh, drat your Jimmy-book!" said Ilse. "Let's get down--and eat breakfast if we have to--and get away."

But Emily, revelling again in her story-teller's paradise, had temporarily forgotten everything else.

"Where is my Jimmy-book?" she said impatiently. "It isn't in my bag--I know it was here last night. Surely I didn't leave it on that gate-post!"

"Isn't that it over on the table?" asked Ilse.

Emily gazed blankly at it.

"It can't be--it is--how did it get there? I know I didn't take it out of the bag last night."

"You must have," said Ilse indifferently.

Emily walked over to the table with a puzzled expression. The Jimmy-book was lying open on it, with her pencil beside it. Something on the page caught her eye suddenly. She bent over it.

"Why don't you hurry and finish your hair?" demanded Ilse a few minutes later. "I'm ready now--for pity's sake, tear yourself from that blessed Jimmy-book for long enough to get dressed!"

Emily turned around, holding the Jimmy-book in her hands. She was very pale and her eyes were dark with fear and mystery.

"Ilse, look at this," she said in a trembling voice.

Ilse went over and looked at the page of the Jimmy-book which Emily held out to her. On it was a pencil sketch, exceedingly well done, of the little house on the river shore to which Emily had been so attracted on the preceding day. A black cross was marked on a small window over the front door and opposite it, on the margin of the Jimmy-book, beside another cross, was written: